It takes more than a spark of passion to start a business. Launching a new venture is a standout commitment that requires time, energy, and sacrifice. To get things off the ground, a founder often wears every hat.
At the beginning, a business has to start small with a lean team. In this stage, it’s natural for the CEO to have a hand in everything: finances, marketing, legal, product, operations, and so forth. But this approach can only last for so long. As we’ve said before—what gets a company off the ground isn’t what it takes to scale it.
Scalability creates a new context for leadership and organization. But for the founder who has been intertwined since day one, stepping out of the way can feel like abandoning their own creation. And that’s often where they become the bottleneck of their own company.
The hub-and-spoke model: It works (for a little while)
The startup phase of any company requires simplicity; this era is defined by limited resources and capacity. Consequently, a “hub-and-spoke” structure settles into place, where the founder is the hub and each team (or employee) represents a spoke.
In a hub-and-spoke model, information flows through the central hub, the founder.
The main benefit of the hub-and-spoke structure is efficiency. As the hub manages decision-making and resource allocation, the spokes deliver on goals and benchmarks. The spokes operate leanly by drawing on the hub—for resources, instruction, and decisions. This model keeps employees close to the founder’s vision, establishes culture, and upholds values.
The problem is: once you’ve become the hub, your company can’t operate without you. You bump up against the Theory of Constraints: “A business system’s performance is limited by its most critical constraint—the bottleneck.” If progress in your company stalls in your absence, the reality is: you are the number one constraint.
Signs that you might be the bottleneck of your own company
1. Employees turn to you for decision-making and direction.
If employees repeatedly come to you for instructions, or if getting your sign-off on every project is the status quo—you might have trained your team this way. Involvement in every aspect of your business might feel like a comforting form of control, but it creates a cascade of impact that ultimately restricts the growth of your business.
2. You’re too bogged down with low-level tasks to get the most important things done.
If you’ve assigned yourself as a touchpoint in every sphere, low-level tasks could be piling up. If you’re constantly behind and rarely able to tend to larger priorities, you’re probably the bottleneck. Distraction and procrastination are adjacent signs that you’ve gotten in your own way.
3. You aren’t meeting sales and profit goals.
If you are the bottleneck in your own company, the numbers will eventually show it. When critical parts of the business are waiting on you, the pace of execution slows. Decisions are delayed, and the business can’t scale beyond your personal capacity. This inevitably puts a ceiling on your revenue.
4. Progress flatlines if you aren’t there.
Back to the hub-and-spoke model: if you’ve built your organization such that all progress hinges upon your approval, then your business will stall in your absence. It might feel like you have more control of your company, but growth will require that your employees are empowered to work without you.
5. You’re missing work-life balance.
When was the last time you took a vacation? If a founder is the bottleneck, then the entity cannot run smoothly in their absence. Understandably, this makes a founder hesitant to step away. If your personal life has shrunk with the demands of your business, it’s likely that you’re struggling to let go of control.
6. You’re the only person who can do a particular skill.
If you are the only person who can do a critical skill (like coding or product development), your company’s output is immediately limited by your availability. If you are wrapped up in specialized work, then you aren’t available to spend your time growing the business. It’s time to shift from the “doer” to the “leader.”
The new model: Becoming the CEO
If you’ve determined that you’re currently the bottleneck in your organization, what comes next?
Understand that things aren’t suffering because you lack the skill or capability. When it’s time to scale, a new model of leadership is simply necessary. Instead of thinking like a founder or an entrepreneur, it’s time to start thinking like a CEO.
Stepping into the CEO mindset means it’s time to spend less time working in the business, and more time working on the business. This doesn’t mean you resign from working on your company’s objectives; it means you adapt your management style to be less of a facilitator and more of an accelerator.
Immad Akhund, CEO of fintech company Mercury, describes this dynamic well: “As a CEO, you can apply pressure and improve things in a way that accelerates progress… In a system where you’re not a bottleneck, your progress continues on an upward trajectory even without you there, but the curve of that trajectory steepens when you are.”
But isn’t it easier said than done? You may be wondering. If you’ve been holding all the strings, surrendering control can feel scary or even like a threat to the well-being of your business. But every growing venture requires an evolving leadership model. So how do you get from here to there?
It’s about moving from efficiency to effectiveness.
Your guide to stepping out of the bottleneck position
Embrace delegation
The simplest advice for no longer being the bottleneck: Do less. The first step to evolving your management structure is honing the art of delegation. But delegation isn’t just offloading tasks (if it was that easy, you would have done it already).
Effective delegation is about giving employees ownership over the work they do. It’s about providing your team autonomy to make decisions and take action without reliance on you. Giving your teams independence means giving them responsibility—fueling motivation, adaptability, and productivity.
But what if something goes wrong? The key is to prepare your employees for inevitable difficulties instead of trying to avoid them altogether. In this case, perfect is the enemy of good. Mistakes will be made, but the growth will be worth it.
Hire smarter
Offloading work will be much easier if you trust the employees you’re handing it over to. Often, founders get stuck in the predicament: “It will take me less time to do it myself, than to train someone else.” But this is only a temporary salve. In the long run, others must be able to take over our responsibilities so that we can focus on higher-level tasks.
This also means identifying areas where you might be the only person with a necessary skill, which inevitably caps your potential. The objective is to replace yourself in that role by hiring or training another individual. Even if they only start at 70% proficiency, you are that much less the bottleneck of your organization.
Documentation
As a business gets up and running, a founder ends up with a lot of specialized knowledge living in their own head. So long as this is the case, your team will be dependent on you. Documentation externalizes this information—making systems, workflows, and rules all available to the team. Without it, no one can act independently.
Documentation is about clearly articulating processes and ensuring that tasks are completed the same way every time. You are no longer the gatekeeper of key information, making the business more self-sustaining. Even better, documentation allows for clear measurement of progress and makes space for improvement.
AI tools make creating documentation a less arduous task for founders. By recording your screen, uploading the video to your AI tool of choice, and asking it to create a process document from it, you are quickly on your way to training someone on a task only you know how to do.
Create decision-making frameworks
A founder having to make all of the decisions is a common and serious bottleneck. Embracing the CEO role means setting up others to make decisions successfully without your input—and that’s where decision-making frameworks come in.
These frameworks allow individuals to make consistent and aligned choices. They help transfer smart judgment by creating structure. Some examples of decision-making frameworks include:
The 80/20 Rule: The 80-20 rule suggests that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. By using this as a decision-making framework, CEOs can focus efforts and resources where they will have the biggest impact. For example, you may find that 20% of your customers drive 80% of your revenue and decide to direct resources to protect, grow, and replicate that high-value segment.
The 5 P's: The five P’s stand for: Purpose, Principles, Priority, People, Plan. This is a widely accepted framework for project organization.
DACI Model: This approach provides a structure to role and responsibility assignment by determining: Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed.
Your role is to create these frameworks, teach your teams how to use them, coach them through the early stages, and then step back.
The financial bottleneck
When a founder has their hand in every pot, critical aspects of scalability fall to the wayside. Strapped for time and resources, a founder is likely making financial decisions without knowing the full picture, working out of static spreadsheets and outdated financial models. Over time, overseeing financial strategy alone can become a bottleneck as the business grows.
Transitioning financial leadership to an experienced professional is a key step on the path to scale. For many growing companies, hiring a full-time CFO isn’t practical or necessary, but bringing on a Fractional CFO offers a smart, flexible solution. A Fractional CFO is a part-time or contract-based financial executive who provides high-level strategic guidance without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.
They can take ownership of critical areas like pricing strategy, fundraising preparation, profitability analysis, and financial forecasting—allowing the founder to step back from day-to-day financial oversight that’s contributing to the bottleneck. At Ascent CFO Solutions, we specialize in connecting growing companies to the financial expertise they need, when they need it.
Often that looks like an outsourced CFO. But we can also support accounting process and infrastructure needs, capital and fundraising initiatives, financial modeling and cash flow forecasting, and M&A advisory. Whatever your current objectives are, we step in on a fractional or interim basis to get you from here to there.
Contact us and learn more!
The benefits of giving up control
When you are no longer the bottleneck in your own business, your time and capacity are freed up for the high-level tasks required for scalability. Instead of just trying to do things right, you’ll be able to focus on the right things. Making the switch from efficiency to effectiveness will benefit your entire company:
Faster execution. When your teams aren’t waiting on you, projects can move forward and objectives will be met more quickly.
Scalability. When you are no longer the bottleneck, the company can grow beyond your personal capacity.
Employee satisfaction. When you empower your team to take ownership, they feel motivated and positive about their individual contributions.
Retaining talent. Similarly, top talent wants room to breathe and exercise their expertise; they don’t want to follow orders. Giving your all-stars autonomy is key to keeping them happy.
Higher innovation. Breaking away from the hub-and-spoke model increases problem solving across the organization, making space for new ideas to emerge.
Higher valuation. A company that is self-sufficient will be more attractive to investors and capital firms.
Your entire business benefits when you actively remove yourself as the bottleneck. And so do you, individually. This shift allows you to focus on the growth of your company—the vision and the strategy. It’s hard to maintain a bigger perspective when you’re bogged down by low-level tasks.
What’s more, this shift can take away the stress and burnout that you might have normalized in over-controlling the company. You can take a vacation from time to time and even enjoy running your business, instead of merely surviving it.
The bottom line
With as much time and passion you’ve poured into your company, it’s understandable that you want to stay at the center.
But as a company grows, so does the CEO role itself. Your job is no longer about doing it all, but about building a business that works without you. That means stepping out of the bottleneck and fully into leadership. The irony is—the more you let go of control, the more you grow. And as they say, anything that’s scary and exciting is worth doing.
That said, you don’t have to do it alone. The best CEOs and leaders know when to ask for help. When it comes to financial expertise, we can support your every step to growth and scale. At Ascent CFO Solutions, we are here to customize a solution that supports your business as a whole and your vision for what it can be.
About the Author
Dan DeGolier is the founder of Ascent CFO Solutions and a Fractional CFO with nearly 30 years of experience. He is passionate about working alongside leaders of companies to help them “upward” to their highest potential. Read more