3 Signs You’re the Bottleneck in Your Business - and How to Fix It For Business Growth

Speaker A: Business growth is amazing. It can be really exciting. It can be really fun. Until every time you get a new client, a new project or a new opportunity, all it's doing is simply creating more work for you. And at some point you have to ask yourself a kind of uncomfortable question. Is your business struggling to grow because it needs more customers, more marketing, or a better strategy? Or is it struggling to grow because everything still needs you? Today we're going to talk about the three signs this is happening and how to start fixing it without handing over your entire business and disappearing into the woods. Welcome to this Mother Means Business, the show for women building real profitable businesses without putting their ambition or their families on the back burner. I'm your host, Laura Sinclair, business strategist, entrepreneur and mother. For years, I've helped women business owners grow profitable businesses, make sharper decisions and lead with clients confidence. Because here's what I know for sure. Motherhood changes how you build a business, but it does not reduce what's possible. Each week I bring you practical strategy, honest conversations, and real world lessons to help you build a business that supports your life instead of consuming it. Because you don't need more inspiration. You need strategies that actually work in the context of your real life. So if you treat your business as a profession and not a hobby, you're in the right place. Let's dive in and get to work. Welcome back to another episode of this Mother Means Business. Today on the show, we are talking about being the bottleneck. And this is something that I think we talk a lot about. In theory, you've probably heard it before. But today I wanna dive into the signs that you, my friend, are in fact the bottleneck and how we can get ourselves out of it. There is a stage in business where being involved in everything is actually useful, right? It is the thing that got you where you are now when you're starting out, that's generally how the work gets done, right? You need to understand everything. You need to know what your clients care about, what's creating a really strong result, what's taking too long, what's profitable, um, and what is the thing that is draining both your time and your money inside of your business. But doing a little bit of everything really does help you learn the business, right? And you can move quickly. There's no layers of approval. There's nothing that you need to hand off to anybody else. You can fly by the seat of your pants, right? You're close to the customer. Like all these things are great. But eventually what helped you builds the business actually becomes the thing that starts limiting your business. And so today I want to talk to you about that. Exactly. And this isn't about growing a big team. There's nothing wrong with staying a solopreneur. But there do have to be things that we think about moving off of our plates. Because if we want growth, if growth is a thing that we're after, we have to stop being the thing that limits our growth. Okay? Because if you still operate your company as this fragile new thing that can't survive without your fingerprints on every single task, you have not set yourself up, uh, for strategic growth. As we grow, as we take on more clients, as we take on more projects, so grows the decisions, the admin, the back and forth, and the opportunities. Often when we haven't changed the way the business operates, all of that growth just creates more demand on you. Right? You then start to assume, okay, maybe the issue is that I just need a better big ass calendar or a stricter morning routine, or maybe if I set up my ClickUp differently that, that actually it's gonna be fine. But usually this has nothing to do with time. And so often business owners will say to me, like, I'm just strapped on time. But more often than not, it's actually the design of your business, the way that your business has been structured. And for most of us, when we start, your business is designed often not on purpose, to depend entirely on you. I experienced this when I, I mean, at so many different points in my business. But when I was thinking about this episode and the conversations that I wanted to have, it really kept coming back to when I was running my social media agency. Because at the time when I first started, I was literally doing everything. And the thing that was, um, for me, that was the last to let go, was actually personally editing all of the videos. And if you know me well, you know, this is like, hilarious, but I had a really convincing reason for me to do this. Like, it's. It sounded very convincing to me. I knew the clients, I understood the brand, and I knew which moments I wanted to stay in, what the vision was, which pauses needed to come out, and exactly what the final product was supposed to feel like. And I told myself that nobody else would be able to do it the way that I did. And now whenever we say that to ourselves, like, nobody else can do it the way I do it, we should probably take a pause, because sometimes that is true. There are parts of your business that are going to genuinely require your expertise, your judgment, your personality. Those things are really important. But the nobody else can do it like me standard that we create actually means I have not created a clear process or communicated how this is supposed to go or allowed anyone else enough time to become good at this. Okay. In my case, I eventually handed the video editing over to someone on my team. Um, and not only could they do it, they were way better than me, which was wonderful and kind of mildly offensive because I had spent all of this time protecting a task that was not actually the best use of my ability. If you've ever watched me edit a video, you know that it took me forever. And we didn't have the tools that we have today. I said that it's as if it was like 20 years ago. It really wasn't. But things have moved so quickly since then. But once someone else took ownership of this task, the quality of the work didn't collapse, clients didn't flee. The world continued on. And the only thing that changed is that I actually had time to do the work that was actually required to grow my business. And that experience showed me that becoming the bottleneck is rarely about being controlling for the sake of being controlling. Usually you become the bottleneck because you care and you care about the result. Right? Uh, you care about your client, you care about your reputation. You know, the business is supporting your family, your team, or both or other people's families. And you do not want to take unnecessary risks. But care without a plan often turns into over involvement. Okay? And so I want to share with you today three signs that this might be happening in your business in hopes of giving you some tools to think about how we can move out of, uh, this space. Okay? So the first one is that nothing moves without your approval. Okay? The first sign that this is the case is that your team or contractors have tasks, but they do not have any real decision making authority. Okay. Um, maybe they can complete part of the work, but then everything comes back to you. Hey, can you approve this caption? Can you review this proposal? Can you check this client email? Uh, what option to choose? Let me choose the options. Can I take a quick look? And usually a quick look is never really the issue. The issue is like having to do that 17 times throughout the day. And every one of those decisions is actually pulling you out of what you were doing then, right? You stop working on the thing that is actually needle moving, the sales strategy, um, the planning document, the, um, pausing, really your most important work, because somebody needs confirmation on something they probably have seen before and they probably don't actually need your Eyes on. And you know, there's always going to be nuance to this. So what? You know, when I think about captions, right? I'm approving the captions that are going out. Anything for my personal brand I need to see. But there might be other things in your business where, hey, you actually don't need to see the captions because you've got team for that. And so, you know, when we're talking about these things, there's not going to be one rule for everybody. But I really want you to think about this in the context of your own business, right? What are you pulling yourself away from? Because you're not giving your team or the people that are on your side, that you need to be on your side the autonomy to actually do it. I have since learned to become the kind of leader that allows my people as much leash as they can take. Okay, I am m not here to be right as a leader in my business, I'm allowed for. I'm. I am here to allow my team be the expert, my ops manager. I am not telling her how to do her job. She is so much better at ops than me. I joke that she's my boss. She's the boss of me because she tells me what I need to be doing, what I need to be doing. But could you imagine if I was spending time being like Meeks? I think that this needs to look different. No, I really just want her to be the expert. And so for so many of you, this actually, when we have this control, when we're trying to have our hands into everything, it actually slows your business down. And I'm willing to bet that your team may be perfectly capable of moving forward, but they're just waiting for you, right? If you're in a meeting, if you're picking up your kids, you're serving a client, or you're just trying to like, take a minute, they get. Things get stuck with you, Right? And then it also, what it also does is it trains people not to think independently, which is not good leadership. If every decision needs your approval, then of course the safest thing for a team member is to ask you. They're going to keep coming back to you. And this doesn't necessarily mean that they're lacking initiative, right? They're responding to the system that you created. And so if people are regularly corrected then for making decisions, but never given clear guidelines for making those decisions, they just learn to wait. And then you're like, hey, why have you had this done yet? Well, I was waiting for you, right? Delegation's not saying, hey, complete this task. Right? Real delegation includes clarity about the result, the boundaries, and the decisions the person is trusted to make. If you were at this Mother means business live, then you already know when we bring women entrepreneurs into a room together, we do not mess around. And if you missed it, you are not going to want to miss this. The boardroom is happening September 22nd at the Postmark Hotel in Newmarket, Ontario, and it's our next in person experience for women entrepreneurs who are ready to get seen, get paid, and get their life back. This is a small, smaller, more hands on mastermind day where you bring your laptop, your questions, and the parts of your business that need a real decision. You'll get strategy, hot seats, connection, and actual momentum all in a room designed to help you move. Seats are intentionally limited, so grab your spot for the boardroom@thismothermeansbusiness.com the boardroom. We'll also put the link in the show notes. Early bird tickets close on June 30th. We'd love to see you there. I was at a Mastermind recently and one of the women, her takeaway was, I actually don't need to fire the person I thought that I needed to fire. I need to do a better job of leading her. Okay? This happens so often. So instead of saying, hey, here, I'll give you an example. Okay, so instead of saying, prepare the client update and send it to me for approval, right? You might say, prepare and send the weekly client update. It should include progress, next steps, and any issues that could affect the deadline. You only need to involve me if the project is more than three days behind or if the client is requesting something outside of the green upon scope. Okay? Now, you've given your team member more than a task. They have a standard and they have a level of authority that they can function at. Okay? And then what that also does is it reduces the number of routine decisions that have to come back to you. Right? They know what to do. You have equipped them with what they need. Okay, so that's the first one. The second sign is that you are still doing work below your level. Okay? That means that you're spending a large part of your week doing work that really shouldn't require you. And that doesn't mean that the work is unimportant. Important, right? Video editing was important in my agency. Admin work is important. Scheduling is important. Onboarding your client also important. Following up on invoices is extremely important, particularly when you enjoy being paid. Right. But importantly Important work is not automatically founder level work. You may be telling yourself that I'll just do it myself, right? It's personally faster, and that might be right today, but it's wildly inefficient over the next year. And so when you're doing something yourself, you complete the task once, right? But when you teach someone else to own it, to document the process, and whether I say someone else, it could even be an AI tool, you give them room to improve. You create capacity for yourself every single time that that task appears in the future. And the problem so often is that this sort of second option feels slower at the beginning, right? Delegating feels slower, feels like it's going to take more work. And it does for a small period of time. And then long term, it lightens up completely because you have to explain what you want, right? When you're starting to delegate, you have to answer questions. You've got to correct something. You have to tolerate the deeply uncomfortable experience of watching another human complete a task differently from the way that you would do it. But differently, by the way, does not always mean wrong, okay? Which is such an important distinction for small business owners or business owners in general. Sometimes we reject somebody else's approach because it won't not create the right outcome, but oftentimes we reject it because it's not the exact route that we would have taken. And gosh, as a Capricorn, this has been such a difficult thing for me to learn. And, uh, Dan Martell talks about this in his book buy back your time. He's saying 80% done by someone else is 100% awesome, right? It doesn't have to be the way that you did it because at the end of the day, if the outcome's right, right, the quality standard is being met, client is being well served. Your preferred method may not actually be the only acceptable method. You have to really look honestly at the work that's filling your days and ask yourself, like, does this require my expertise or are you doing it because you're just familiar with it, Right? Does it actually create meaningful value or does it create the comforting feeling of being busy? Sometimes we hold on to lower level work because it gives us a clear sense of completion, right? We did a thing. You can finish editing a video, you can clear an inbox, you can update a spreadsheet. Growing the business is often messier, right? You can spend two hours developing a partnership and not know whether it's going to lead anywhere. Uh, you can spend time refining an offer, but you still need to Test it. Or you can make a hiring decision and wonder whether you chose correctly. So often we retreat into tasks where we feel very competent and very useful. But business needs your leadership, not just your effort. And that really is where sustainable business and work life balance start becoming real rather than just aspirational. Because you cannot create space in your life while also keeping yourself responsible for every detail in your business. At some point, something has to operate without you. Okay, third sign is that growth automatically creates more work for you. The third sign is that every new client, launch, service, opportunity, everything just directly adds more work to your plate, right? You sign a new client and now you have another 100 meetings to attend, right? You had launched a new offer. Now we have more emails to answer. I just did this the other day, and it's funny because as we're talking about, uh, bandwidth, I was opening up some VIP day spots and I sent an email about it that my team didn't know about because sometimes I go rogue because I'm imperfect. And my team messaged me. I was like, I don't have that set up on the back end yet. I was like, don't worry about it. This is my mess that I've made. But I really shouldn't have done that, right? I really should have gone to my team and say, hey, this is the thing that I want to do. And so sometimes I break my own rules. It's important for you to know that I am not perfect. My team was like, please, Laura, can you not do that ever again? I was like, yes. Um, it can be better, okay? But you launch a thing, you got more emails to answer, right? You're going to bring on someone else on your team. You're gaining another person to manage. Your revenue comes up, but your free time disappears. This is not sustainable business growth. This is really just creating a bigger job for yourself. And frankly, a growing business should eventually develop ways to absorb demand without requiring a matching increase in the founder's involvement. I have interviewed. I interviewed a founder recently. We haven't ran the episode yet. It'll run after this one. And she runs a multi million dollar business. Their goal is to get to a hundred million dollars this year. I asked her, is that goal going to require more of you? And she was like, well, no, not me personally, right? Often it just means clearer systems, stronger onboarding. Maybe it means giving somebody else ownership of an entire area rather than just handing them a bunch of disconnected tasks. It could actually mean simplification, simplifying your offers even more, right? Reducing any unnecessary customization productizing the things that you have, creating templates, uh, could be improving your client communication or establishing some firmer decision making rules. Right? The specific solution is going to depend on your business, but the question is always going to be the same, which is when the business grows, where does the additional work grow? And if the answer is always to me, the business is not yet designed to scale beyond your personal capacity and we need to fix that if you want it to be fixed, which I think if you're here listening to this episode, you probably do. And this is so especially important for a business owner mom. Because your available time is not an abstract resource. There may be school schedules, appointments, family responsibilities, and all of the invisible work that seems to reproduce overnight. You do not need business advice that assumes you can simply work for an extra four hours every evening. Right? You need a business that does not treat your time as the only available source of capacity. And if you are building a service based business and you want growth to, uh, feel manageable, that is the shift. Right? We need to stop delegating only tasks and start delegating ownership. Right? A task is edit this video. Ownership is manage the video editing process, make sure each video meets these standards, deliver it by this deadline, and only involve me when one of these specific issues arise. Okay? A, uh, task is going to be something that is removing an item from your list, whereas ownership removes an area of responsibility from your mental load. And that is a very different change. If this is the kind of practical entrepreneur advice that you need, not more pressure to squeeze yourself into an impossible routine, I'd love to have you join the free this mother means business community. The link is in the show notes and it is a space for women building businesses that support their lives rather than consuming them. Okay, Now I want to give you a simple exercise to begin making the changes that we're talking about. I want you to choose one recurring area of your business, not the entire company. Okay? We are not renovating the whole business before school pickup. I want you to choose one area. It could be your onboarding, uh, content creation, invoicing, scheduling, customer support, podcast production, weekly reporting, and then I want you to answer four questions. Okay? First, what outcome is required here? Be specific. Okay. Handle client onboarding is a little vague. We want to come down to something like make sure every new client signs the agreement, completes payment, receives the welcome materials, and books the kickoff call within five days. That is very different. Secondly, what decision repeatedly comes up? Okay. List the decisions you currently make over and over and over again, and what Kind what? Like, what happens when a client hasn't completed a form? What happens if a payment is late? What happens when someone requests a different meeting time or some information is missing? These repeated tasks are opportunities to create guidelines. Okay. Third, what standards need to be met? Uh, okay. What does good work look like? What needs to be accurate? What needs to be on brand? What needs to happen within a certain timeframe? What would create a poor client experience? Right. Do not expect people to read your mind and then become frustrated when they fail. Okay. Then finally, explain the standard. Okay. What could somebody else own without checking in on you every single time? Right. This is such an important question, because if you're looking for decisions that do not genuinely require your expertise, that's. This is where we need to land. Okay. Maybe someone else can approve your routine content. Maybe they could resolve client questions within a certain boundary or move deadlines, uh, issue refunds under a set amount or choose between predefined options. The goal is not to remove yourself from every meaningful decision, but it's really about using your intention on decisions that do not need you. And yes, this may feel uncomfortable. You may worry that something will be missed. That's normal. You are not aiming for perfect delegation. In one attempt, you're building a business that can function with less dependence on your constant involvement. Okay, so challenge for the week. I want you to identify one place where your business is waiting for you. Then ask whether it genuinely needs your expertise or whether it has simply been trained to need your permission. Okay. Choose a, uh, recurring responsibility. Define the outcome, the decisions, and the standards. Then give somebody else a meaningful level of ownership. Okay. And this is not because you're going to stop caring. Not doing a thing doesn't mean that you don't care. It's because you care enough actually about the business to stop limiting it to what you yourself can carry alone. Okay. And so if you're ready to build a business that grows without taking over every part of your life, join us inside the free community. Send the link in the show notes. Business growth should create more opportunity, right? It should not simply create more work for you. So go run your business like the CEO you are. I hope to see you inside of the free community, and I hope you have an awesome day. Thanks for listening to this. Mother means business. If this episode gave you something useful, do two quick things for me. One, subscribe so you never miss what's next. And two, leave a review. It's the single best way to help more business owners find the show. And if you want more of this real strategy alongside women who take their businesses seriously. Come join us inside the free this Mother Means business community. The link is in the Show Notes. That's all for today. I'll talk to you soon. This podcast is produced, mixed and edited by Cardinal Studio. For more information about how to start your own podcast, please visit www.cardinalstudio.co or email Mike at, um mikeardnostudio. Co. You can also find the details in the Show Notes.