Everyone in a startup has done this. You see a problem, you fix it. You see a gap, you fill it. You don’t ask for help. You don’t complain. You just work. Because you care. Because it has to get done. Because who else is going to do it?
Our CEO became our lead sales person because he didn’t have faith in our lead gen. Our CPO codes new features because he’s the one everyone asks to get things done. I’ve built sales SOPs, created courier operations processes, gone out to do deliveries myself because we were underwater. Our customer success team still imports deliveries manually when we spent months building a system to do exactly that.
Every one of us has been the hero. And it’s killing us.
The signs are hard to spot because heroes don’t complain. They just work. But it becomes obvious when primary objectives never get met. Not because people aren’t working hard — because they’re too busy doing ten jobs to do the one job that actually matters.
Process breaks first. Then the person breaks because the process is broken. From the outside, it looks like they can’t do their job. In reality, they’re doing everyone’s job.
This isn’t ego. This is passion. And passion without lanes is chaos.
The fix is boring. Clear lanes. Clear communication. SOPs for every process. Actually reading them. Asking questions. Understanding why things are falling down. Asking why we can’t scale.
The goal isn’t to be a hero. The goal is to be a cog. Know where the company is going. Know your part in getting there. Do that part well. Let the business be the hero.
When everyone tries to save the company, nobody builds the company.