Don't Hire a Unicorn (Hire a Rhino, a Horse, and a Firefly)

Let me save you one of the more expensive lessons I learned the hard way. When you're scaling a company, do not try to hire a unicorn. Hire the parts of one.

Stick with me, this metaphor pays off.

When you start, YOU have to be the unicorn

Here's the brutal truth about starting a business: in the beginning, you have to know how to do everything. Sell, market, deliver, handle the money, handle the clients, and build a genuinely great product (that last one happens to be my specialty). You have to learn all of it, and if you don't come in with much experience, that's a savage uphill climb.

I've written about how sales and systems thinking are two of the most valuable skills you can own. They are. But learning all of these skills at once, from scratch, is nearly impossible. If you actually pull it off, congratulations, you're a unicorn. A genuinely rare creature.

Then you try to hire another one. Big mistake.

So here's the trap I fell into as we grew. I went looking for someone who could do it all, someone who knew the business inside and out the way I do. I wanted to clone myself.

The problem? Almost nobody is wired like a founder, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Entrepreneurs are a different breed. I'm the guy who doesn't love being told what to do, who looks at chaos and thinks "I'll either find a way or make one," who turns a mess into order through sheer brute force. Most people, very reasonably, want stability and structure instead. (That, by the way, is exactly why SOPs matter, but that's another article.)

And honestly? Founders make terrible employees. When I was a personal trainer back in the day, I got in trouble constantly. I'm fairly sure the only reason they kept me around was that I hauled in a mountain of clients. So the idea that I'll find another me, and that they'll happily sit in a seat and follow the playbook, is a fantasy.

So sever the unicorn

Here's the reframe that fixed it. Picture your unicorn as three parts: the horn, the horse, and the sparkle.

Instead of hunting for one mythical creature that has all three, you hire three real people. One is a rhino, they bring the horn. One is a workhorse, they're the horse. And one is a firefly, there's your sparkle. No single one of them is a unicorn. But together? They get you about 80% of the way to one.

And 80% is the magic number. It's the same logic from my piece on automation: you automate 80% of the work and keep the 20% only you can do. Delegation is identical. Hand off the 80%, act as the QA on it, and pour yourself into the 20% you do better than anyone. For me, that 20% is high-level architecture and specs. (Let's be real, I'll be writing code until the day I die. I'm not exactly disappearing to the Bahamas every week.) The point of replacing yourself isn't to vanish. It's to stop being the bottleneck on everything.

Where I learned this

A lot of these ideas crystallized for me while reading Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time, which I'm in the middle of right now. Genuinely fantastic, highly recommend it if you're a founder drowning in your own to-do list. And of course, figuring this out meant getting it wrong a bunch first, which, if you've read I Love Failing, you know I'm completely at peace with.

The takeaway

Stop trying to hire a unicorn. They're rare, they're expensive, and the closest match is usually another founder who'll be miserable working for you anyway. Instead, hire the parts. A rhino, a horse, a firefly. Get to 80% of the mythical creature, act as the glue and the QA, and keep doing the handful of things only you can do. Do that, and the machine slowly starts to run without you standing over it. Which is the entire point.

Want to stop being the bottleneck?

We build the systems and automation that let you delegate the 80%. That's what we do at HyppoAI.

Build it right