Entrepreneurs frequently begin by performing tasks that would belong to several different positions in a larger company. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, operates in a business environment where sales, marketplaces, logistics and management need to work together, illustrating a question that becomes increasingly important as companies expand: should an entrepreneur continue learning how to execute every activity or become capable of building a team that can execute without constant intervention? Technical understanding remains valuable, but growth gradually changes the entrepreneur’s role from doing the work personally to creating the conditions for other people to perform it consistently.
Does an entrepreneur need to understand execution?
Knowing how the operation works gives entrepreneurs practical references for making decisions. Someone who understands the basic mechanics of online sales, for example, can better evaluate deadlines, difficulties and trade-offs instead of managing exclusively through reports. The objective is not necessarily to become a specialist in every function, but to understand enough to ask useful questions and recognize when something is not working as expected. This operational awareness also makes it easier to distinguish a genuine constraint from a problem that can be solved through better organization, resources or processes.
This knowledge is particularly valuable during the early stages of a business. With smaller teams, founders often participate directly in customer service, purchasing, commercial decisions and operational routines. That proximity can reveal how processes actually function and where recurring problems emerge, creating experience that later helps when responsibilities are distributed. Direct involvement can also provide a clearer understanding of which activities require specialized knowledge and which can eventually be standardized or delegated.
However, practical knowledge becomes a limitation when it creates the belief that the entrepreneur must remain responsible for execution. Hugo Galvao operates across areas in which growth requires coordination between different functions. As complexity increases, understanding the work and personally controlling every task become very different management choices. The challenge is recognizing when direct participation continues to add value and when it begins to restrict the team’s ability to make decisions and operate independently.
When does knowing how to do everything become a problem?
The difficulty usually appears when the company grows faster than its decision structure. A founder who once approved a manageable number of activities may gradually become responsible for dozens of small decisions every day. Employees wait for answers, tasks accumulate and issues that could be solved elsewhere repeatedly reach the same person. As the volume of these decisions increases, the entrepreneur can become an unintended bottleneck even when the rest of the business has enough resources to continue operating.
Centralization can initially create a sense of control because the entrepreneur remains close to every detail. In the experience of Hugo Galvao, however, growth also increases the importance of distributing decisions across the operation. If purchasing, pricing, customer service or operational exceptions constantly require the founder’s approval, business capacity becomes tied to the availability of one individual. This dependence becomes especially visible during periods of rapid growth, when a higher volume of sales and activities also produces more situations requiring decisions.
Is hiring enough to create autonomy?
Adding people does not automatically distribute responsibility. A company can expand its team while maintaining exactly the same decision bottleneck if employees receive tasks but not sufficient authority to solve them. In this situation, the entrepreneur delegates execution while continuing to retain most meaningful choices. The organization may appear larger on paper while its ability to act independently remains practically unchanged.
Building autonomy requires clearer boundaries. Teams need to understand which decisions they can make independently, which criteria should guide those decisions and which situations genuinely require escalation. This does not eliminate supervision. It makes supervision more selective, allowing leadership attention to concentrate on exceptions and decisions with broader consequences. Clear decision limits also reduce unnecessary consultations and give employees greater confidence to handle recurring situations without waiting for approval.
For Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, whose experience includes marketplaces and online sales growth, this distinction becomes especially relevant in digital businesses. Ecommerce operations generate continuous decisions involving products, inventory, customer experience and sales channels. If every adjustment depends on one person, increasing transaction volume can also increase managerial dependence. Creating a structure capable of absorbing these decisions therefore becomes part of preparing the operation for growth rather than simply responding to a larger workload.
