The Founder the Business Needs

Part One

The bottleneck is rarely a capacity problem. It is rarely the case that the founder, in raw skill or intelligence or experience, cannot do the volume of work the business currently sits on. The bottleneck is, almost always, a structural choice that has become invisible to the person making it.

The structural choice is the founder's relationship to control. Early in a business, the founder is the source of almost every decision because there is no one else, and the business cannot afford the time it would take to teach anyone else how. The decisions are quick because they are made by the person who knows the most context. The business moves fast because the structure is simple. The founder, the work, and the business are tightly coupled.

This works extremely well in the early years. It is one of the reasons the business gets built. The same coupling, sustained past the point where it should have been adjusted, becomes the ceiling. The team grows. The complexity grows. The volume of decisions grows. The structure has not been adjusted to grow with them. So the team starts queuing at the founder's door, and the founder, by reflex, processes the queue, because that is the version of the founder the business was built around.

The processing works for a while. Then it stops working. The signs are the ones you already know. The decisions that take longer than they used to. The team that has learned to wait rather than to move. The initiatives that should have been finished last quarter that are still in progress. The founder who is doing the same volume of work and feels less able to do it, not because of capacity, but because the system of work was built for a different version of the business than the one she is now running.

The low-grade guilt comes from knowing all of this. The founder is rarely in denial about being the bottleneck. The founder is in negotiation with the cost of addressing it. The negotiation is held in the guilt, where it can sit for years without forcing a decision.

Part Two

The work of addressing the bottleneck is, in some sense, the work of becoming a different founder. Not a better version of the same founder. A different one. The founder who built the business was right for the early stage, and that founder cannot, by simple extension, be the right founder for the next stage. The next stage needs someone who has done specific kinds of unlearning the previous stage did not require.

This unlearning is harder than it sounds because the founder is being asked to develop capacities by relaxing capacities that have been the source of her success. Trust the team to make decisions she would have made differently. Allow standards to be set in ways that are not quite hers. Spend time in parts of the business that are not currently on fire, which usually means being less needed in the parts that are. Sit with the discomfort of being less central without filling the discomfort with new urgency.

None of these are skills. They are shifts in how the founder occupies the founder seat. They cannot be downloaded from a book or implemented through a programme. They have to be worked through, on the founder's actual life, with someone who can hold the question of what the new shape needs to be without pre-deciding it.

My own version of this was not as a founder, but as a senior person in a different kind of structure. The role I had been playing for two decades had not, until a certain point, been adjusted for the version of me that was now playing it. The adjustment, when it finally became impossible to defer, was not a skill problem. It was an identity problem. The role had been built around a version of me that had been right at thirty and was not right at forty. The work of meeting that, properly, was the longest work I have done.

The practice I run now is built around this kind of work. The Diagnostic, the Reset, and the Rebuild. The Diagnostic is where we name what is actually going on. The Reset is the period where the structural choices the founder has been making become visible and then adjustable. The Rebuild is the slower work of running the business, and the life, from the new arrangement. None of it is quick. All of it is, in my view, the thing the founder has been waiting for, even when the founder has been waiting without knowing what she was waiting for.

If the guilt has been there for a while, the Diagnostic is the place to start. Free, 30 minutes, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Continue reading: The Standards Problem →

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