If you’re spending hours managing your inbox, booking travel, scheduling meetings, or handling administrative tasks, you may be creating your own founder bottleneck. On Beyond 7 Figures, BELAY CEO Tricia Sciortino explains how Executive Assistant support and AI can help protect your time for strategy, leadership, key relationships, and the decisions that move your business forward.
In The Founder Bottleneck: How to Reclaim Your Time and Scale Faster, Predictable Profits CEO Charles Gaudet talks with Tricia about return on time, hiring strong people, trusting them with real ownership, and using AI to increase what support can accomplish.
Tricia brings an unusual perspective to that conversation. She joined BELAY as its first employee and now leads the company as CEO. Early on, she watched BELAY’s founders bring in people with expertise they didn’t have so they could stay focused on building the business. That experience still shapes how she thinks about leadership today.
A founder bottleneck forms when too many decisions or day-to-day responsibilities depend on you. Work may still get done, but your availability starts setting the pace.
Charles describes hearing a common frustration from business owners: They’re working long days, handling back-office tasks, and ending the day feeling as if they didn’t move the business forward. He frames the problem through ROT, or return on time. The question is simple: Are you spending your hours on the responsibilities that create the most value?
Tricia says CEOs and founders should be thinking about the future of the business. That includes strategy, revenue, team health, and what’s coming next. If your attention is consumed by inbox management or expense reports, those higher-value responsibilities get less of you.
A useful question to ask is, “Does this require my specific judgment or expertise?”
If the answer is no, the task may belong with someone else.
Paying yourself to be your own assistant means using executive-level time on administrative work someone else could handle. Tricia puts it more directly in the Beyond 7 Figures episode:
She explains that some leaders spend two or three hours a day on Executive Assistant work. That might include inbox management, travel, scheduling, or follow-up.
The cost isn’t limited to those hours. It also includes the strategy you didn’t get to, the relationship you didn’t develop, the decision you delayed, or the idea you didn’t have time to consider.
That’s why Tricia connects Executive Assistant support to return on time. If your time is among the most valuable resources in the company, the way you spend it deserves the same scrutiny you’d give any other business expense.
You may need an Executive Assistant when you’re consistently too busy to think, important priorities keep slipping, or administrative work is taking hours from your week. You don’t need to wait until you hit a particular revenue milestone.
Tricia shares a firsthand example from her time supporting author and entrepreneur Michael Hyatt. When he left Thomas Nelson and started his own business, one of his first hires was Tricia as a fractional Executive Assistant for 10 hours a week. She handled his inbox and speaking requests so he could protect time for writing.
That experience changed how Tricia thinks about the timing of support. An assistant can be a resource that helps create success from the beginning.
Charles shares a similar story. His first assistant started at 10 hours a week and eventually grew into full-time support. As more administrative work came off his plate, he had room to step back and think about new initiatives.
If you keep saying, “I don’t have time,” that may be the signal.
Delegation is hard because handing off a task also requires trust. You have to let another person into parts of the business you may be used to controlling yourself.
Tricia admits that she understands that instinct. She describes herself as someone who likes to hold onto things and says leaders often hesitate to give an assistant access to email or other parts of their work.
Her advice is to set appropriate guardrails and give people room to prove what they can do. As confidence grows, responsibility can grow with it.
Charles points to another common barrier: “It’ll take me longer to explain this than to do it myself.”
He uses a 15-minute daily task to show the math. Fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, becomes more than an hour each week. Over 52 weeks, that small recurring task adds up to more than a full workweek.
His solution is to record a repeatable task once, explain what he’s doing, and let his assistant turn that recording into a documented process. That prevents him from having to explain the same task again.
Executive Assistants are using AI to take on more complex work and reduce the time spent on repeatable processes. BELAY CEO Tricia Sciortino says AI has changed what her own assistant can handle.
In the podcast conversation, Tricia explains that her assistant now helps with board deck memos and sales-performance analysis using AI. She says the role has moved closer to a chief-of-staff function because her assistant can manage higher-level support alongside traditional administrative work.
Tricia gives a specific example from the day the podcast was recorded. Before the interview, she sent her assistant a voice memo about a new hire. She asked her to take the training plan and job description, use Claude to create 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals, put those goals into OKR format, and return the document for review.
Her assistant handled the process, and Tricia reviewed the result.
AI can also reduce the manual work behind meetings and follow-up. Tricia shares how her assistant has worked with Zoom AI, Claude, and Asana to streamline follow-up from BELAY’s remote leadership meetings. Work that once required manually identifying action items and entering tasks into a project management system can now move into the company’s workflow much faster.
That changes where an assistant spends time. Less goes toward transferring information from one system to another, leaving more capacity for judgment-intensive support and higher-level work.
A strong Executive Assistant should know the role well enough to bring expertise to the relationship. Charles recommends hiring someone who understands how to be an assistant better than you do.
If you have to teach the person how the role works from the ground up, you may create another management burden for yourself.
Tricia adds that “okay” support isn’t enough. The person needs the right competencies and character for the role.
Leaders have responsibilities here, too. Charles and Tricia both point out that missed expectations can come from unclear management. If you haven’t explained what success looks like, your assistant may be guessing at the standard.
Tricia has seen clients complain that an assistant didn’t meet expectations, only to realize they never clearly set those expectations in the first place.
Clear instructions and regular feedback give the relationship a better chance to work.
Tricia’s best leadership advice is to hire excellent people and let go of work that no longer needs to stay with you.
Near the end of the episode, Charles asks for her best advice to founders, with one condition: It can’t simply be “hire an assistant.”
Her answer is broader. Hire people who are smarter than you in the roles you bring them into. Train them well, then trust them enough to do the job.
Tricia says leaders who refuse to bring in strong people can become the limitation on their own company’s growth.
That point reaches beyond Executive Assistant support. It applies to any role where someone else can bring expertise you don’t have or take ownership of responsibilities that no longer need your direct involvement.
The goal is a business that can keep moving while you focus on the work that truly requires you.
Listen to the full conversation between Tricia Sciortino and Charles Gaudet on Beyond 7 Figures for more on return on time, delegation, Executive Assistant support, and AI.
If you’re ready to protect more of your time for the work only you can do, learn more about BELAY Executive Assistants. More than 25,000 leaders have trusted BELAY to help them find the right support.
A founder bottleneck happens when too many decisions or responsibilities depend on you. When your team has to wait for your input before work can move, your availability starts limiting the pace of the business.
Return on time, or ROT, is a way to evaluate whether your hours are going toward the responsibilities that create the most value. In the episode, Charles uses ROT to ask whether business owners are spending their time on the work they should be doing.
If you’re consistently too busy to think strategically, important priorities keep slipping, or administrative work takes hours from your week, it may be time to consider Executive Assistant support.
An Executive Assistant can use AI for research, analysis, drafting, and repeatable workflows. Tricia shares examples involving board materials, sales diagnostics, hiring plans, and meeting follow-up.
Set clear expectations and reasonable guardrails, then give your assistant room to own the task. Feedback helps both of you refine the process as trust grows.
Start with recurring responsibilities that don’t require your specific judgment or relationships. Inbox management, scheduling, travel coordination, and routine follow-up are common places to begin.