For Eric Partaker, who helped Skype achieve its multi-billion-dollar exit, success is purely a byproduct of focus. Drawing on behavioural science and his experience coaching over 100 companies to scale, he unpacks why founders who do too much are actually letting their teams down.
Back in 2007, CEO coach Eric Partaker knew that something in his restaurant business wasn’t working. He just couldn’t put his finger on exactly what - until someone pointed a finger at him.
Partaker began his career as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he spent years advising Fortune 50 CEOs. In 2005, he joined Skype as the Head of Business Development for Global eCommerce, helping to grow the team from around 30 to 500 people before its $2.6 billion acquisition by eBay.
For his next move, Partaker drew inspiration from the Mexican food he’d grown up with in Chicago. Together with Dan Houghton, another ex-Skype team member, he co-founded the award-winning burrito chain Chilango.
Despite early success, the company wasn’t growing as quickly as Partaker expected. Something was slowing it down. “There was a period where I thought, okay, we have a hiring problem, or an execution problem - or maybe there's a communication problem. But it was actually a me problem,” he says.
Stepping into a new niche where he was relatively inexperienced, Partaker insisted on being involved in every decision linked to the product development process - from concept through to final approval. “The problem is that as the company grows, what doesn't grow are the hours in your day. Your calendar is finite - whereas the potential growth of your company, relatively speaking, is infinite.”
As a result, Partaker became a bottleneck. After delays cost the team months of progress, someone on his leadership team finally pushed back. Partaker recalls: “She said to me, very bluntly, you're really slowing us down because we can only have meetings when you're available. Can you just trust us?”
Partaker agreed, scaling back his involvement to only the most essential step of the process - the final taste test. The outcome was a pleasant surprise: the burritos remained delicious, and Partaker’s time was freed up to focus on where he could add the most value.
“I realised that by spreading myself all over the business, I wasn’t focusing on the parts that needed my specific skillset. On top of that, it was demoralising for my team to have to run basic decisions past me. That was a big ‘let go’ moment for me.”
Since Chilango, Partaker has founded several companies, hired over 2 000 people, and now uses his experience to coach founders and CEOs who want to achieve peak performance.
How to let go and where to redirect focus are core lessons Partaker tries to impart on every client he works with. “There's this phrase, hire great people and get out of the way. I agree with the first half. I strongly disagree with the second. The phrase should be rewritten to hire great people so you can do what only you can.”
This could be something a founder is naturally gifted at, or something that no one else on the team has the skillset to achieve. “For me, the conversation about letting go happened at a time when we were trying to raise a major funding round. Being less involved in product development meant I had more time to focus on securing the capital we needed. There was nobody else who could do that - and that’s the big lesson.”
Why teams need to learn to walk on their own
“A company never fails to scale, people do. Usually, it starts with the founder,” says Partaker. “The founder is rarely the bottleneck because they're not working hard enough. It happens when the business starts to get ahead of them.”
“In the early days, you do need to be involved in everything.” The problem, Partaker warns, is that this leads to a mindset where founders believe their team can’t figure things out without them. “You start thinking that you alone are essential, but there’s always someone who can do a job better than you.”
“It’s kind of like having a young child who’s learning to walk,” he says. “You can see where they’re trying to go, and the fastest way to get them there would be to pick them up and carry them. But then the child never learns to walk.”
Building a competent team is exactly the same, says Partaker. “It’s scary when other people take over decisions you thought only you could manage. But you need to let them get a few bumps and bruises. Give them some freedom and they won’t just learn to walk, they’ll end up being faster than you. That’s when your company really starts to grow.”
Letting go means learning to focus
Partaker sees success as a byproduct of focus. “When people fail to scale, it's typically that they're failing to focus on the right things, and they're doing too much.”
Being intentional about when to focus and how focus is applied makes all the difference.
When to focus: Five signs it's time to step back
Partaker’s first warning sign was his calendar capacity. “I use this as a lesson for other founders. Take your existing business and say, okay, if it doubles and triples, will my calendar survive? Will it hold up?”
Often, a founder’s calendar is already bursting at the seams and they can’t imagine doubling their workload. “If their answer is no, my calendar wouldn't hold up, then that's a warning sign that you're the bottleneck.”
Some other signs Partaker warns his clients to look out for include:
- The team waits for founder input before taking action.
- The founder is being chased for follow-ups on key decisions.
- Workload continues to grow even as capacity runs out.
- Taking a vacation feels impossible.
How to focus: The behavioural science behind setting goals
Feeling the pressure that came with being a founder, Partaker turned to behavioural science to help: “Everything is on you as an entrepreneur, so naturally I became very focused on how to optimise my own performance.”
A big driver for him was being the world’s worst procrastinator. “At some point, I felt like I was a broken person, that there was something literally wrong with my brain.”
“I was so bad that, in the year 2000, I even bought a set of books on overcoming procrastination. I didn't read those books until 2010. It took me a decade. And I still achieved a lot, but it just came with so much pain, it was such a heavy grind.”
The solution, which has helped both Partaker’s own leadership teams and other management teams he’s worked with, is simply the act of focusing - something anyone can programme their brain to do.
Focus hack #1: Count the red cars
“The human brain has a special system designed to help us focus on goals - if you know how to use it,” explains Partaker.
When someone sets out to start a business, it’s unlikely their goal is to be statistically average. Everyone wants outlier results. To get there, a founder needs to make being an outlier an explicit goal. “It sounds obvious, but it’s something a lot of founders miss. It’s about hacking into the biology of our brain; to do that, you have to get the goal right,” explains Partaker.
During the course of the day, humans are bombarded with millions of stimuli. “If we were to notice and take in all of these things, we’d be a complete mess. Luckily, our brains are wired with a reticular activating system, which filters out non-essential information and helps you focus on only what is relevant at any given moment.”
Partaker explains using an analogy from childhood: “It’s like playing the game where you and a friend count every red car you see. They stand out specifically because you’re looking for them. But if after five minutes your friend suddenly asked how many grey cars you had seen, you would have no clue - because your goal was to look for red cars.”
Applying the red car logic to business, the brain will shut out anything that's not relevant to the goal someone has set, “so, if you want to grow a business by 10%, you'll see lots of small ways to grow by 10%. But if you focus on wanting to grow by 10 times, then a lot of the ways that would have gotten you to 10% won't even factor into the equation.”
“We might as well set our ambitions as high as possible, because then we will see the path that helps us get to that super high goal.”
Once the ambitious goal has been set, the path to achievement becomes easier to find. Working backwards, the leaders of a business can start to come up with the best strategy to achieve whatever they need to in pursuit of the goal.
“With a 10 times focus versus a 10% focus, you’ll stop knocking on doors that only gain you a single customer at a time - and start looking for opportunities where one door opens up to 10 000 customers.”
“When we were building Skype, for example, we used this approach for entering new markets. We would find the local internet service provider that had the largest market share, and then we would bundle Skype together with what they were offering. So, one door would immediately spread to millions of households at once. And that’s all because we set a big, ambitious goal to begin with.”
Focus hack #2: Distraction free minutes
Having said all that, Partaker concedes, focusing can be difficult at founder level - precisely because so many things require their attention. His solution is to “schedule in at least 90 uninterrupted, distraction-free minutes per day - dedicated to your ambitious goal.”
“A founder’s to-do list is literally endless, which can feel overwhelming. By committing to a set number of distraction-free minutes, you’re no longer working towards crossing things off the list. The goal becomes to hit the 90-minute mark.”
This is Partaker’s way of gamifying focus: “hitting 90 minutes often feels much more achievable than crossing off 50 tasks. As you become better at it, the number of minutes can increase with time, but 90 is a solid starting point.”
“By committing to this approach, day after day, without fail, and over the course of a month, you’ll likely end up spending more than double the amount of time working towards your ambitious goal than you otherwise would have,” says Partaker.
Focus hack #3: The thing only you can do
Once the ambitious goal has been set, it becomes exponentially easier for a founder to decide what to let go of, and where to focus their time and energy.
One powerful question a founder can ask themselves is, ‘if every area of my business were to maintain its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?’
From there, the founder must decide what it is that only they can do within that area - and focus on that. “It's a relative question,” Partaker explains, “because you may not be the best person to do it, but with the budget, the people, and the resources that you have, you're the best option.”
Partaker illustrates his point with an example from his own journey. Post-Chilango, he pivoted from running startups, to helping other ambitious entrepreneurs scale their companies.
Partaker set his ambitious goal early on: “I wanted to turn on an absolute fire hydrant of demand. So, I asked myself where I could find my ideal customers - founders and CEOs - in the highest concentration, and what lever could only I pull to make this happen. The answer to both was LinkedIn.”
At the time, Partaker had never used LinkedIn. “And at 50 years old, I don't consider myself to be some kind of social media guru. But by spending at least 90 uninterrupted distraction-free minutes on that per day, I went from a following of 20,000 to more than 1.2 million in a few years.”
This growth happened because Partaker set an ambitious goal, worked backwards to get to the right strategy, and intentionally focused on making it happen.
Tying it all together: When pure focus meets an ambitious goal
In the beginning, a founder does need to hustle hard - because that, ultimately, is what builds the first version of a business. “The thing is, hustle doesn't scale. If you just continue in that mode, then you will actually multiply chaos, and minimise growth.”
That’s why focus is so supremely important. With Chilango, Partaker had tried to stay involved in too many decisions and too many details. Once he stepped back, he was able to focus his time and energy on the thing only he could do: fundraising for the business.
But a founder can only focus when they’ve got the right team in place, says Partaker, “it really all goes back to people,” he says. “You want to have as many star players as possible, all individually outshining your capability within their position. Then, your job is really to get them to play well together and to win as often as possible.”
When the team is playing to their strengths, the leader is freed up to move from hands-on mode and into leadership mode: “you need to stop seeing yourself as a doer, and start enabling others to do.”
Tying everything together, Partaker explains that “it’s about trusting the people you’ve hired and letting them do their jobs - while you focus on the thing that only you can do. And that, ultimately, needs to be the highest leverage lever for business growth.”
