Breaking the Bottleneck - Episode 206

You wake up at 5 30 a.m. Grab your coffee, review your goals, hit the gym. By eight o'clock, you've parked in front of your building an hour before your team arrives. This is your time to think, to plan, to get ahead of the curve.

But the minute the door opens at nine o'clock, the machine starts. Questions, approvals, slack pings. A client just needs five minutes of your time.

And somehow, even after all your prep, the day still runs on you. It's not that your team is bad or that you haven't delegated. It's just that nothing really moves unless you push it.

But what if things didn't have to be that way? What if your role wasn't to hold everything, but to build something that holds itself? It's time to stop running your business this way and start building systems that run without you. Welcome to The Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm Randy Bridges, business advisor, consultant, coach, and trusted partner to service-based business owners who are serious about performance, profit, and progress. 

This podcast exists to do one thing, help you solve the real problems that stall your growth, kill momentum, and burn out the very people who built your business. So let's get started, shall we? 

All right, all right. We are on episode 206 of the podcast, and today is Friday, July 4th. 

Happy Freedom Day, everybody. On this day, 249 years ago, we dumped England's t-tax and tyranny. So just like 1776, let's toss those bottlenecks overboard and declare your freedom for your business.

Today, we're digging into a problem I hear from business owners all the time. Why does everything still come back to me? You've hired, you've delegated, you've documented some things, but you're still in the middle. You're approving, checking, correcting, cleaning up. 

And in this episode, we'll walk through why your team might still be leaning on you, even if you've delegated, the three most common bottleneck patterns I see in service businesses, how to shift your role from operator to what we call orchestrator, and a dead simple filter to help you know what to let go of and when. And let's start here. Being the bottleneck doesn't mean you're a control freak.

In fact, a lot of owners become bottlenecks because they care so much. I know that was how I was when I first got into business. I treated my business like it was my personal baby, because to me it was.

And you want things to go right. You don't want to disappoint your clients. They are your last line of defense. 

But here's the challenge. When you're the one holding everything together, you become the limiter. No matter how talented your team is, they can't move unless you make the move first.

So if you feel like you are the system, it's time to redesign that system. Let's talk about where things show up most that create that problem for you that you really want to get out from underneath. In essence, there are three bottleneck patterns that keep you stuck.

The first one is decision hoarding. This is when you're the one making all the calls, even the small ones. Here's how it shows up.

Your team checks in on basic decisions. Nothing moves forward without your green light. You're constantly answering, what should we do here? Well, the fix is pretty simple. 

We've talked about this before. We want to build a decision matrix. It's a simple, if this, then that set of rules.

You define what decisions you need to make, and then what your team is empowered to handle. It gives everyone the freedom with boundaries, and it gives you the breathing room that you need. The second thing is communication gatekeeping.

This is where you're the in-between person for clients, vendors, team members, everybody. And how it shows up is you find people see-seeing you just in case. Maybe you're relaying info between two people that should be talking directly.

And in many cases, you're translating emails or filtering messages to the team because you don't want somebody's feelings to get hurt because they made a bad decision. Now, the fix here is you want to create visible communication paths. These are things like shared inboxes, project boards, internal status docs.

You want to make sure your team knows where the updates go, and that the system holds the message, not you. That frees everyone else from being able to rely on you and think of you as the only place that the decision can be made. And the third one is invisible expectations.

You've assigned the task, but you haven't defined success. Now, how it shows up is that generally work gets done, but it's off. It's not right, it's not correct, and nobody really can tell you why.

Or you find yourself redoing or rewriting things, and you think these people should know this by now. And so the fix for this is to clarify outcomes, not steps. You want to define what done looks like, what's non-negotiable, what principles should guide the work.

When expectations are visible, your team can rise to them. But when they're hidden, the team's going to default to hesitation or over-dependence. Now, bringing in a mini case study, I like to call this from choke point to clarity.

One of my clients is Brian. He runs a specialized consulting firm. Brian was stuck in approvals. 

That was his big sticking point. His team would send over deliverables, but he'd spend hours reviewing, rewriting, polishing over and over again. Brian felt like nobody else could really do it as well as he can.

And he's probably right. 100% of the time is actually pretty good when you're dealing with the owner. But what a lot of us don't understand is that 80% with a working team is probably almost as good, maybe a little bit more believable.

So he and I sat down and we built a decision framework for common deliverables. We created a few what done looks like guides. And I made sure that he gave the team the authority to approve anything under a certain threshold.

Within a month, the client delivery time dropped by 30%. Brian's inbox traffic dropped by half. And his team reported more confidence, not less.

In this case, especially in this choke point to clarity environment, systems didn't just save time. They also unlocked a lot of trust. Now, let's do a quick self-check, because a lot of times you might find yourself in the middle, but you don't realize it.

So let's do this quick self-check. This week, pick one of the following focus areas and take action. The first focus area is build a decision matrix.

Choose one recurring task or deliverable. Define what decisions you need to make, what decisions your team can make, and then share it with your team in writing or in your next meeting. Another focus area is to clarify done for a common task.

Pick one task you've delegated that still comes back to you. Create a one page or one paragraph what done looks like guide. What does success look like? What must be included? What's a red flag? Review this with your team members before the next time it's assigned.

And the third focus area is to run a bottleneck audit. Ask yourself three simple questions. Am I still reviewing or reworking tasks I've already delegated? Is my team regularly waiting on me to move things forward? And do I catch myself saying it's just easier if I do it and then I go ahead and deal with it? If you answered yes to any of these three, chances are your role needs redesigning.

You've most likely outgrown how things were built. Now imagine ending your day knowing the right decisions were made, without you making them. Projects move forward, clients received updates, and your team executed.

Meanwhile, you were available but not essential to every single thing. Your goal is for decisions to happen without you and the team moving forward confidently. That's not just the mark of good delegation.

It's the mark of real leadership. So if everything still runs through you, let this be the episode that reminds you, it doesn't have to stay that way. And as I like to say at the end of the day, build it smart, run it clean, stay aligned.

That's it for this episode. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. If you want to keep the conversation going or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out.

And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. For The Budding Entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you.

Take care and we'll see you back here next week.