The Two Dials Every Young Business Owner Under-Turns
You can delegate more than you think and charge more than you think — turn both
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 80%
Williamson reduces the early-stage founder's problem to two dials, both under-turned for the same emotional reason. The first is control: you know exactly how everything is supposed to be done, down to which railing the inflatable ties to, and letting go feels like a child being pulled away from you. The second is price: almost everyone undercharges, erring on the side of terror, because imposter syndrome leaks into how they market themselves and they would rather have demand than profit. Both are fear artefacts rather than considered decisions, which is why the same corrective applies to each — assume your comfortable setting is well below the true one and move it deliberately. He notes that his own delegation happened more slowly than was optimal, and that a book like The E Myth Revisited would have shortened it had he been ready to receive the message.
Origin
Distilled by Chris Williamson from scaling Voodoo Events from a two-person side hustle to over 1,000 staff, and offered on Deep Dive as the two things young businessmen and women most need to remember.
Core principles
- 01Control is the binding constraint on scale long before capital is
- 02Fear, not evidence, sets most founders' prices
- 03Wanting demand instead of profit is a symptom of imposter syndrome
- 04Handing work over feels like loss and is still correct
- 05Both dials are under-turned in the same direction, for the same reason
How to run it
- 1
Recognise both dials are set by fear
Neither your delegation level nor your price was reasoned to. Both were set at whatever felt safe, which is systematically too low.
- 2
Inventory what only you do
Write out every task that currently routes through you and mark which genuinely require you. The list is shorter than it feels.
- 3
Recruit underneath you before you feel ready
Bring in people you trust who can sit below you and absorb workload. Williamson did this progressively — managers, then trainees, then hundreds of staff.
Pro tip Recruit from people who already show up well inside your operation.
Watch out Delaying because nobody does it exactly your way is the exact failure mode; he held on longer than was optimal.
- 4
Sit with the discomfort of handover
Expect letting go to feel like something being pulled out of you. The feeling is not evidence that the decision is wrong.
- 5
Test the price above your comfort
Raise the price past where it feels justified and watch what happens to demand. Most of the fear is about being called a fraud, not about the market.
Pro tip A higher price often permits a higher-touch product that serves a smaller segment better.
Watch out Do not raise price without being willing to defend the value; the goal is accurate pricing, not extraction.
- 6
Re-run both dials periodically
Delegation and pricing drift back toward the comfortable setting as the business changes. Treat both as recurring reviews.
In the wild
Williamson describes knowing his events inside out — where the inflatable goes, which railing it ties to, what knot, where the cable ties belong on the barriers controlling the queue. Scaling required handing all of that to other people, which he did more slowly than was optimal. Over time he and his partner brought in trusted managers underneath them and outsourced progressively more of the workload, picking up more nights and more events, until the structure ran to twelve managers, junior managers beneath them, and roughly 500 guestlist staff.
→ A business running venues six nights a week in Leeds and four in Newcastle with over 1,000 staff.
Abdaal recounts that his YouTuber Academy was initially going to be a $200 self-paced product. His reasoning was explicitly defensive: he would not risk a single person saying it was not worth it or that he was selling snake oil, so he would overload it with value and charge almost nothing. Mutual friends Tiago Forte and David Perell talked him out of the fear of selling, pointing out that he could raise the price and deliver it as a higher-touch product serving a specific segment rather than his whole audience.
→ The product was repositioned at a real price as a high-touch offer instead of a fear-priced one.
Common mistakes
Waiting until someone matches your quality
Nobody will execute exactly as you do, so this standard postpones delegation indefinitely and caps the business at your personal throughput.
Pricing for reassurance
Charging little to guarantee nobody complains optimises for demand over profit and encodes imposter syndrome into the business model.
Turning one dial only
Delegating without repricing simply raises your cost base, and repricing without delegating leaves you the bottleneck at a higher rate.
Is it for you?
Best for
Young owner-operators whose business has product-market fit but cannot grow past their personal throughput.
Not ideal for
Pre-validation businesses where the founder still needs to do the work to learn what it is.
From the transcript
“The first one is you can relinquish far more control of your business than you think. The second one is you can raise your price…”
“Almost everyone is under charging for their product, almost everybody is doing that, because they err on the side of terror.”
From the episode
How To Embrace Your Weirdness - Chris Williamson
Chris Williamson