Last week I was on a call with a client who swore he didn’t have an operations problem.
‘We’ve got systems for everything,’ he’s telling me.
‘The issue is people not following them.’
So I asked him to walk me through his week.
By Tuesday afternoon, he had personally approved four invoices, fielded a hiring question, fixed a client’s onboarding form, and rewritten a team email because “it just needed to sound right.”
I didn’t have to say much.
I just gave him space to think.
He just stared at me for a second and I saw it hit him. He said,
‘Oh… I am the system.’
Exactly.
It’s a moment I see all the time with founders: the realization that they are the bottleneck.
It might not feel like the business has an operations problem.
But it does.
It’s a dependency problem.
And they aren’t doing it intentionally.
Sometimes it’s happening in ways they don’t recognize.
They don’t ‘see’ what they are doing as being a bottleneck.
But...
Every decision still runs through them.
Every fix starts with them.
Every slowdown points back to them.
When that’s happening, the solution takes more than new SOPs.
If you are a service business owner who wants to get out of the weeds...
Who is ready for less day-to-day and more leading...
Here are the first three steps:
1️⃣ Change how you see your role.
If you replaced yourself tomorrow, what higher-value levers would you focus on?
Stop measuring progress by busyness. Measure it by how unnecessary you’re becoming in the day-to-day.
2️⃣ Clean up your operating habits.
Most “overwhelm” is self-inflicted.
Get better at setting expectations, meeting commitments, and eliminating rework. (accountability)
Small operational disciplines create massive breathing room. Massive.
3️⃣ Build systems that actually run without you.
Stop depending on memory and heroics.
Design, document, and delegate so decisions don’t flow through you.
If you are the system, you are a bottleneck.
If you are the system, you don’t have a business, you have a job.
If you wanted a job, there are easier ways to get one.
But you don’t want a job.
And the goal isn’t just to get out of the weeds.
It’s to build a business that works for you (not the other way around) because you’ve built it well (not because you’re propping it up.)
Am I right?
