The biggest risk your business will ever face is YOU!
Many people will tell you it’s cash flow or unsuccessful marketing tactics. But it’s not. Indeed, as the entrepreneur, YOU are the heart of your company, its engine. And when you get stuck, so does your business.
It happens when you become the bottleneck in your business. And from this position, no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to thrive and your company will stall.
How to tell if you’re the bottleneck in your business?
Here are some of the most common symptoms:
You're lost in operational details, overlooking the strategic vision.
You can't let go and have difficulties to delegate.
You're constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on business growth.
You're feeling disconnected from your customers and staff.
You are giving more credit to the critical voice in your head with a growing fear that you’ll be caught out for not knowing enough.
As you can see, you can be a bottleneck in many ways, but the price you pay is always the same: you're stuck, and the outcomes can be detrimental to your business and people.
2 practical examples to illustrate the entrepreneur bottlenecks.
Example #1
I know many entrepreneurs who get buried under the many tasks they deal with daily. Getting lost in operational details, and having everything tied around you is one of the main reasons entrepreneurs hire me.
They suffocate and can’t see a way out.
I was talking with the top team at a client's company, asking about their boss, the founder. They said he's a great leader but dives too much into day-to-day stuff. They want him to trust them more and pick his battles wisely, focusing on big-picture stuff where he can make a difference. They reckon he could help them even more by stepping back and letting them take charge of smaller things.
What’s the point of hiring people if you don’t empower them with responsibilities and decision-making?
A typical case of being the bottleneck.
Example #2
Initially, your direct involvement in all aspects is necessary, but as your business matures, stepping back becomes essential for sustainable expansion. That requires to learn to
let go. And the inability to let go is one of the strongest bottlenecks entrepreneurs face.
A client of mine was supervising all his customers’ projects himself. He reached a point where he realized his position was unsustainable because he couldn’t find the time to do anything else.
He told me he loved the interactions with his clients, which is why he was deeply involved with them.
So, we started digging and found out he didn’t want to delegate the responsibilities to someone else.
We dug a little deeper, and we uncovered the cause of the problem. He was very proud of the high-quality standards his clients benefited from, standards he’d spent years building. The truth was he was afraid of seeing a significant decrease in quality if he were to delegate project management to someone else.
In other words, he couldn’t let go. He had become the bottleneck, and his behavior was jeopardizing the business's growth.
The entrepreneur bottleneck is real.
What can you do about your bottlenecks?
In short, you must build self-awareness. Overcoming your bottlenecks first requires that you acknowledge you’re being the bottleneck. And that’s the toughest part.
Let me share 4 tips to help you:
Don’t stay isolated, reach out to your peers. Many entrepreneurs have walked the walk before you.
Never stop learning. Read books, watch videos, and compile the best entrepreneurial practices.
Listen more to your team. They can see when you’re the bottleneck as illustrated by example #1.
Hire a coach like me. The greatest benefit of coaching is the results it brings. It's better to prevent bottlenecks rather than deal with them later. You might be on the verge of becoming the bottleneck without realizing it.
I recommend scheduling an Impact Assessment call with me today. During this call, we will identify and diagnose your potential bottlenecks, understand their impact, and create a practical action plan to eliminate them.
There’s no charge for this. Schedule your free call now.
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