10MINMC.Ep.28.V1.AUDIO
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] Most businesses don't stall because of a lack of strategy. They stall because the founder became a bottleneck. In today's podcast, we're gonna talk about how to spot it. And more importantly, how to fix it.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass. I'm your host and lead MC, Trey Sheneman. And it's our goal on 10 Minute Masterclass to be your weekly mic drop for business breakthrough every single week. My whole approach to doing this is to try and teach you some timeless business principles that I've learned over the last 15 or 16 years in the trenches so that you can apply those timeless business principles to today's business problems in your business.
That's why I'm doing this. I want you to grow. And so the way that we talk about [00:01:00] growth here too is we use a, a framework we call the core four drivers of growth, marketing, sales, operations, and leadership. And it's today, we're. We're driving down deeper into the growth driver that is operations and we're talking about bottlenecks.
More importantly, founder led bottlenecks. It's like a kind of a dolphin. Like you got a bottle nose dolphin, you got a bottleneck founder. I'm just kidding. I really think that founder led bottlenecks are like the silent killer of scale. Um, 'cause here's the hard truth. You're not gonna be able to get to 2 million or 5 million or 10 million.
Be if you remain a founder led business. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the clients we work with are founder led businesses, but a lot of the clients we work with are sub two or $3 million and they're trying to get to five or 10 or $15 million in revenue. And the whole thing we're teaching 'em how to do is how to project.
Productize the founder's thinking so that the founder no longer becomes a lid on the business. Okay. It's gonna be really hard. There's been very few [00:02:00] businesses that have remained founder led and gotten to 30, 40, 50, 60 million. And I, the cool thing for me is I've worked for a couple of 'em and they are unicorns.
Okay? So the odds are that's not gonna be you. So you need to figure out how to make sure you can scale past yourself being the bottleneck. So. When you first start your business, you're the engine. You know, I get it. You're the driver. You gotta do it all. The challenge is, is like if you remain the engine though, you will eventually stall out.
You will choke out. Um, it won't work. So it's not about an effort. Issue either. It's not that you, you don't work hard enough or you're not talented enough. It's just more a concept of architecture here and that, that, that certain businesses, most businesses for that fact actually have to change their model in order to grow through different growth plateaus.
Um, it's kind of that old ad of what got you here won't get you there. Uh, not only that, it also might be what's holding you back, meaning like continuing to want to do it that way will keep you here. Not only will it not get you there, it will keep you here. So the [00:03:00] big idea for today is there are four bottlenecks that I see founders create.
And I can speak very candidly about this because I've lived through most of them as a founder. I'm, I'm, I'm being a founder now for the third time. So I completely, this is me talking to me just as much as it is me talking to you. Okay? So let's work through what these four bottlenecks are so you can spot 'em and you can stop 'em so that your business can grow.
So number one, first bottleneck is the decision bottleneck. The way you know you have a decision bottleneck is if you hear yourself saying or thinking, nothing moves unless I approve it. Every decision routes through you. I mean, that is immediately gonna kill the speed inside of your company. The way that you fix this bottleneck is you build what are called decision rights.
Um, a, a good way of thinking about decision rights. If you've never seen a RACI chart before, RACI is RACI. Um, actually, I'll make sure that the team builds a RACI chart as the deliverable that we serve up for. Uh, for those of you that are on our [00:04:00] [email protected], that's one zero MIN mc.com. If you want to go there and get on our newsletter, a RACI chart stands for who's responsible, who's accountable.
Who's consulted with and who's informed. And the faster you can move yourself to the I bucket, the informed bucket instead of the consulted accountable or responsible bucket, definitely not that R bucket. Um, the, the quicker decisions are gonna get made. Now, don't get me wrong, there, there's, there's a process there.
Of course, a lot of the decisions have to come through you when it's early on, but man, if you're gonna build out a team. Then assign ownership. You know, give them responsibility, hold them to it. And, uh, that's one of the ways that you're gonna be able to grow faster and, and get past stall. The second bottleneck outside of the decision bottleneck that I see when I consult with businesses is the communication bottleneck.
Hey, I, I'm, I'm the bridge. I'm the bridge between everyone. I'm the go between, you know, uh. Everyone talks to you, and then you have to talk to everyone else. So all the emails come to you and you forward 'em out to your team. All [00:05:00] the Slack requests come to you, and then you send them out to your team. Um, you know, all the conflict, all the conflict comes to you, and you gotta be one to solve it.
If that sounds familiar, you got a communication bottleneck. And the truth is, it's like. That's not leadership. That's like being a human version of Slack, like being the catchall of everything that has to happen. And so the way that you fix the communication issue is, is a little bit of a, like a multitude of things, but you really gotta make sure you have strong meeting rhythms.
I'm, I'm not a huge proponent of meetings, if I'm being honest with you. I think they're one of the most, uh, drag inducing things in a business. But good. I am a fan of good meetings and really few well run good meetings. And again. Something I'm working on myself, but better meeting rhythms. Better scorecards.
Scorecards. We talked in an earlier episode or 10 minute masterclass about giving people the scorecard and giving them something to own. 'cause if you give 'em something to own, they'll play like there's something to lose. Um, and that's a huge lift. And then also just making sure you have a system.
[00:06:00] Somewhere that is the hub for communication, like a project management tool, like an Asana or a Basecamp or a monday.com or, uh, Clickup is another one a lot of people will use. You can't be the one that's getting all the information. It's gotta be going into a third party place. Okay? The third bottleneck is the task bottleneck.
This is where you find yourself saying, well, they just won't do it like I will. So I just keep doing it. Um, this is like the age old founder as a martyr. Kind of a complex where you almost, uh, it's like a job security thing, even though you own the company. It's kind of weird, to be honest with you. I can, I can, I definitely struggle with the first two.
Just like, you know, calling myself out here. I gave this one up a long time ago. I got so many people on the team now that are so much better at doing their jobs than I ever was, number one to start with, and definitely than I am right now. So this is one, this was the easiest one for me to kill. Um, now don't get me wrong, there are some areas of the business.
That I wish I could still give up, but we're just not there yet. It's fine. We're a growing business [00:07:00] too. Um, but it's like, hey, if you still, um, if you still gotta run the ads. Or you still gotta write the copy or you still gotta call the customers, or you still gotta do the sales pre, uh, presentations, or you gotta go out and do the inspections or whatever it is.
If that's where you're at, you, you, you understand that you are gonna become the biggest problem in the business if that's, if that's where you're, you will getting stuck is, uh, is inevitable. If that's the case, the way that, the way that I mentally broke this is, and, you know, this is gonna, might sound aggressive.
Um. In some ways I learned this from Dan Martel's book, buy Back Your Time. Basically, I created a buyback rate and I started telling myself, if it's not worth a thousand dollars an hour to do. I'm not doing it. There will be someone else on our team that will do it, like especially if it's worth $20 an hour to do, or $30 an hour.
And that sense isn't to like cash shade on my team, it's to create a prioritization of tasks that the owner should be doing, the CEO should be doing [00:08:00] compared to the team that you're building out. Okay, so. And the last thing that you wanna do is like things that are like a thousand dollars an hour. And that's not a literal number guys.
It's more about just the mental model of thinking about the high dollar stuff that the founders should be doing. Like you can never outsource vision, uh, for the business. Like you can't really outsource. All the strategy for the business. That's really what you're there to do in the first place. So, but you can get rid of a lot of the tasks.
The fourth, the fourth, uh, bottleneck would be the priority bottleneck. Um, that's where you'll say things like, I'm the only one who knows what's important. Well, if your team can't prioritize without you, it's because you simply never taught 'em how. Like that's, that's an issue with you. That's not an issue with them.
So it's, this one's pretty simple to fix. Just start pushing more decision making to your team. Create situations where they can have non-fatal failure. Use things like OKRs or rocks to show them the way and give them priorities and then let 'em run and see what happens. That's the sign of really great maturing leadership too, whenever you can let them be the ones that own the priorities instead of you.
So this week, if you're a business [00:09:00] owner, do a founder audit. Are you the bottleneck? And if so, which one could you be? Am I involved in all the approvals that don't necessarily re uh, require my expertise? Does my team wait for me to set direction every week? Am I the middleman in too many conversations, do I leave every day thinking if I don't do it, it's not gonna get done?
If the answer is yes, definitely, if it's a yes more than once, then you got a founder bottleneck issue. Okay? So this week, the way you would fix it, you would make sure you install a decision making framework, create rules for what the team owns, like the ACY chart. Make sure you have operational scorecard.
Episode 16. In the podcast I go through what should be in a scorecard and how to get, uh, your team members to feel like they're winning. 'cause if they see the score, they'll stop guessing. They'll stop playing to win. That's great. And make sure you've got a solid meeting rhythm that could also run without you if you're out.
So some sort of tactical weekly check in. Some sort of monthly strategic meeting and some sort of quarterly vision kind of OKR goal planning, [00:10:00] reset. If you do those three things well, you're gonna make yourself less and less and less of a bottleneck. Um, and I really want that for you. So be in the bottleneck.
It doesn't necessarily mean you're broken as a business, but it does mean you're probably stalled out or you've outgrown the way you were operating. So it's real easy. When the operating system is broken, just install a new one. Delegate decisions build your scorecards. Set the priorities that live beyond the calendar, and because you started the business to own your time.
Make sure that's what's happening. Don't be owned by the business. Make sure you own it. Before we wrap up today, I wanna remind you about our season sponsor Live Well membership. If you like to travel, there's no better way to do it than traveling with Live Well it's luxury travel Without the timeshare traps.
Go book your next vacation and until next time, we'll see you on the flip side.
