Stop Being The Bottleneck In Your Business

It’s a bottleneck – and it’s why many small business owners fall out of love with the business they’ve created.

You don’t need a massive overhaul to fix it. You just need a few clean decisions that will create space.

Creating structural capacity is often less about logistics, and more about decisions and identity. If your brain is expecting complexity, complexity will show up – even if you’ve got the prettiest Asana task list. 

Instead of asking: “How do I get more productive and do more in a day?”

The better question is: “How do I set direction so the business can move without me being the center of every small decision?”. (This applies whether you have team or not.)

So here’s three things you can do today.

1. Make One Capacity Decision

The first place to start isn’t thinking about systems or hiring. Start with decisions that reduce complexity.

When I’m doing this clients, I’m looking for the key areas that feel ‘fuzzy’ – when things are a bit fuzzy, they drag your energy, time and thinking. You lose time context switching, re-answering the same questions, and deciding the same things in slightly different ways.

Sometimes the most useful decision is deciding what you’re not doing anymore.

It could look like:

• You stop replying to messages across 4 different channels, and just select 1 support channel.
• You stop putting a lot of effort into a platform that doesn’t convert – like posting daily on Instagram when your sales come from email.
• You stop offering custom work or lots of tweaks outside your core offer.
• You stop ‘jumping on a quick call’ for things that could be asynchronous.

Another example, is that you decide what becomes the default, so you’re not re-deciding time and again.

That could look like:

• Having a fixed schedule for calls and availability.
• New inquiries go through one pathway – no variation each time
• Your content goes out once a week or a cadence you decide, and anything extra is a bonus. 

2.  If You Have Support, Create Decision Filters

If you have a team, or even light support from a VA, and lots of micro-questions keep coming back to you, you don’t need better support – you need better decision filters.

Your team isn’t asking you because they’re incapable (usually!), it’s because your business structure currently says, ‘When in doubt, ask you.’

So you become the bottleneck that stops them moving forward with their work.  

Here’s 3 filters you can use immediately – you can copy these straight into your Slack channel or team SOP.

• No 1: ‘Where do you have autonomy to decide without me?’
  In other words: what decisions are theirs now?

• No 2: ‘For non-urgent questions, what’s the next check-in point with me?’
  Instead of drip-feeding you non-urgent questions all week, they collate them for your next meeting.

• No 3: ‘What’s the default if I’m not there?’
  If you disappeared for a week, what would they do?

This is how you give your team the confidence to make decisions – and you build your own confidence that they can.

That matters because if your identity is: ‘I’m the one who holds it all together‘, then even a great team will keep asking you those micro-questions.

The identity shift is: I set direction. I give clear decision filters. The business can move without me touching everything.

3. Create One ‘Release Valve’

‘Release Valves’ are those pressure points in your business where, if you solved for them, it would open up chunk of capacity.

These vary business to business, but here’s 3 that show up again and again. I suggest you pick one – the most impactful one for you – and look to get in place in the next week (they can be that quick, honest!)

Option A: Give clear communication expectations – for your team and your clients.

Have one communication channel – with clients or team – that you review once in the morning, and once in the afternoon.

Instead of being interrupted 15 times a day across 4 different platforms, you can get your head down with the important, strategic work that only you can do. Your energy and focus switches to supporting team and clients at those other times.

Option B: A weekly decision meeting.

For non-urgent decisions, you have a weekly decision meeting with your team or your virtual assistant. It could be 30 minutes, every week.

Instead of lots of bitty ‘Can you just check…’ messages throughout the week, they bring it to that call: any decisions needed, any blocks, anything that sits outside your current decision filters.

This can also be powerful if you don’t have any team. What are the bitty decisions you need to make that you keep putting off? Grab a note of them, set aside time, and decide.

Option C: A role handoff – even a tiny one.

If you have a repeating task, where you find yourself thinking: ‘I’ll just do it. It’s quicker’, that’s a strong contender for this one! For example: publishing content, onboarding new clients, sending invoices.

Now this could be a system, a light automation, or it could be having a team member take on a task.

You want to define clearly:

• What ‘done’ looks like
• When it happens
• If team are involved, what decisions they can make without you

The goal here is that you don’t touch it, it just happens.

Structural Capacity Allows Your Business To Grow

If you want more for your business – or more capacity for the projects you’d love to do (finally write that book, create the new revenue stream, or just take more time off) – something has to give.

Your business doesn’t become easier to run because you get better at carrying everything. It becomes easier to run because fewer things need to be carried by you in the first place. That’s what we’re creating here.

Find the capacity hiding in your business

If you’d rather work through those decisions with experienced eyes on your business, you can learn more about a Next Level Audit right here.

Thanks for reading!