If you’ve ever thought “why does everything in my business come back to me” or “am I the business bottleneck”, you’re in the right place. This article is for business owners who suspect the way their company runs is more dependent on them personally than it should be, and who want to understand what that means and what to do about it.
The Thing About Being Good at What You Do
There’s a particular trap that catches business owners. It happens to those who care and who are genuinely good at what they do.
In the early years of building a business, your personal involvement is the business. You’re the one who take the calls, closes the deals, solves the problems, and you are the one who delivers the work. You are faster than anyone else, more reliable than anyone else, and more trusted by clients than anyone else. So naturally, things flow through you. Decisions, queries, approvals, client conversations, everything.
Fast forward five years or ten years, and now you’ve got a team, a decent client base, and real revenue, you can see that you’ve built something. Scroll back through last week’s messages. How many of them were asking you to make a decision that someone else should have been able to make? How many things could only you do? How many things stopped until you got involved?
If you said “most of them”, then you’ve built a business that needs you to run. Not a business, but a machine with a single point of failure.
That’s the business bottleneck and it happens when you build fast, alone, and never quite find the time to build a layer that sits on top of the doing part.
A Short Test
Here are Five questions to check if you are the business bottleneck. Answer them as how things currently are, not as you want them to be.
1) If you were to disappear for two weeks, with no phone, what would break?
I don’t mean what might take longer, but what would actually break? Is it a client relationship? An ongoing project? What about financial approvals? The more specific you are with your answer, the more useful the information is.
2) How many decisions were made last week that only you could make?
These are not any decisions you made because you were available and it was quicker, but decisions that couldn’t have been made without you.
3) Are your best client relationships with the business, or with you personally?
This one is important. If your three biggest clients would follow you out the door if you left, a buyer is going to notice that. More on what a buyer sees in Article 4: What a Buyer Actually Sees [exit-blueprint.com/what-a-buyer-actually-sees].
4) Could someone buy this business and run it without you?
Not perfectly, and not knowing everything. Could someone else run it, make the key decisions, keep the clients, and move forward. Most owners answer this with a no.
5) Does your team report problems to you, or do they solve them and then update you?
There’s a world of difference between these two. One means the business has a functioning team, the other means the owner is running a help desk.
Most business owners know the answer before they get to the end of the list. They know they’re the business bottleneck, but what they don’t know is whether anything can change.
It can, but it requires understanding what you’re dealing with.
Still Not Sure?
If you’re still not sure if you’re the business bottleneck, take the Dependency Test.
It takes less than 3 minutes and will give you a clear answer.
Why Effort Alone Won’t Fix This
The default response to a business that’s dependent on you is to work harder to fix it. Delegate more, explain things better, or hire someone good. You keep seeing the same problems and you decide that your team just isn’t capable of handling things without you.
The team isn’t being lazy, or failing to take responsibility. They learned that the owner solves the problems and makes the decision, so the team brings problems and decisions to you. Every time you step in and do something, people learn that if they bring it to you, you’ll do it. Over time, a team learns to follow this rule. It becomes “that’s how things are done here”. The system they’re operating in asks them to work that way.
This is a problem, and this problem won’t get fixed by trying harder. It only gets fixed if you change the way things work.
After a business has been running for five, something seems to happen. The number of hours you work goes up, but the business isn’t growing. You put more effort in, but less comes out. Why Your Business Is Not Growing looks at why this ceiling exists and what you can do to move beyond it.
What The Business Bottleneck Is Costing You
There are Two costs of being the business bottleneck.
The obvious one is personal. Your time, your energy, the fact that you haven’t been able to switch off for years. You built a business because you wanted some kind of freedom, but what you’ve ended up with is an office that you take everywhere you go. Answering messages on holiday, or getting the laptop out on a Sunday morning, just for an hour, which becomes three. At some point this stops being dedication and becomes something else.
Most owners see this when they decide to take some time off. The week before they go away is chaos, they try to get lots done in advance and leave instructions on what to do if certain things happen. The holiday involves constant checking of email, and the odd urgent phone call. The Holiday Problem looks at what this tells you about how your business is set up.
The other cost is commercial. If a business needs the owner present to function properly, it isn’t worth what the owner thinks it’s worth. If you want to sell the business, a buyer looking at it will spot the owner dependency. They’ll respond to it, with a lower offer, a deal structure that keeps you tied in for years, or they will walk away and find a different business.
A Bottleneck Is a Structural Problem with a Structural Solution
Being the business bottleneck isn’t a permanent state. It’s a design problem. The business that runs through you today can be redesigned so that it doesn’t have to. This doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes time and effort to get it right. But it can be done, by an owner who decides to tackle it properly.
The reason most don’t change the system is that they’re so busy being the business bottleneck, that they never seem to find the time to fix it. The fix requires you to do something hard. It needs you to step back, and make the time to do this, even if it feels impossible.
There are 2 different things that are needed to fix this.
The first is systems, getting the decisions, processes, and knowledge that live in your head into a form that other people can use without your involvement. How To Document Business Processes covers the five areas to focus on and the order that makes the most sense.
The second is your team, building a culture that allows capable people to actually take ownership. Get Your Team To Take Ownership gets into how that works in practice.
None of this is quick, but the direction you need to head in is clear.
You Got This Far
You’ve built a business that got to this point. Years of graft, decisions made under pressure, clients looked after, salaries paid through those difficult months. What you have done is an achievement that a lot of people haven’t been able to do for themselves.
Most owners get stuck at a specific point. They figure that because the business got this far, it should stick with what has worked. Put in more effort, have more hands-on involvement, do more of what worked before. The problem is that what got you here created the dependency that you’re now trying to unpick.
What you need to do is something different. This is not just work more hours. You need a business that runs without you running every part of it. It doesn’t matter if you want to step back, scale, or sell, the starting point is the same: you need to remove yourself from the day-to-day operations of the business you’ve built. This does not mean you are absent from it, you’re just not the engine.
This is an adjustment for owners, especially if you’ve built a reputation on being the person to go to get things sorted out. A business that reaches a successful exit, or that reaches a point where the owner has a choice about their day-to-day involvement, are the ones that made the shift before it was forced.
Are You the Business Bottleneck?
These questions don’t reveal anything you didn’t already know. Most owners know the answer, even if they can’t say it out loud. What the test does is make it harder to ignore it. This is the point where they decide that something is going to change.
Go back to those five questions. One of these will stand out to you and this is where the work should start.