Julian de Salay co-founded Chatsworth-based JB Office Solutions in 2012 and serves as its chief executive. The office supply retailer became one of the fastest-growing businesses in the San Fernando Valley, even during the Covid-19 pandemic when working from home became the norm. That workplace shift last year prompted De Salay to add a solutions wing to the operation, to cater to people setting up home offices or shared workspaces. Recalling the early days of JB Office, De Salay admits that he had a hard time delegating – but it was a mistake that became a learning opportunity.

“The biggest mistake for me is trying to do too much by myself and not relinquishing parts of my business in order to grow in the beginning. I was the delivery driver and the warehouse guy, which was good in the fact that I understood a lot of it, but I think I did it for too long and wasn’t using my time more efficiently. I think that was my biggest thing – just constantly working in my business, not on my business. When I switched to focusing on my business, I definitely saw huge growth and a more stable business as well.

When I was doing something in my business, something else wasn’t getting done, and you could see it, whereas when I was working on my business, there were people doing the different parts. I probably could do it better than they could, but the fact that I was able to let them do it at, let’s say, 90% or 95% – even 80% – allowed me to do something else where I could bring more value to the company.

So he hired more than he’d planned

“In the beginning I was very worried about hiring and taking on more people, but at a certain point, there was a finical part where I realized I needed to go ahead and bring on the next person – maybe even before I needed the next person – in order to grow that next person’s job. A lot of the times, I saw everything being a lot rosier than they were. Dreaming for the moon, my biggest thing was: ‘I want to get to this level. What do I need to do to get there?’ Maybe the person I brought on was at 50% capacity; but by the time they were ramped up to 100% capacity, we’re bringing somebody else on so we weren’t also running our staff at 120% all the time, because that’s also not cool. Nobody really wants to run that consistently. It’s fine for every so often, but I was trying to scale up appropriately. It’s almost like ‘dress for the position you want, not the position you have.’ It’s kind of like ‘scale up for the people that you want, and for the size of business you want, not the one that you have.’”