The Founder's Misallocation
"Too busy to market" usually means the founder is spending irreplaceable time on work someone else could do.
The mechanism
The chart compares two bars for the founder's week. The left bar is all the growth work only the founder can do, a tall dark bar of what actually grows the business. The right bar is the founder's real week: mostly a big red block of replaceable delivery, with only a thin sliver of growth work and a dashed gold box on top showing the growth work they didn't get to. Delivery has a finish line and positioning doesn't, so the urgent work wins the week. Pour your one-of-a-kind time into work others could handle, and you pull yourself out of the only work that grows you.
Part of Persistence. Infrastructure that keeps growth compounding past founder heroics.