This morning Seth Godin published a post titled Dumb Down and Scale Up and I have a distinct feeling that he wrote this after my wife and I were in the Hot Seat at the Business Gets Personal event that just happened in NYC on Thursday last week (Oct. 10, 2014). Up on stage with Dave Ramsey and Gary Vaynerchuck, Rachel and I asked Seth, “How do we delegate responsibility to our team members and build them up to be leaders?” He answered our question with a question, which was in essence very similar to what he posted today.

His point is actually quite profound: don’t just grow because you feel you should, hiring people that are diluted versions of the special talent that helped create your success. He puts it really well,

“Acknowledge your special sauce and hire people only when they help you do what you do best and uniquely. Don’t worry about replicating yourself, focus instead on leveraging yourself.”

This hits close to home because Rachel and I have grown our company from just the two of us to a team of more than 25 in 3 years. We love our team and they actually do a phenomenal job, but they just aren’t “us”. And as our business grows and faces new issues, we’re finding we have some things we’re really, really good at, and others where we frankly just plain suck. We’re having to fight a lot of learned behaviors from our early school years that we need to round ourselves out and get ‘good grades’ in every subject.

But being well-rounded is not what the most successful people are.

Seth, Dave, and Gary all talked about this last week, saying that the keys to their success is building on their strengths and delegating away things that are not essential for them to do.

As a company, GouletPens.com does need to be well-rounded, because if we are rockstars at marketing and customer service but don’t pay our bills, then we’ll fail. If we are tremendous at shipping and logistics but ignore our customers, we’ll fail. But what Rachel and I as the founders really need to do is focus on leveraging other people on our team who have natural strengths that balance out our weaknesses, and focus on the things where we’re really exceptional.

I can really appreciate where Seth is coming from with his concept because he has grown companies like Yoyodyne and Squidoo very quick and very big, to discover that in his heart he’s really a freelancer. He sold them off and he now works alone. I have to respect a man that knows himself that well. Seth challenged us on our own end goal for our business in our Hot Seat (and in conversation following it), recognizing that the natural assumption with small businesses is that they will grow and we will need to determine for ourselves what we really want.

I don’t know for sure if our Hot Seat conversation was what inspired Seth to write this post and it honestly doesn’t really matter. What matters to me is that I’m learning more about who I am and what my passion really is. I love fountain pens, I love running my business, and I actually love getting to sit on stage with world-class leaders that challenge me to the very core of my being in front of hundreds of other business owners. While growth has been difficult and does not come easy on pretty much any day of the week, I am really loving the challenge.

Thanks Seth, for telling it to me straight.