I Pity the Fool...

When you’re building a small, fast-growing company, there are a thousand ways to mess it up, and that’s just before lunch.

Sure, you might be really good at your craft. Maybe you code like a caffeinated octopus or design like your Figma board deserves its own museum wing.

But then reality sucker-punches you with all the other stuff: sales, marketing, finance, ops, recruiting. You know, all the boring business chores that don’t fit neatly into your zone of genius.

As a Microteam founder, there’s no way one person can be an expert in all that.

But you also know that all the work you’re doing to scale your expertly-crafted product or service won’t go anywhere if you mess up the rest of the business.

Here’s the truth uppercut: if you’re a founder who only knows one thing deeply, you’re building a house of cards in a wind tunnel.

Craig Hyde, CEO of Rigor, learned this the hard way. He started as a computer engineer before moving into sales.

Craig once admitted his first sales deck was “just charts of system performance” . Accurate, maybe, but he absolutely lost the audience. Halfway through, an exec interrupted:

That was his rude awakening. He couldn’t just speak technical talk. He had to translate product benefits into the business language of ROI.

Writing his first pricing sheet, he said, was scarier than shipping production code.

“I thought starting a company meant freedom. Turns out it means doing all the jobs at once.”

That’s when he discovered T-Shaped Skills, the core competency of Microteam founders who scale like pros without losing their minds.

The term “T-Shaped Skills” was first coined by David Guest in 1991, later popularized by IDEO.

It means having deep expertise in one core area (the vertical bar of the T) and useful breadth across related areas (the horizontal bar).

Imagine you’re building with LEG… toy connector bricks:

Your tall tower is your deep skill, the thing that makes you valuable.

Your horizontal plate is your connector, the thing that lets you actually work across the different and necessary lines of business.

Without that horizontal piece, you’re just an impressive but lonely tower of “I know everything about this one thing, and only this one thing.” Truly “I” shaped!

Likewise, you can be a “flatliner” where you have a little bit of knowledge in a broad range of areas, but no real depth or expertise in any particular area. The PowerPoint warriors of the world. This is what we call a McKinsey consultant “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”.

So being T-shaped means you’re not just good at your thing, you’re also skilled and competent enough in other areas to successfully work and collaborate with others.

This is why as a Microteam founder, you need to be T-shaped.

Do necessary high-value work and coordinate, operate, and connect dots across functions.

In the Microteam era, T-Shaped skills are necessary not only to survive, but to scale. T-shaped skills provide the following key benefits:

You’re not just wearing many hats, you’re knowing which one matters most right now.

To be T-shaped, you can’t just be horizontal, you need to have depth as well. And that depth needs to be where it matters.

In general, there are four archetypes of deep founders:

🧠 Technical Founder: Deep in code or product. Needs sales, finance, and ops basics. Bonus: can automate the drudge work.

🎨 Creative Founder: Deep in design, content, or brand. Needs sales and money literacy to make art make money.

🤝 Service / Consultative Founder: Deep in client work. Needs systems to escape the “feast and famine” cycle.

📊 Business / Ops Founder: Deep in sales, ops, or finance. Needs technical and delivery understanding to avoid becoming the “MBA meme.”

As a T-shaped founder, you need to spend as much time as possible wearing the hat of your deep expertise so you can add value. But you need to balance with breadth so you don’t pigeon-hole yourself.

The challenge of building T-shaped skills is to change your mindset. Too often small team founders think:

Nope. That’s the I-Shaped mindset.

The problem with the first statement is that it’s tempting to hire lots of people and build your team to offset your lack of broad competence.

The problem with the second statement is that it’s tempting to hunker down into your area of competence and shed any other responsibilities, keeping you small.

The goal is to scale as much as possible without bulking up on staff. That requires broadening your mindset to avoid scaling traps.

You don’t have to become an expert at everything. Just get fluent enough to make smart decisions and lead your Microteam like a pro.

Feeling overwhelmed? Let’s start with a simple 30 day challenge.

Here’s your one-page challenge:

Scalemaxxing isn’t just about leverage and automation. It’s powered by founders who are T-Shaped enough to lead small teams like big ones.

So next time you’re tempted to stay in your comfort zone, remember: