At some point in building a business, most founders become the thing slowing down growth. It’s rarely because they’re bad at their job. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. They’re good at too many things, they care too much about the details, and the team has quietly learned that waiting for their sign-off is easier than making a call.
I’ve been there. Three times. And each time it crept up the same way: the messages and meetings multiplied, and “quick decisions” that should’ve been made well below me started landing on my desk. The teams weren’t lazy; it just felt safer to ask than risk being wrong.
The problem with being indispensable is that it feels like a compliment… right up until it isn’t. Until something slips, and you realise you were the bottleneck without even noticing.
What I’ve found (and what I work through with founders inside Unusual Group) is that this usually has nothing to do with trust; it’s about clarity. People aren’t clear on which decisions are theirs to make.
They’ve got a rough sense of the boundaries, but nobody ever made it explicit, so they default to asking. And you default to answering. And six months later, you’re wondering why you can’t take a week off without everything falling back to you.
There’s a meaningful difference between telling someone to send the client update and making them responsible for the health of that client relationship. One creates a task, the other creates an owner. Owners think about the problem when you’re not in the room. Task-completers wait for the next instruction.
Most delegation fails here; the person was most likely capable, but they weren’t given the full picture of what “good” looks like. They were given work, not ownership.
The most successful organisations I’ve seen are obsessive about one thing: not just who does what, but who decides what.
Who can say yes to a discount? Who can change the scope? Who can approve a hire? Who owns the client relationship?
When people have clean ownership over a defined set of decisions, things start to move. When it’s murky, everything escalates, and you end up back in the middle of things you thought you’d handed off months ago.
It takes a couple of hours to map this out fully. It’s common for founders not to do this because it never feels urgent enough. Then one day, they realise they’re the bottleneck.
Delegating well doesn’t mean disappearing. The founders who do this best don’t “step away” so much as they change how they stay close.
They agree on what good looks like upfront, they keep a light-touch check-in with the owner, and they choose a simple way to spot drift early, before things start to slip. They don’t micromanage; they just stay in the loop.
And for the record: handing something over and never looking at it again isn’t delegation. It’s just hoping for the best.
Take a look at your last two weeks of meetings and messages. Find a few decisions that ended up with you that shouldn’t have.
For each one: decide who should own it, be clear about what “good” looks like, and give them the boundaries they need to run with it. Then give it to them to own.
Want a sounding board on any of it? Talk to me.
If you want to get into the real shape of your business, how it’s structured, what keeps pulling you back into the weeds, and what it would take to get a week of your life back? Let’s have a conversation.
You built the business. At some point, the job becomes building the team that runs it. Most founders know that.
Fewer make the shift early enough.
Here’s to getting out of your own way,
Writer, The Success Method
%20(1).webp)
.jpg)
