The image of the pioneer who works too much who is burned by the finish line must be killed. But there is a silent rule and it is something about which innumerable female entrepreneurs continue to play: you must do it yourself, in order to create something real. Not just exhausting, this belief also is counter-productive. Women entrepreneurs are redefining the concept of scaling by undertaking strategic delegation and smart outsourcing, the most successful ones.

The Myth of the Solo Founder

There’s a particular narrative surrounding women entrepreneurs that deserves to be questioned. Men in business are known to be glorified in terms of team building and delegating; women are sometime judged when they do the same things. This two-sided approach is a horrific scenario in which women believe they must demonstrate they can do it and therefore, take charge of all the arrangement, including strategy, social media, and accounting.

Here, however, is what the data reveals: those founders that can delegate scale more quickly and are less likely to experience burnout. They are able to make better choices as they are not tired. Their teams are trustworthy and grow quicker. Their companies are running more efficiently as there are specialists who handle tasks as opposed to jacks-of-all-trades who would handle them.

The Delegation Decision

Strategic delegation is not weakness admission: it is the identification that your time is the most valuable thing that you have. Most of your time and attention should be on your own unique skills, the vision, creativity, relationships and decision making which can be contributed only by you. The working activities that take hours? They can be more efficiently done by another person.

That is why a lot of developing companies prefer to resort to fractional support models. Fractions can be used instead of full-time staff to fill each position, giving you access to knowledge and bandwidth when you need it (and give you a opportunity to cost-effectively share the responsibilities with fellow team members). Professional support at a professional level but you do not need to pay any extra salary to a higher-level team to manage.

Building a Sustainable Work Life

Sarah, a founder who scaled her consulting business from six to seven figures, recently shared her turning point: “I finally hired a fractional executive assistant, and it was transformative. I was no longer swept up in timekeeping, mails, and paperwork. I would get the opportunity to work on clients and business development. Her story is the same as hundreds of other women entrepreneurs who were able to find a relief in delegating intelligently.

This is not necessarily a hustle free transition. The first thing is a learning curve to be able to properly communicate what should get delegated, set mechanisms in place and trust another person with your business. However, those founders that endure this acclimatizing time testify that the reward is bountiful. Their stress also is reduced, but their business tends to grow quicker.

Sustaining a high-performance business also means sustaining yourself — incorporating eco-conscious women’s daily wellness rituals for health creates the kind of daily foundation that keeps you energized through the demands of scaling.

Creating Systems That Scale

The key to success in delegation is having the proper systems. Anyone can just jump in and work on the tasks, when they are well documented and the processes are standardized. In fact, this is more beneficial to your business as a whole since you are not forming unwarranted reliance on any one individual.

The idea is to have a business that would operate effectively with 60 hour work or 30 hours work. That needs to change to be less about doing it myself faster and more about coming up with a system that can be done by anyone who has been trained to do it. That attitude opens up the possibilities of scaling since you have modeled your business to expand without necessarily having to work more and more on it.

Working Smarter, Not Harder

The common features of women entrepreneurs who have succeeded in scaling without burnout include: they are also clear on their best activities, they are not afraid to outsource the rest, and they have put in place systems and processes.

When you are doing everything yourself now, it is not a title of honor that I have, that is a bottleneck. You cannot run your business bigger than you can take it on yourself. As soon as you start to take the strategic delegation approach and seek help, you eliminate that ceiling. It does not mean you have to admit defeat when you delegate whether it is administrative support, project management, content creation and any of the dozens of tasks that take up your time. It is preferring to drive your business instead of it driving you.

Your vigor, concentration and health are business resources. Preservation is not acting selfishly by protecting them, it is part and parcel of leadership.

The most resilient founders know that personal wellbeing is a business strategy — embracing the new wave of simple, sustainable health habits is what keeps you performing at your best for the long run.