Is the Owner Really the Bottleneck?

Apparently my social media feed has figured out that I spend a lot of time thinking about businesses, because lately I’ve been seeing quite a bit of content about the business owner being the bottleneck. You know how that works. Watch one video about something and suddenly the internet decides it has discovered your newest obsession.

There is certainly some truth behind the conversation. If every decision has to go through the owner, every problem eventually lands on their desk and work stops whenever they aren’t available, it’s worth paying attention to. A business can only move so fast when everything has to travel through one person.

I do wonder if we sometimes make too big of a jump from recognizing that dependence to deciding what it means. If the owner is heavily involved in the business, does that automatically mean we need to reduce their involvement? What if they actually like being involved? They built the thing. They may love talking with customers, being part of operations, helping make decisions and knowing what’s happening throughout the company. Not every business owner is trying to build a company they can eventually watch from a beach somewhere while someone else runs it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

There’s also a difference between an owner choosing to be involved and an owner having no choice but to be involved. An owner who wants to participate in major decisions is in a very different position from an owner who can’t leave for three days without everything piling up. One reflects how they want to lead their business. The other may be telling us something about how the organization currently operates.

Even then, the owner being involved doesn’t necessarily tell us enough to know what the actual problem is. Maybe decisions keep coming back to the owner because nobody is quite sure who has the authority to make them. Maybe information isn’t getting where it needs to go. Maybe responsibilities that worked when there were eight employees aren’t nearly as clear with thirty. Maybe managers haven’t been given what they need to make certain decisions confidently. Maybe different parts of the company have grown at different speeds. Or maybe the owner really does have a hard time letting go of things they probably don’t need to be doing anymore.

All of those situations can look remarkably similar from the outside. The owner is involved in everything. The business slows down waiting for the owner. People constantly ask the owner questions. It would be pretty easy to look at all of that and say, “There’s your bottleneck.” Maybe that’s exactly what’s happening, but I’d still want to understand why everything keeps ending up there before deciding what needs to change.

The same thing applies when we talk about growth. If an owner wants to double the size of the company, their current level of involvement may eventually limit how much the organization can handle. If they want to prepare the business for a future sale, reducing dependence on them could become extremely important. If they want more time away from the business, obviously the organization needs to be capable of operating without requiring their constant involvement. Those are all legitimate reasons to look closely at how dependent the organization is on its owner.

But those aren’t everybody’s goals. What if the owner loves the company at its current size, enjoys coming to work every morning and wants to stay closely involved for the next fifteen years? I’m not sure we should be designing their business around somebody else’s definition of what business ownership is supposed to look like. Their desired role in the company should probably be part of the conversation before we decide their involvement is something that needs to be fixed.

That’s why I think the better conversation starts with what the owner is trying to accomplish. Once we understand that, we can start asking whether the organization as it operates today is capable of supporting where they want to take it. Their involvement might be part of that conversation. It might even turn out to be an important constraint. Or we may discover that something happening elsewhere in the organization is creating the conditions that continually pull the owner back in.

That distinction matters to me because the goal shouldn’t automatically be to get the owner out of the way. The goal should be to understand what’s happening well enough for the owner to decide what, if anything, needs to change. After all, it’s their business. They should get to decide what role they want to have in it.

And maybe that’s the question worth thinking about here: Is your business dependent on you because that’s how you want to lead it, or because it doesn’t yet know how to operate without you?

OGA, giving you something to think about.