NEW YORK — Delegate, delegate, delegate. It's the mantra of management experts and yet one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to do. But delegating is critical for your company to flourish.

        “If you don't learn to delegate, you don't learn to grow,” said Steve Kalafer, chairman of Flemington Car & Truck Co. in Flemington, N.J.

        Mr. Kalafer, who started in the car business with one showroom and eight employees 25 years ago, now co-owns a company encompassing 26 franchises with 600 workers. He said it would have been impossible for his business to grow — “the most we would have been was one or two dealerships” — if he hadn't delegated responsibility to employees.

        Many entrepreneurs find it hard to delegate for two main reasons, said Jay Barney, a professor of management and human resources at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University.

        First, Mr. Barney said, “there's an emotional attachment because a new business really is a personal creation much as a child.” Second, he said, research indicates that “the cognitive skills that make entrepreneurs successful as entrepreneurs make them less successful as managers of organizations.”

        “They tend to be very confident in decision making ... willing to generalize from very small samples and their personal experience,” he said. But as the company gets larger, “decisions can no longer be made on the gut feel of the entrepreneur.”

        Mr. Barney noted that many highly successful companies have prospered because the founder or founders were willing to bring in someone to help deal with the operational side of the business. A famous example: Bill Gates asking Steve Ballmer to handle the business end of Microsoft Corp.

        Entrepreneurs should think about giving their companies a structure akin to big corporations with a chief executive and a chief operating officer, said Daniel Rodriguez, a professor of organization and management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University in Atlanta.

        “One could be raising capital and getting the word out, while the other could be back in the shop working the operations,” he said. “Those two roles become increasingly distinct and also require the assumption of a lot more responsibilities than can be effectively done by one person.”

        Mr. Rodriguez said the number of hours an entrepreneur works can be a tipoff that it's time to delegate. “If you find you're working 20 hours a day, the company suffers,” he said.

        For many entrepreneurs, a big obstacle to delegating is fear that a job won't get done exactly as they would do it. Delegating also means living with the fact that employees are going to make mistakes.

        “There is a point where you have to say, "This is fine,”' said Linda Rothschild, president of Cross It Off Your List, a New York firm that supplies concierge, organization and relocation services. “There is no such thing as perfect — you have to trust that people around you are doing as good as is necessary.”

        That's also Mr. Kalafer's advice. “If you don't trust them, they shouldn't work for you.”

        Ms. Rothschild said delegating was hard for her at first, but she knew she had to do it when she found she couldn't manage everything herself. She realized she wasn't able to return phone calls as fast as she wanted, and couldn't keep up with clients as well as she had in the past.

        Since then, she's come to accept that “as long as someone is maintaining the relationship (with clients) it doesn't have to be me.”

        Getting to that point requires hiring the right people and giving them a balance of supervision and freedom to do their jobs. As Kalafer puts it, “Let them carry out your mission, and verify and audit what they're doing.”

        Mr. Barney, the Ohio State professor, said hiring is not the forte for many entrepreneurs. A good recruiting or search firm might be the way to find the help you need.

        Many entrepreneurs might find delegating brings more peace. Ms. Rothschild said she recently took a mid-year vacation for the first time, even though she had two new people working in her office.

        “I went somewhere where I really wasn't that reachable — Morocco,” she said. “It worked; nothing happened, everyone survived.

        “Once you do it, you really get used to it.”

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