Top 13 'Chief-Everything-Officer-Curing' Business Tools to learn for Founders Ready to Finally Delegate in 2025 - Goh Ling Yong
Are you wearing the "Chief Everything Officer" badge with a strange mix of pride and exhaustion? You know the feeling. One minute you're closing a sales deal, the next you're debugging the website's contact form, and by evening you're figuring out payroll. It’s the founder's rite of passage, but it's not a long-term strategy. It's a bottleneck. Your bottleneck.
The truth is, your business can't scale if every decision, task, and email has to pass through you. The transition from founder-who-does-everything to leader-who-enables-everyone is the single most critical leap you'll make. But letting go is hard, especially when you feel like nobody can do it "right." This is where systems—and the tools that power them—become your salvation. They create the structure, clarity, and trust needed to finally delegate effectively.
As 2025 approaches, it's time to trade that "CEO" badge for the title you actually want: Visionary. We're going to break down the 13 essential business tools that will help you clone your best habits, systematize your knowledge, and empower your team to run with their roles. It's time to stop being the doer and start being the director.
1. For Project Management: Asana
Asana is more than a digital to-do list; it's a central nervous system for your team's work. It transforms chaotic email chains and scattered sticky notes into a clear, actionable roadmap. By creating projects, tasks, sub-tasks, and assigning them with due dates, you create a single source of truth that anyone can reference. This is ground zero for delegation.
Instead of verbally assigning a task and hoping it gets done, you can build a complete "task package" in Asana. Attach all relevant documents from Google Drive, write a clear description of the desired outcome, set a deadline, and tag the responsible team member. You can then check in on progress without a single "just checking in" email, because the status updates are right there in the project board.
Pro-Tip: Use Asana’s "Templates" feature. Once you've perfected a process—like onboarding a new client or publishing a blog post—save it as a template. The next time, you can deploy the entire workflow with pre-assigned tasks in seconds. This is how you delegate an entire process, not just a single task.
2. For Asynchronous Communication: Loom
How many hours have you wasted in meetings that could have been an email? Loom is the cure. It allows you to record your screen, camera, and microphone simultaneously to create quick, shareable videos. It's the ultimate "show, don't just tell" tool, and it's a delegation supercharger.
Imagine you need to explain a complex task or give feedback on a design. Instead of scheduling a 30-minute call, you can record a 5-minute Loom video. You can walk through the document, highlight specific areas with your cursor, and provide clear, contextual feedback with the right tone of voice. Your team member can watch it on their own time, re-watch it as needed, and they have a permanent record of your instructions.
Pro-Tip: Use Loom to build a video library of your standard operating procedures (SOPs). The next time a new hire asks how to use your CRM, send them the Loom video. You've just delegated training.
3. For Centralized Knowledge: Notion
If your company's critical information lives in your brain, you can never take a vacation. Notion is the solution. It's a flexible, all-in-one workspace where you can build your company’s "second brain." Think of it as a dynamic combination of Google Docs, a wiki, a project manager, and a database.
You can use Notion to create your company's operating system. Build a team directory, document your mission and values, outline your marketing strategy, and create detailed SOPs for every repeatable process in your business. When a team member has a question, their first instinct should be to check the Notion wiki, not to message you. This single habit shift will reclaim countless hours of your time.
Pro-Tip: Create a "Founder's FAQ" page in Notion. For the next month, every time a team member asks you a question, answer it, and then immediately add the question and answer to that page. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you build a resource that makes you redundant (in the best way possible).
4. For Internal Communication: Slack
Email is where productivity goes to die. For internal team communication, you need a dedicated channel. Slack organizes conversations into channels, making discussions topic-specific, searchable, and transparent. It eliminates the "who was on that email chain?" problem forever.
By creating channels like #marketing, #sales-wins, #tech-support, and #random, you empower your team to communicate with the right people without needing you as the middleman. Someone in marketing has a question for sales? They can pop into the #sales-wins channel. It fosters cross-functional collaboration and reduces your role as the central information hub.
Pro-Tip: Integrate your other tools (like Asana and Google Drive) with Slack. You can receive notifications for task updates or new comments on a document directly in a relevant channel, keeping everyone in the loop without constant app-switching.
5. For Process Documentation: Scribe
"How do I do that thing again?" If you hear this question more than once, you have a process that needs to be documented. Scribe is a magical tool that automates this. You simply turn on the Scribe extension, walk through a process on your screen, and it automatically generates a beautiful, step-by-step guide complete with screenshots and written instructions.
This is delegation gold. Instead of spending an hour writing out instructions on how to update a product listing on your website, you can do it once while Scribe records you. The result is a perfect SOP you can hand to a virtual assistant or a new employee. You've just turned a one-time action into a repeatable, delegatable system.
Pro-Tip: Use Scribe to document processes you think are simple. You'll be surprised how many micro-steps are involved. Having them documented ensures consistency and quality, no matter who is performing the task.
6. For Automation & Integration: Zapier
Zapier is the digital duct tape that connects over 5,000 different web apps, allowing you to automate repetitive tasks without writing a single line of code. Think of it as your first robotic employee. If you ever find yourself manually moving information from one app to another, Zapier can probably do it for you.
Want to save every email attachment from new clients to a specific Dropbox folder? Create a "Zap." Want to add every new Stripe customer to a Mailchimp email list? There's a Zap for that. Want to get a Slack notification every time someone fills out a Typeform on your website? Zapier. Each Zap you build is a task you've permanently delegated to a machine.
Pro-Tip: Start small. Identify one 5-minute task you do every single day. Maybe it's copying customer info from a form into a spreadsheet. Spend 30 minutes building a Zap to automate it. You'll save nearly 2 hours every month from that one automation alone.
7. For Marketing & CRM: HubSpot
As your business grows, you can't keep customer information on a spreadsheet or in your inbox. HubSpot offers a powerful, free CRM that acts as a central database for all your customer interactions. It allows your sales and marketing team to see the full history of a contact—every email opened, every page visited, and every support ticket filed.
This is crucial for delegating sales and customer service. With HubSpot, a new salesperson can pick up a conversation with a lead and have the complete context, without needing you to fill them in. You can build marketing email sequences that nurture leads automatically, delegating the follow-up process to the system itself.
Pro-Tip: Use the "Tasks" feature within the HubSpot CRM. You can create automated follow-up tasks for your sales team based on lead activity, ensuring no opportunity falls through the cracks.
8. For Accessible Design: Canva
You are not a graphic designer, and you shouldn't be spending hours in Photoshop trying to create a social media post. Canva has democratized design, empowering anyone on your team to create professional-looking graphics, presentations, and documents using intuitive drag-and-drop tools and thousands of templates.
Instead of being the bottleneck for every visual asset, you can set up a Brand Kit in Canva with your logos, fonts, and colors. Then, you can delegate the creation of social media content, blog banners, or sales one-pagers to a marketing assistant or a VA. They can work within the brand guidelines you've established to produce high-quality work, freeing you up completely.
Pro-Tip: Create a set of core templates in Canva for your most common needs (e.g., Instagram post, YouTube thumbnail, presentation slide). This makes it even faster for your team to create on-brand content.
9. For Finance & Accounting: Xero
Few things keep a founder bogged down like bookkeeping. Trying to manage invoices, expenses, and payroll yourself is a recipe for error and burnout. Xero (or a similar tool like QuickBooks) is cloud-based accounting software that simplifies your financial management and makes it incredibly easy to collaborate with a bookkeeper or accountant.
By connecting your bank accounts, Xero automatically pulls in transactions and helps you categorize them. You can send professional invoices and get paid online, track expenses by taking photos of receipts, and run crucial financial reports with a few clicks. Delegating your bookkeeping to a professional who can access your Xero account is one of the highest-leverage decisions you can make.
Pro-Tip: Use a tool like Dext (formerly Receipt Bank) which integrates with Xero. You and your team can simply snap photos of receipts, and Dext will extract the data and push it into Xero, ready for reconciliation. No more shoeboxes full of receipts.
10. For Secure Password Management: LastPass
"Hey, what's the password for our Mailchimp account again?" This question is not only a time-waster, it's a massive security risk. Sharing passwords via Slack or email is a disaster waiting to happen. LastPass (or 1Password) is a password manager that securely stores all your credentials and allows you to share access with your team without revealing the actual password.
You can grant a team member access to a specific tool, and when they leave the company, you can revoke their access with a single click. This gives you the confidence to delegate tasks that require access to sensitive accounts. It’s a non-negotiable tool for secure and scalable delegation.
Pro-Tip: Conduct a "password audit." Go through all the tools you use, update them with strong, unique passwords generated by LastPass, and then organize them into shared folders for different teams (e.g., "Marketing Tools," "Dev Tools").
11. For All-in-One Productivity: ClickUp
For founders who love having everything in one place, ClickUp aims to be the "one app to replace them all." It combines tasks, docs, chat, goals, and whiteboards into a single, highly customizable platform. While Asana is fantastic for structured project management, ClickUp is the playground for teams that want to design their own perfect workflow.
The power of ClickUp for delegation lies in its flexibility. You can create a simple to-do list for one project and a complex Gantt chart for another. You can write SOPs in ClickUp Docs and link them directly to the relevant tasks. This consolidation means your team spends less time switching between apps and more time doing the work, with all context readily available.
Pro-Tip: Explore ClickUp's "Automations." You can set up rules like "When a task status changes to 'In Review,' automatically assign it to the manager" or "When a task is overdue, post a comment and tag the assignee." This builds accountability into your process.
12. For Simplified HR & Payroll: Gusto
Hiring your first employees is a huge step, but it comes with a mountain of administrative work: payroll, taxes, benefits, compliance. Gusto is a platform designed to automate and simplify all of it. It makes running payroll a 5-minute task instead of a 5-hour headache.
By putting your HR on a platform like Gusto, you can confidently delegate onboarding tasks to an operations manager or VA. They can send offer letters, set up new hires in the system, and ensure everyone gets paid correctly and on time, all while staying compliant. This removes a massive, high-stakes burden from your plate.
Pro-Tip: Use Gusto's employee onboarding checklists to ensure a consistent and welcoming experience for every new hire, a process that can be fully managed by your operations lead.
13. For Scheduling & Calendar Management: Calendly
The back-and-forth dance of scheduling a meeting is a colossal waste of cognitive energy. "Does 2 PM on Tuesday work for you? How about Wednesday at 10 AM?" Calendly eliminates this entirely by allowing others to book time on your calendar based on your real-time availability.
This is a perfect first task to delegate to an executive assistant (EA). You can give your EA access to your Calendly, and they can manage your entire schedule, sending booking links to clients, partners, and interview candidates. It professionalizes your scheduling process and instantly reclaims the time you used to spend as a personal secretary.
Pro-Tip: Create different event types in Calendly with different durations and instructions. For example, a 15-minute "Introductory Call" link for new leads and a 45-minute "Strategy Session" link for existing clients.
Your Freedom is a System Away
Looking at this list can feel overwhelming. But you don't need to implement all 13 tools tomorrow. The goal isn't to adopt more software; it's to adopt more systems. Each of these tools is a vehicle for creating a repeatable, scalable process that doesn't rely on you. As my friend and mentor Goh Ling Yong often says, "Your business can only grow to the extent that you do." Learning to trust your team and these tools is a critical part of that growth.
Your mission for 2025 is to systematically fire yourself from the role of Chief Everything Officer. Pick one area that causes you the most friction—is it project management? Is it marketing? Is it finance?—and commit to mastering the tool that solves it. Build the process, document it, and hand over the keys to a team member. Then, move to the next.
This is how you build a business that can run, and thrive, without you at the center of every single action. This is how you finally get the time and mental space to do the one job only you, the founder, can do: dream up what's next.
Which tool from this list will you commit to mastering first? Share your choice in the comments below!
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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