When you start a business, you have to be everything if you want it to survive and grow. When I started my development company in Halifax, I was the repairman, the bookkeeper, the property manager, the leasing agent, the janitor and the CEO. I ran it that way, small scale with no official team, for at least four years. Early on, you can't afford to hire out everything. You don't have the budget to pay time and material on every job, and you can't carry big overhead. Try to, and you'll go out of business.
It was seven years before I brought in an in-house bookkeeper. By then I'd already hired admins and leasing agents, but the books came in-house naturally, not because I forced it. Our remote bookkeeping company just couldn't give the business the attention it needed, and they didn't understand how our operations actually worked. In this business, cash flow is everything. One huge lawyer's bill can sink you or ruin a relationship, and you never want to leave invoices unpaid. Sometimes people won't bill you for weeks or even months, and when the invoice finally shows up five months later, they want to be paid right away. So at the beginning, you really have to keep your finger on the pulse and know what you can take on, and when. You always have to be ten steps ahead. That's exactly why bringing the books in-house, and hiring the right person for it, mattered so much.
But as the business grows, you have to teach yourself the reverse: how not to be involved in everything. You have to learn to delegate and let others take the torch. You only have two hands. If you want 20 torches burning, you have to learn how to lead.
I heard something once that stuck with me. The owner of a company really has two jobs: deciding where the company is going, and developing the people who will get it there. Everything else is noise. It still matters, but your job is to build the systems for it, keep improving them, and train your team to run them. That's how you stay proactive instead of reactive. Anything you spend your time on that isn't moving the company forward is, in effect, moving it back.
Right now Project Avaleen, our 17-unit, four-storey multi-family building in Halifax, is moving through its milestones, and I'm not the one holding the schedule together. Not long ago that would have been me, on top of everything else.
Wanting control comes with building something
Most people who start a business want control over everything. I get it. You built it, so you want your hands on it.
I don't consider myself a micromanager, and it's not because I'm especially laid back. It's math. Every hour I spend re-checking someone's work is an hour I'm not spending on the next mission, the next permit or the next building. As a developer in Nova Scotia, that time is where the growth comes from.
Think about where the fence or the garbage bins go on a site. Is that more important than the direction of the company? No. You trust your team to put them in the right spot. Letting go of decisions like that frees up your attention for what actually matters. Your job is productivity across the whole company, not your own production. There's a difference.
What I do want is to stay close enough to see the business grow and help it along. That's different from control, and it took me a while to tell the two apart.
Delegation is really a hiring problem
A lot of advice makes letting go sound like a decision. Decide to delegate, and you've delegated.
In my experience, it's a hiring problem. Good people are hard to find, and finding them takes time. Once you do, you still have to build trust, and that only comes from working through real jobs together.
Until there's someone to hand the work to, you're not micromanaging. You're the only manager. From the outside those look the same, but they're not.
Why it matters for tenants and for housing
As a landlord, this is the part I care about most. When one person does everything, tenants wait. A real team means repairs, questions and leases don't sit in one person's inbox.
And as a developer, the time I'm not spending double-checking work goes into getting more buildings permitted and built in Halifax. More homes is the most direct way I know to help with rents and affordability here.
What I measure now
What changed for me is the question I ask. I used to ask whether something was done the way I would have done it. Now I ask two things: did it get done, and will the person who did it be better at it next time?
The first question keeps you stuck in the middle of your own business. The second is how a team gets stronger with every project.
A few years ago, I would have seen a schedule I'm not personally holding together as a risk. Today I see it as the only way a company like ours grows.
The company writes up each milestone as it happens. The most recent is Project Avaleen reaching weather-tight.
Neyaz Saberi is a developer, landlord and general contractor based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.