For: Founders between $1M and $10M who are in the middle of every decision

How do I stop being the bottleneck in my own company?

Where the line actually sits

2 weeks

Of time logged before you change anything

Hour by hour, roughly, the job you actually did rather than the one you imagine you do. Every decision that follows comes from that log and not from your instincts about it, because the instincts are wrong in a specific and consistent direction.

1 owner

Per function — sales, delivery, money, product

One name written down, even if two of them are still you for now. Shared ownership is the mechanism by which things quietly become yours again.

10x

How far off your escalation threshold usually is

Put a dollar figure on what someone can decide alone. Most founders discover the honest number is ten times higher than how they've been behaving, which means most of what reaches them shouldn't.

20 minutes

Of numbers in the weekly meeting, then decisions only

End with owners and dates or it wasn't a meeting, it was a status update you paid for with everyone's morning.

What changed in the last year

• The bottleneck moved. Five years ago the founder was the constraint because there weren't enough hands. Now there are enough hands — the constraint is that only one person in the building is allowed to decide anything.
• Teams got smaller and denser, which makes unclear ownership more expensive, not less. In a company of twelve, one unowned function is 8% of the org with nobody's name on it.
• The work you're still doing personally is increasingly work that neither needs you nor needs a person. Before delegating a task, check whether it should exist.

What most founders get wrong

• “Nobody can do it as well as I can.”

  Usually true, and mostly irrelevant. Work done at 80% by someone else, repeatedly, beats work done at 100% by you, occasionally, once you are the constraint.

• “I'll delegate once we hire someone senior.”

  You can't hire your way out of it. A senior person walking into a company with no defined ownership becomes another person asking you questions, at a higher salary.

• “I did delegate — I told them to own it.”

  Ownership without a number is a suggestion. If you can't name the one number they report weekly, you defined a helper, not an owner.

When I'd tell you the opposite

• You're under about $1M and pre-product-market-fit. Being in everything is correct at that size; the learning is the job and delegating it delegates the only thing that matters.
• The company is in genuine crisis — a real one, not a busy quarter. Centralise, fix it, then hand it back, and say out loud that's what you're doing.
• The thing you're in the middle of is the thing customers buy you for. Then it isn't a bottleneck, it's the product, and the question is how to charge for it properly.

Related questions

How do I know if I'm actually the bottleneck?

Count the decisions waiting on you at 6pm on a Wednesday. If work stops while people wait for a reply, you're the bottleneck — regardless of how responsive you think you are.

What's the first thing to delegate?

The thing you do most often that has a clear right answer. Not the thing you hate — the thing that's frequent and teachable, because that's where the hours are.

How long does it take to get out of the middle?

Two quarters to see it hold, if you're disciplined about sending questions back with an owner's name attached. The first two weeks feel unhelpful and that's the part most founders quit at.

Should I hire a COO or an integrator?

Only after ownership exists. Hiring someone to run a machine that hasn't been defined means you've hired someone to define it, which is your job and they'll do it worse.