The Bottleneck

For years I was the answer to every question in this company. Pricing, design, an upset customer, a shipment that ran late. It all came to me. I thought that was leadership. It was just a bottleneck with my name on it.

When I took over in 2018 the business was small enough that I could hold most of it in my head. Then we doubled. Then we doubled again. The same habit that got us there started to choke us. Nothing moved unless I touched it, and a person can only touch so much before 3:30 in the morning stops being early and starts being the only time there is.

The hard part was admitting that being needed everywhere was not the flex I thought it was. It meant I had built a company that could not run without me, and a company that cannot survive a week without its founder is one bad week away from nothing.

So I started giving things away, and I mean decisions, not just tasks. The whole decision, including the right to make a call I would have made differently. That last part is where most founders choke. They hand over the work and keep the judgment, then wonder why nobody around them ever grows.

It went badly at first. People made calls I did not love. A couple cost us real money. But the ones that cost us money taught the person something, and their next call was better for it. The alternative was me making every decision forever, which was going to cost us the whole company in the end anyway.

I am still the last one to get paid and still up before the sun. That has not changed and probably never will. What changed is that the company no longer stops when I leave the room. I can be gone a week and come back to problems that got solved without me. That is the goal. It is the only version of this that lasts.

If you are the smartest person in your company about every single thing, you have not built a company. You have built a very tired person. Ask me how I know.