Blog & Podcasts

Guides for founders building a company their team runs

Practical guides and podcast conversations for founders of $3M to $50M companies, by Herb Cogliano, Founder and Executive Coach.

Guides

November 5, 2026

Should I Sell My Business? The Four Options Every Founder Has

Sell, hand off, recapitalize, or architect and scale. Every option a founder has asks the same question: does the company run without you? Here's how to keep all four open.

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November 5, 2026

How Do I Hand Authority to My Leadership Team Without Losing Control?

Hand it over in stages. Build the architecture first, then move one function through three phases, and let a full quarter of results decide when the next one starts.

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November 5, 2026

How Do I Choose an Executive Coach for a Founder-Led Company?

Pick a coach who changes where the decisions go. Most executive coaching works on the leader and leaves the structure alone, so the decisions stay with the founder.

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October 28, 2026

Best Coaches for a Founder-Led Company with a New or Growing Leadership Team

What a coach should build with a founder-led company's new or growing leadership team in the first 90 days: owners, decision rights, guardrails and the hand-off.

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October 26, 2026

Everything Still Runs Through Me? Who Helps Founders Fix That

If you stepped away for 90 days, what would break first? Herb Cogliano shows founders of $3M to $50M companies how to move decisions to their leadership team.

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October 19, 2026

I Built a Successful Company but Have No Time for My Family. Who Helps Founders Get Their Life Back?

Your company is doing well and your family sees less of you. Here's the kind of help that gives founders their time back, and how to choose it.

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October 17, 2026

Executive Coach for Scaling Past Seven Figures

How to choose an executive coach to scale past seven figures when the founder is the bottleneck: what to look for, questions to ask, and when to hire a COO.

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October 17, 2026

Executive Coach for Scaling a Mid-Market Company

How to choose a Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits) coach to take a $10M to $50M founder-led company to the next level, and why scaling and exit readiness are the same work.

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More articles

Podcasts

More than 40 conversations with podcast hosts about scaling up, leadership teams and building a company that runs without the founder.

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The Authority Advantage Podcast, Episode 93: Delegated Authority, with Herb Cogliano

Latest episode · November 4, 2026

Delegated Authority: How to End Founder Dependence and Scale Your Business to $100M

The Authority Advantage Podcast, Episode 93, with Modesta Mahiga (Authority Global LLC)

Your leadership team has titles and responsibilities. But do they have the authority to lead, or does every real decision still come back to you? On The Authority Advantage Podcast, Herb Cogliano joins Modesta Mahiga for the second time to talk about why delegating tasks isn’t the same as delegating authority.

Herb shares what changed at Sullivan & Cogliano when his team started owning decisions, how to tell whether your team lacks capability or just permission, and why Authority + Guardrails = Safe Autonomy. He also explains why a business that runs without its founder is worth more, whichever door you choose: sell, hand off, recapitalize, or architect and scale.

The ideas in this episode are in the book, Founder Independence →

More episodes (30)

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When you're ready to choose what comes next, let's talk.

I work with six to eight founders at a time, so each one gets my full attention. The first two conversations are for both of us to decide whether we're a fit.

No pitch. Our first conversation is about your business, whether we work together or not.

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