Ask the founder of any scaling business where their time goes every week and the answer is rarely strategy. It disappears into meetings, follow-ups, approvals, reporting and the constant coordination required to keep a growing team moving. The business gets bigger, but the founder’s calendar only gets fuller.
Research on scaling businesses, as published in the Harvard Review, states that founders create the greatest value when they focus their time on strategy, leadership, customers and innovation, rather than remaining absorbed in day-to-day operations.
“The most expensive resource in any scaling business is the founder’s attention, yet most founders spend the bulk of their week on recurring tasks that AI can now shoulder. The founders who build that leverage will run their businesses. The ones who don’t will keep being run by them,” says Jason Goldberg, co-founder of Art of Scale and Edge Growth, and author of The Art of Scale, a practical guide for founders on how to build scalable businesses.
A new masterclass being held in Cape Town this month has been designed to help founders do exactly that. The Founder Leverage Lab is a practical, hands-on working session in which founders identify the highest-friction recurring tasks in their week and set up AI-enabled workflows to reduce the mental and coordination load, freeing them up for the work that actually grows the business.
“As businesses grow beyond 20 employees, the ‘founder-as-the-system’ model that worked in the early stages begins to break down,” explains Goldberg. “Recurring tasks multiply, coordination demands increase and decision fatigue sets in.
Founders get pulled into the whirlwind of urgent, day-to-day demands, and despite working harder than ever, the priorities that truly drive growth are pushed aside”.
Although AI is often cited as a viable time saver, many founders are still using it casually – a quicker way to draft an email or summarise a document – rather than embedding it into the way they run and scale their businesses.
“Using AI to write faster emails is like buying a race car to listen to the radio. The real prize is the planning, coordination, follow-up and reporting load that quietly consumes a founder’s week. Hand that to well-designed AI workflows and the hours come back,” he says.
The masterclass forms part of the national Founders at Work (FAW) masterclass series, launched in October last year through a partnership between FNB and Art of Scale. Art of Scale, an initiative within the broader Edge Growth ecosystem, is dedicated to helping South African founders scale their businesses in the AI era. The series aligns with Edge Growth’s mission as a small business development specialist, recognising that sustainable growth requires more than capital. It requires the leadership capability and operating systems to scale.
The Founder Leverage Lab takes place at Southpoint Studios, in Pinelands, Cape Town on 21 July 2026 between 9am and 12pm, with limited in-person seats still available. The session is designed for founders and senior decision-makers in established or scaling businesses with between 10 and 200 employees and annual turnover of R8m to R150m.
Thanks to the sponsorship by FNB, attendance is at no cost to delegates with qualifying criteria and will also be streamed online for founders anywhere in South Africa.
Business founders are invited to register at foundersatwork.co.za/july-2026-masterclass-the-founder-leverage-lab/.
