Most founders we talk to hit the same wall in the same way. Pipeline is fine, but the founder is the pipeline. Every inbound lead funnels through them. Every partnership gets worked by them. Every proposal has their fingerprints on it. The account growth conversations depend on their relationships. One quarter they look up and realize they haven't done strategic work in four months, because they've been running a full-time sales job on top of the one they were supposed to be doing.

The obvious answer is to hire someone. A head of sales. A BD lead. Someone to carry the load.

It usually doesn't work.

Peter has a line on a recent episode: if we had a nickel for every time an agency founder told us they tried hiring a salesperson and it didn't work out, we'd have many nickels. The hire isn't the problem. The framing is. What a founder thinks of as "my BD work" is actually five different jobs held together with scotch tape and personal stamina. Handing that package to one person and expecting them to replicate it is, as Peter puts it, setting them up to fail.

The move that actually works is breaking BD into its component functions and handing them off in a specific order.

The five functions hidden inside "BD"

When a founder says they "do BD," here's what they're actually doing:

1. Marketing and awareness. LinkedIn posts, newsletters, webinars, conferences, award submissions, PR. The top-of-funnel work that puts your agency in the mental index of someone who'll have a problem next quarter.

2. Partnerships. Referral relationships with other agencies, consultants, and tech platforms. The quiet long game of being on the shortlist someone else keeps.

3. Outbound. Proactive prospecting: cold email, LinkedIn outreach, sometimes direct mail. A volume game with its own cadence and skill set.

4. Closing and sales process. Discovery, scoping, proposal writing, presenting, negotiating, signing. The full journey from qualified opportunity to first invoice.

5. Account growth and expansion. Upsells, cross-sells, and expanding the footprint inside existing clients. The function where most agencies are drastically underinvested.

A founder doing "BD" is splitting time across all five, usually unevenly. Account growth dominates in some seasons, sales in others, marketing in the slow weeks. The total hides how different these jobs actually are. The skills don't overlap. The cadences don't overlap. The personalities that excel at each don't overlap.

This is why the head-of-sales hire fails. You're asking someone to replicate five jobs at once. No one can.

The sequence: what to hand off first

Peter and Sei-Wook walk through a specific order in the episode, and the order is counterintuitive. Most founders want to delegate closing first. It's the most time-consuming, the most visible, the one they resent most on a Tuesday afternoon. The episode argues closing should go last.

Here's the sequence, with the logic for each.

First: Account growth. This is the easiest to delegate because you probably already have the people. Your account managers and project managers are already inside these accounts, already in the relationships, already seeing the expansion opportunities. What's usually missing is the mandate and the incentive. Formalize the role, add a commission or bonus component tied to expansion, and you have a team running a growth motion instead of hoping one happens.

Why first: you've already won the account. The hard part is done. Growing an existing client from $100k to $180k is dramatically cheaper than finding a new $80k one.

Second: Partnerships. A lightweight founder-led motion works for a while, but it has a ceiling. A dedicated partnership manager can go much deeper. At one of our agencies, Barrel, bringing on a partnership manager who'd previously worked at Shopify unlocked a level of depth with that ecosystem that the CEO couldn't have driven personally while running the business. The hire came with existing relationships and the time to nurture them.

Why second: partnerships compound. The earlier you get a dedicated owner, the more runway the relationships have to mature.

Third: Marketing execution. A coordinator-level hire who owns the content calendar, case study production, event follow-up, and newsletter cadence. The founder can still be the voice. Someone else is making sure the posts go out, the case studies get written on a quarterly rhythm, and the event you just attended turns into follow-up emails within 48 hours instead of three weeks.

Why third: marketing execution is the function where "I'll get to it when I have time" is most obviously broken. Consistency is worth more than brilliance here, and consistency is exactly what a founder can't provide.

Fourth: Outbound. Here's the warning that's worth stopping on. Founders reach for outbound first, usually when pipeline gets tight, and it almost always disappoints. The reason is structural. Outbound only works when you already have clear positioning, proof points, and a crisp offer. If those aren't in place, outbound is just generic messages from a generic agency. The outreach lands cold because the agency still reads cold.

Get marketing and partnerships cooking first. Let the reputation flywheel start turning. Then outbound can layer on top as a supplement, not a replacement.

Fifth: Closing. This is the last function to hand off, and for some agencies it never fully leaves the founder. Closing involves trust-building, reading rooms, credibility, the weight of the person on the call. The founder's reps are genuinely hard to replicate.

But "fully hand off" isn't the bar. The bar is breaking the sales process into sub-functions others can own: inbound qualification, discovery calls, scoping, proposal drafting, follow-ups. By the end, the founder might only show up for the final pitch on strategic accounts, and even then as the senior voice, not the operator. In our experience, a well-built sales team can run 80% of opportunities end-to-end, with the founder stepping in on the high-stakes deals where their presence genuinely moves the needle.

One warning: don't bundle

The temptation, once a founder accepts they can't hire one person to replace themselves, is to hire someone for two or three functions at once. Hire a partnerships person and also ask them to help with outbound. Hire a marketing coordinator and also ask them to run inbound qualification. It feels efficient. It isn't.

Bundling muddies objectives, splits attention, and sets the hire up for the same failure the founder was trying to escape. "Only two things instead of five" still isn't one thing. Give each role a single lane and the accountability that comes with it.

What changes for the founder

The founder's job doesn't disappear. It shifts. The highest-leverage thing a founder can do in BD isn't to do the BD. It's to architect the system that runs it.

That means choosing which strategic deals genuinely need them in the room. It means owning the thought leadership that can't be delegated because it's the founder's perspective. It means nurturing a few key partnerships where the relationship runs founder-to-founder. And it means building a team structure where a fire on the operations side doesn't cause a proposal to sit untouched for three weeks, because the founder is no longer the only person who can send it.

Where are you in the sequence?

List the five functions in order: account growth, partnerships, marketing execution, outbound, closing. Next to each, write the name of the person who currently owns it at your agency.

If your name is on three or more, you have a sequencing decision to make. Don't start with the most painful one, and don't start with the one eating your week. Start with the earliest function on the list where your name is still the only name. That's the first hand-off to plan.

The sequence exists for a reason. Each function's delegation gets harder than the last, and starting at the easy end is how you build the muscle to eventually delegate the hard one. Skip to closing first and you'll be the founder with many nickels.