You're The Reason It's Growing. You're Also The Bottleneck.

This is me on a normal working day, building an AI system to take yet another job off my own plate. I'm not doing it because it's clever. I'm doing it because in all of my businesses, the biggest constraint on growth was me.

Picture this for this yourself... Today, everything runs through you because you built it that way, and for a while that's exactly what made it work. Then the business gets bigger, and the thing that made it work becomes the thing that slows it down. Deals wait for your opinion, the team waits for your answer, and you end up as the most expensive queue in the company.

When I sold my business in 2021, I learned that one of the main things a buyer is looking for is whether this business can thrive with out the founder at the helm.  This one thing governs valuation more than you think and, therefore, the money you ultimately take home. 

Now, here's the good news, you don't need a complete restructure to start loosening your grip and reducing founder friction. Here are three things you can start doing today.

1. Find your repeat decisions.

Look back over the last week and write down every decision you made, then circle the ones you've made more than twice. Pricing exceptions, which clients to take on, how to answer a common objection. Each of those should only ever be made once. Write the answer down as a simple rule, something like "under 10% discount, use your judgement, above that come to me", and hand it to your team.

2. Record it once instead of writing it up.

Founders put off documenting things because a process document feels like a project. So don't write it. Next time you do a task only you do, record yourself doing it and talking through why, then put the transcript into an AI tool and ask for a step by step checklist. Twenty minutes of you talking becomes a playbook someone else can follow. It's also how I build AI systems, because a system can only do what you've been able to explain.

3. Hand off the 80% job.

Pick one task this week that someone else could do at 80% of your standard, and let them do it without checking over their shoulder. The hard part isn't the handover, it's leaving it alone afterwards. If you find yourself redoing their work, you haven't delegated, you've just added a step. Give feedback on the result and you'll find it gets to 90% faster than you expect.

None of this is complicated. What makes it hard is that being needed feels good, and it's easy to mistake being busy for being important.

Here's what I want to leave you with:

If you stepped away from your business for 30 days, would it grow, hold, or stall?

How many of the decisions you made this week could someone else have made if they'd been given the rule?

If a serious buyer looked at your revenue today, how much of it would they say depends on you personally?

A quick note on Revenue & Beyond which was built to address these exact conversations I keep having with founders... It offers the process, the playbooks and direct access to an operator who has built and sold businesses before, so you can shortcut the trial and error I went through. There is a service designed for every stage of your business and any budget.  
If you're a founder who has built something real but knows it still runs through you, I'd love to have that conversation. Just reply to this email. No pitch, no agenda.

Simon
Onwards we go!