If you think of skill as being the ability to operate the business, growth does in fact require you to hire people who are less "skilled" -- specifically technicians who are specialized in one area of the business' operations (preferably even better at it than you are), and who can handle that part of the business for you. Gerber goes into this with his description of how to support business growth by building out a hypothetical org chart even when you're the sole person in the business, and gradually replace your name next to most of the job titles with someone else's.
This is pretty much how you'd build out an engineering team of 50 or 500 people, too.
And within any kind of org - sales, engineering, support, whatever - eventually you're going to get large enough that you can be more efficient by sequestering simple work into simpler roles, which gets done by cheaper, junior people.
All 100% applicable to the audience here which is filled with people who are trying to found and grow companies.
Your comment implied that perhaps you think sales and support are low-skill roles, which makes me wonder if you have any experience working in those areas or managing people which perform those functions? I can assure you they take a very high level of a different kind of skill, and you would grow those teams more or less in the same way you grow an engineering team: starting with yourself, defining specific functions and duties, sequestering simpler work into lower skill roles for efficiency, and hiring people to fill those roles one by one. Exactly like Gerber describes.
This is pretty much how you'd build out an engineering team of 50 or 500 people, too.
And within any kind of org - sales, engineering, support, whatever - eventually you're going to get large enough that you can be more efficient by sequestering simple work into simpler roles, which gets done by cheaper, junior people.
All 100% applicable to the audience here which is filled with people who are trying to found and grow companies.
Your comment implied that perhaps you think sales and support are low-skill roles, which makes me wonder if you have any experience working in those areas or managing people which perform those functions? I can assure you they take a very high level of a different kind of skill, and you would grow those teams more or less in the same way you grow an engineering team: starting with yourself, defining specific functions and duties, sequestering simpler work into lower skill roles for efficiency, and hiring people to fill those roles one by one. Exactly like Gerber describes.