Why everything still runs through you
I thought I was too busy. Turns out I built it that way.
The first time I tried to take a real vacation, I answered emails from a beach chair while my family swam. Someone needed a decision. Then someone else needed a different one. By the third day I stopped pretending and just kept my phone in my lap.
I told myself it was a season. Things were busy. Once we got through the busy stretch I’d be able to step back. The busy stretch never ended, because there was always another decision waiting, and every one of them came to me.
For years I thought I had a time problem. Not enough hours in the day, a to-do list that grew back faster than I could clear it. So I did what you do with a time problem. I woke up earlier and got more efficient. None of it touched the actual thing, because the actual thing was never time.
Lightbulb moment for me: the business wasn’t built to run without me. It was built so that everything had to come back to me. I was the only place the answers lived. Pricing questions, scheduling conflicts, the weird customer situation nobody had seen before and all of it routed to my inbox, because I’d never built anywhere else for it to go.
You can’t out-work that. More hours just means you’re the bottleneck for longer.
I tried hiring, the way everyone tells you to. Outsource! Delegate! It didn’t fix it, and for a while I decided that meant the person wasn’t good enough, or that nobody cares about your business the way you do. What actually happened is I handed someone a job with no system underneath it. They still had to come to me, because I was still the only one who knew how things were supposed to go. I’d added a person and kept the bottleneck.
The fix wasn’t a person. It was building the thing so decisions could happen without me in the loop and so the answers lived somewhere other than my head, and my team had what they needed to make the call themselves, even when they made it a little differently than I would have.
None of this is mine, by the way. I pulled it from EOS, from Strategic Coach, from a stack of business books with broken spines. What I did was cut. Most of those systems are built for companies ten times the size of mine, and following them whole would have buried me worse than the problem did. So I kept the few parts that actually moved things and threw out the rest. That’s the whole method. Take what works, lose the overkill.
These days my husband and I own a handful of companies, and we’re not the operators in any of them. The teams run them. We’re there for the big calls and the money decisions, and the rest happens without us. I can take the call about my mom’s doctor without the day falling apart.
So if you’re reading this answering texts on your day off, I don’t think you have a time problem either. I think everything still runs through you, and no amount of waking up earlier is going to change that. The setup is fixable. What it takes isn’t doing more, though, it’s building the thing so it stops needing you for every small decision.
I’m going to start sharing the actual fixes I implemented here in the hopes they make as big of a difference for you as they did for me. The first one’s super simple. More on that soon.