Faster If I Do It: The Business Model No One Means to Build (But Everyone Does)
Scaling Dysfunction: A Love Story. 6 perfectly logical ways smart owners end up becoming the bottleneck.
TL;DR: The “How the $^&# did we get here?” installment of my Owner Dependence series: How the habits that made you successful harden into bottlenecks later (aka How bad habits happen to good businesses. Like yours.)
Every small B2B business starts as a beautiful act of desperation. Especially service-based ones.
They don’t begin with an org chart. They begin with a person who said Yes too many times — and got good at it.
Things start off as scrappy, but an element of danger lurks close at hand:
Decisions happen in real time (usually during fire drills).
Systems stay fluid (because nothing’s been nailed down long enough to dry).
Trust lives in relationships, not documents (which is charming, right up until someone quits).
Yup, it totally works — until it really doesn’t.
Because the habits that made you fast early on harden into bottlenecks later.
Without noticing, your business starts depending on your proximity and institutionalizes your particular brand of panic.
That’s not a business, that’s a hostage situation.
Let’s take a tour of how that happens.
Did you miss the first part of this series? Catch it here:
1. The Heroic Build Phase
You, as the Chief Everything Officer.
You wore every hat. Processes lived in your head. Documentation was for people with time — and you didn’t have any.
Result: Everything became custom-fit around your brain: your style, your taste, your memory. It worked because there was no distance between the thinker and the doer.
➡️ This phase ended as you began to add people — and they inherited your invisible system like a cursed family heirloom.
2. The Loyal Assistant Era
Your first sidekick: a psychic on payroll.
Enter the first real hire: an EA, VA, or all-purpose Swiss Army human.
You two develop a telepathic shorthand. The working style is informal and high-trust, with multiple touch-points every day.
Result: Your assistant becomes your second brain — but only your brain. The business now depends on real-time collaboration, not replicable logic.
➡️ So as more team members get added, everyone asks the assistant — who asks you. And you secretly make plans to fake your own death.
3. The “Helper” Hiring Pattern
Helpful generalists, trained to hover until you make up your mind.
They are delightful. They are eager. They’re great at everything except mind reading, which is unfortunately the real job description.
They’re not expected to own outcomes — just execute requests. There’s no habit of upward pushback or ownership thinking.
Result: You remain the only strategic node. Team members don’t lead processes; they staff them.
➡️ Growth slows once it outpaces what you can personally micromanage. To absolutely no one’s surprise.
4. The Invisible Success Trap
You were hitting your goals so you assumed everything was working — because what could possibly be wrong if everyone’s busy?
Revenue climbs. Clients cheer. Slack hums. Nobody audits how the work is getting done — only that it is.
Result: Top-line success acts like a smoke machine. It hides the execution cracks until the day something snaps — burnout, turnover, a missed deadline — and everyone is shocked, shocked I say.
➡️ “This is perfectly, perfectly fine”, says the dog, as he takes his sip.
5. The “No Time to Train” Cycle
You would delegate more if you weren’t so busy.
Classic. You need help but have zero bandwidth to onboard.
So delegation happens on the fly, in half sentences, between meetings.
Your new-hire is thrown into to deep end, then evaluated for not swimming well. And you decide, once again, that it’s faster to do it yourself.
Result: Stick a bottleneck on that! You’ve now engineered a business that trips over itself.
➡️ Congratulations. You’ve invented Groundhog Day, but with payroll.
6. The Owner-as-Source-of-Truth Habit
You have strong taste — and a high bar. And the final say on everything from brand voice to font size.
You’re the chief arbiter of quality, nuance and aesthetics — which is great, until your calendar becomes the production queue.
Result: Even your sharpest hires freeze. Nobody knows where their authority ends or yours begins, so they orbit, waiting for approval that’s always a meeting away.
➡️ No one, human or machine, knows what “done” looks like until you bless it. Guess how this works out for you.
Bottom Line Patterns: Perfectly Logical. Totally Unsustainable.
None of these behaviors are character flaws. They are adaptive responses to real pressures:
survival mode
early-stage speed
resource constraints
excellence standards you had to hold alone
These were smart moves. That aged terribly.
The problem? What once made you nimble now makes you fragile.
And there’s no place for AI to plug into — yet!
….To be continued!
Part 3 of this series will map the way out: the four leadership shifts that turn owner-dependent businesses into scalable ones.
Keep saying the things other CEOs are scared to admit! This is gold.