If You’re Still the Bottleneck After Hiring Help, Read This

I know a founder who handed off her inbox, her calendar, and her team check-ins and expected to get her time back.

She got some of it. But every day, there were still people hounding her for answers. Customers with questions about their project. Team members looking for direction.

She was frustrated. She’d hired help, delegated, and still felt like the founder bottleneck.

Most founder bottlenecks I’ve seen don’t exist at the task level. They exist at the strategic decision level.

If a CEO wants to keep the final say in decisions, but doesn’t want the whole business to flow through them, delegation needs to be structured differently than if they just want some tasks off their plate.

Hire the Right Help: VA vs. OBM vs. Director of Operations

There are four kinds of hires a founder can turn to for help with the day-to-day operation of their business. These roles are not interchangeable, and frustration bubbles up when you hire the wrong one for the outcome you want.

You can delegate parts of your operation to a VA, EA, OBM, or director of operations.

• VA (Virtual Assistant): A VA takes defined tasks like scheduling and inbox management off your plate. You need to provide direction for anything that comes up outside their assigned tasks.

• EA (Executive Assistant): An EA has additional problem-solving skills.You can give them your priorities and desired outcomes and empower them to get things done. They can clear your way and keep you on track, but can’t make the kind of decisions that shape the business.

• OBM (Online Business Manager): An OBM directs day-to-day projects. They can make routine decisions in line with your business strategy. You need to provide strategic direction and make the final call on major decisions.

• Director of Operations: A director of operations can run the business as your proxy, setting priorities, structuring workflows, and handling situations as they come up. They can make some strategic decisions, but only if you’ve given them enough information and authority.

Who you hire and how you train them determines what they take off your plate. If you hire the right person but don’t give them the tools to do the job, they can’t give you the best outcome.

The founder I mentioned in the beginning hired the right person to manage all her communications. But she didn’t give that person enough information. As long as the answers her customers and team needed were only in her head, she had to stay in the loop.

KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR: This video breaks down what great VA support actually looks like so you can hire with confidence

Why You’re Still the Bottleneck After Hiring Help

If you’ve hired help and you still feel like you’re the one doing everything, the problem might not be what you’ve delegated. It might be how the delegation is structured.

If you’re the only one who knows how things work, you’re the only one who can answer questions and make decisions.

If you want your VA to sort your emails by importance, you need to document what signals importance.

If you want your director of operations to manage discipline, you need to document when and what level of discipline is appropriate.

Documentation comes before delegation. Always. Otherwise you’re asking people to guess what you want, with consequences if they guess wrong.

Responsibility needs to come with authority. Once you’ve delegated responsibility for a part of your operation, you need to detach from it. Lots of founders make their own jobs harder by hiring people to help them, then refusing to give up control of the tasks.

How to Clear the Bottleneck and Keep Control

If your goal is to be a fully hands-off founder, hire people you trust, delegate everything, and let it all go.

Most small business owners don’t want that. They want to keep control of what they’ve built and expand on it. They just don’t want everything to rely on them.

Those are the founders I work with. You can delegate your operation and still be a hands-on CEO. What you need is a system that does three things: protect your time from low-level decisions that don’t need your oversight; bring you decisions that need your attention in a timely manner; create a dedicated time for you to address those questions so they don’t compete with everything else in your day.

I had a client who felt like she was being pulled in a million directions. Her team communicated on Slack, and every ping distracted her from what she was doing and sent her on a spiral of busy work.

We developed a daily rhythm to give her team the direction they needed without her constant input. She briefs her EA on each day’s priorities, then the team coordinates in the background to keep things running while the founder focuses on serving clients and making sales. At the end of the day, she catches up on messages she missed, and the entire team meets once a week.

She didn’t need more people or a productivity tool or a fancy blueprint. All she needed was a system designed to fit how she thinks and how she works.

A system that’s good for the founder is good for the business. Not only is she calmer and happier, the focused time we freed up supercharged her sales ability, and the business is bringing in more money.

Exercise: Sort What You Can Delegate

If you’ve tried delegation and still feel like the bottleneck, figure out which decisions are taking up your time.

First, go through all the channels people use to reach you and make a list of all the questions people brought to you last week.

Mark the ones only you could have answered. These are the ones that need CEO-level authority or your particular expertise. Dedicate a specific time on your calendar each day to handle these.

In a different color, mark the questions you’ve answered before. If the same question keeps coming up, document the answer and let the team know where to find it.

The rest of the questions didn’t need to hit your inbox in the first place. Set the criteria so your team knows what they can handle without your input and delegate.

Structure Your System to Let You Focus on Being the CEO

The goal of delegation isn’t to stop making decisions. It’s to stop tying up your day on decisions that don’t need you.

Once you’ve figured out what you can delegate, document everything a person would need to know to step in and do that task. Then hire the appropriate role to help you.

If the tasks are getting done, but the business still doesn’t move without you, you might be ready to bring on an OBM or a director of operations. They can step into the managerial role to free up your time. It’s the middle step between executing on your own and hiring a full-time executive team.

If you’re frustrated and don’t know where to begin, book a call. We’ll talk about what’s happening in your business and I’ll recommend your next steps.