From Founder to Architect: The Leverage Framework That Builds Legacy Businesses
Most business owners start by doing everything themselves — selling, fulfilling, managing, and reacting.
But the ones who scale?
They evolve.
They stop being the engine and start becoming the architect.
At a certain point, growing your business isn’t about grinding harder — it’s about building better systems, attracting better people, and making better decisions.
This is where leverage comes in — not just as a concept, but as a multiplier of your time, your effort, and your capital.
And just like any good tool, leverage needs something to push against. That’s where your fulcrum comes in — the judgment, insight, and positioning that determine whether your effort moves a boulder or just kicks up dust.
The lever and fulcrum are both unique here.
The lever represents leverage.
Leverage is the tool you’re using to amplify your input.
Fellow entrepreneur and angel investor Naval Ravikant, breaks this down in 4 categories.
The first is labor.
It’s the oldest form of leverage - having others work alongside you.
Leverage in this form comes from the idea of listing your tasks in order from low-dolar to high-dollar value tasks.
Scheduling meetings, bookkeeping, formatting slides/documents = low dollar value tasks.
Developing strategic partnerships, hiring/training A-players, closing new business = high dollar value tasks.
By having someone work alongside you to do those low-dollar tasks, you free up your time to perform higher dollar tasks.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day - some people just operate more leveraged than others to get the most out of their day.
The next form of leverage is capital.
The ability to allocate financial resources behind your decisions is a force multiplier.
Capital can buy labor, acquire new technology or equipment, amplify marketing, and fund R&D and innovation.
The key is once you make a decision, capital lets you amplify that decision at scale.
Code is our third form of leverage.
Code works 24/7, with no investors or gatekeepers needed.
Code could be a CRM that automates your sales follow-ups, a mobile app that adds value passively, or an automation that allows multiple pieces of technology talk to each other to save your staff time.
Key = you write it once & it works forever.
Our last form of leverage is media or content.
Media is unique because it allows you to access zero marginal costs of replication.
I can give a talk today in front of 200 people - or I can post this on Youtube and 250,000 people can see it (& hint - maybe combine it with a marketing funnel, that uses capital to advertise to expand the outcome & now I’m using multiple forms of leverage at once).
I don’t have to be in the room to reach those people — I post once, and an army of internet algorithms works around the clock, even while I sleep, to put that content in front of the right audience.
To key point here on leverage is a couple things:
Leverage amplifies your judgment: One good decision can have a 1,000x impact.
Leverage allows you to detach time from income — you stop trading time for money.
The more leverage you apply to specific knowledge, the faster your results compound.
As Archimedes moves the world, it’s not just the length of his lever that matters — it’s the precise placement of his fulcrum that makes it possible.
You can have the longest lever in the world but where and how you apply that leverage will determine whether you succeed or fail.
A fulcrum in your business is a metaphor for a few key things — your knowledge, your judgment, and your strategic position.
Specific knowledge is about knowing your niche, having a deep understanding of your supply chain, or mastery of software tools that automates your operations.
Good judgment is essential — because if leverage amplifies your outcomes, then poor decisions will only produce bigger failures.
Strategic positioning amplifies leverage — the right network or audience ensures your effort lands where it matters most.
I like to say that the person with the longest time horizon wins - so you’re not optimizing for the next week, rather, you’re optimizing for the next decade which acts as a forcing function for:
Less short-sighted decisions
Prioritizing reputation over revenue
Allows you to invest in high-quality people, systems, and skills that compound.
This reminds me of Jeff Bezos who was congratulated after a strong quarterly earnings for Amazon and he said, “Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I’m working on a quarter that’s going to happen in the next three years.”
So to wrap up the idea of the fulcrum - there’s a parable, I like to come back to called “The Expert and the Hammer”
The parable is something along the lines of, there’s a large expensive machine in a factor that breaks down - stopping the business operating fully.
Managers of the company have fully exhausted all their internal resources and no one can fix it - so they bring in an outside expert.
This expert inspects the machine for a few minutes, then takes out a small hammer, taps a specific bolt, and the machine immediately comes back to life.
A few days later, the factory receives an invoice.
Total = $10,000.
Outraged, the factory demands an itemized bill.
The expert replies:
Tapping with hammer: $1
Knowing where to tap: $9,999.
So in this parable, the expert’s judgement about where to tap is the real value.
But here’s the catch — the lever and fulcrum both change as your business grows, because there’s bottlenecks at different stages of your business change
So consider that there’s ~$34.8 million U.S. small businesses
If you’re stuck in each one of these categories, consider the following:
$0 - $1M = your model is broken - it’s your offer, market, or delivery model that isn’t working well enough to scale.
You may find you’re selling a product or service people don’t really want or aren’t willing to pay for, margins are too tight, or your cost to acquire a customer is too high relative to lifetime value.
The solution here is to fix the model. Refine your offer until it resonates, convert better, charge more, or change how you fulfill. This is the “proof of concept” phase — no amount of leverage can save a flawed model. You’re not scaling yet; you’re trying to find what works.
$1M - $3M = you’re distracted. Your model works but now you’re doing too many things.
Maybe you’re chasing too many marketing channels, product lines, clients, or priorities. Your time and your team's time is diluted across low-value tasks.
At this stage, consider auditing your time. Have a repeating alarm every 15 minutes of your day for 1-week to see where exactly your time is spent.
Distraction is killing your momentum.
$3M - $10M = people problem #1 - you’re hiring the wrong people.
As the owner, you’re too involved in the day-to-day operations & worse, your existing team likely is good enough to keep things afloat, just not at a point where they can scale the company without you.
You’re likely hiring people to take orders, not solve problems.
You’re settling for B/C-players because you think A-players are too expensive or hard to find.
You’re managing tasks, not delegating decisions.
Your solution here is to update your talent.
Either they’re a hell-yes or a hell-no.
$10M+ = people problem #2, your leadership isn’t delivering.
At this level, it’s not the frontline team - but the leaders who aren’t performing.
The company has scaled beyond your personal oversight. You’ve hired managers, directors, VPs but they’re not aligned, not executing, or leading effectively.
Maybe these are siloed teams that don’t communicate.
Projects stalling in the “almost done” stage
A leadership team full of people manage status instead of driving outcomes.
Your solution here is to upgrade your leadership bench. Going from $10M - $50M, your org chart has to run without you.
So wherever you are on that journey—$500K, $5 million, or $50 million—the lever is always there.
But the fulcrum? That has to be placed with intention.
It’s not about working harder. It’s not even about working smarter.
It’s about working more leveraged.
Because when you combine the right lever with the right fulcrum—
When you apply sound judgment, specific knowledge, and long-term thinking—
You stop building a business that needs you every day…
And you start building a machine that works because of you, even when you're not there.
So the real question isn’t just: “How hard are you working?”
It’s:
“Where are you applying your leverage?”
“Where are you placing your fulcrum?”
Get those two things right—and you don’t just grow a business.
You build a legacy.