The Hidden Cost of "I'm the Only One Who Can Do This"

Let's start this off by saying, I've fallen into this trap myself.

This year I launched PrismPath and published a board game. Both projects stretched me in different ways, but the board game taught me something that I think a lot of founders need to hear.

For a long time, I didn't know if the board game would make it beyond a prototype. I learned a lot through the process and was enjoying the exploration of learning new skills. It felt like unlocking new tiers in a game!

Over time though,I started believing it could be a finished product and the realization that getting there meant I would be really pushing the boundary of my skills and talents.

I think a lot of founders can relate to that mindset. We start businesses because we're resourceful people. We learn things on the fly. We wear multiple hats. We solve problems as they come up.

After doing that for long enough, it becomes easy to look at every challenge and think, "I'll just handle it myself."

When I was working on the board game, one of those moments came when I started thinking about the artwork. I'm not a trained illustrator. Could I have learned illustration? Probably, I had learned so many other skills why not one more?

There are more tutorials available today than ever before. Given enough time and effort, I likely could have developed the skills and produced something usable.

The question I had to ask myself wasn't whether I could do it , but whether I should.

I remember looking around at the incredible artists working across Canada and around the world knowing there were people who had already invested years developing that skillset. People who were far better equipped than I was to bring the visual side of the game to life.

Meanwhile, I was sitting there contemplating spending months learning an entirely new discipline. That's where "I'm the only one who can do this" starts to become dangerous.

Sometimes that phrase is true, often it isn't. What we're really saying is:

"I'm the person who knows the most about this {fill in the blank} right now."

Those are not the same thing.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that if I insisted on doing everything myself, the game might never get published.

It would still be sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to learn illustration, refine my skills, make mistakes, start over, and eventually produce something good enough.

The project wouldn't be moving forward, I'd just be busy.

Looking back, hiring an illustrator wasn't giving up control of the project.

It was recognizing where someone else's strengths could take the project further than my own. I still had a vision for what I wanted the game to become. I still made decisions. I still guided the direction.

What changed was accepting that I didn't need to personally execute every piece of it. That's a lesson I see repeated in businesses all the time.

Founders tell me things like:

Underneath those comments is usually something deeper.

Pride.

Not arrogance, but the pride earned from building something from nothing.

The pride of knowing every corner of your business because you've spent years creating it.

The pride of being the person who can always figure it out.

I understand that feeling because I've lived it. But I also know that pride can quietly become a limitation.

If we insist on being the person who does everything, eventually we become the thing holding growth back.

The board game taught me that there are talented people everywhere whose strengths complement my own. The moment I stopped trying to do everything myself, the project moved faster and became better than it would have been if I had held onto every task.

The lesson wasn't really about publishing a board game.

It was about recognizing how easy it is to become the person everything depends on.

At first, that can feel like leadership. You're involved in every decision, every project, and every problem because you care deeply about the outcome.

Over time, though, it's worth asking a harder question:

If you stepped away unexpectedly for a month, what would happen to the business?

Many founders don't realize how much knowledge, decision-making, and responsibility has accumulated around them until they stop and look at it objectively. That's where key person risk begins.

Curious how dependent your business is on you?

Take the Key Person Risk Assessment to uncover opportunities to reduce founder dependency.