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In Part 1 of this series, Adam Roy introduced the distinction between working in your business and working on it. The plateau. The signals that something needs to change.
Part 2 is the harder conversation, because the reason most business owners never make the shift is not a lack of knowledge about what working on the business means, but something more personal. What is usually holding the business back is the business owner.
Most business owners know something needs to change. What stops them is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of trust.
Business owners who are stuck often describe the same experience of working at maximum capacity. They are the first one in and the last one out, involved in every significant decision, every client interaction, every problem that needs solving.
But the business isn't growing.
The instinct is usually to work harder, take on more and try to push through, but the ceiling a business hits when the owner becomes the central point of everything is not a problem that is solved by more effort. It's a structural problem and it has a structural solution.
The brick wall arrives before most business owners see it coming. The routines that once worked stop working. The way the business operated when it had three clients does not scale to thirty. But the habits formed in the early days are hard to break, and breaking them requires an acknowledgement that is uncomfortable for most people.
The business is not the problem. The way the owner is running it is.
The routine problem
Running a business creates powerful habits. The way decisions are made, how clients are handled, and how problems are solved: these patterns form quickly and feel safe. Disrupting them feels risky even when the status quo is clearly not working.
Business owners who are stuck in this pattern often know something needs to change but struggle to identify what specifically needs to change. They keep asking how when the real question is what. What would the business look like if I were not doing this? What would need to be true for me to step back from this?
The trust problem
The second and more common reason business owners stall is trust. Specifically, the difficulty of trusting a team to handle things the owner has always handled personally. This is where most delegation conversations break down. The business owner has a team that is capable. They know the team is capable, but handing over the things they have always controlled feels like losing something rather than gaining something.
The language in that last paragraph is worth pondering on. The growth of the business is limited to how much the owner can handle. Not how good the team is, how good the product or service is, or how strong the market opportunity is. The ceiling is the owner's capacity and willingness to let go.
One of the most clarifying points in this conversation with Adam is the observation that the business stagnates as much as the owner does. They are not separate problems.
When the business owner is the central point of everything, the team around them cannot develop. They cannot take on more responsibility because the responsibility never gets passed to them. They can't solve problems independently because the expectation is that is the owner's job. The whole organisation is held at the level of what the owner is willing to delegate.
The business stops growing because the owner stops growing, and until the owner makes the shift, the business cannot make it either.
The good news is that the bottleneck is not a permanent feature of the business. It's a mindset that can change.
The shift is a specific realisation: the business owner does not need to be the business. The business can function, make decisions, serve clients, and grow without the owner being the central point of every action.
Growth naturally occurs. The business does not need to be forced to grow once the owner stops being the ceiling. The growth that was being suppressed by the bottleneck happens on its own.
The practical path from here is the same for almost every business owner who has gone through this transition: reaching out, asking the right questions, getting the right support around them, and being held accountable for making the changes they say they want to make.
We recommend The E-Myth by Michael Gerber as the book that articulates this transition most clearly. If the pattern described in this article sounds familiar, it is worth a read.
Part 3 of this series will cover what the business looks like once the shift is made: the process-driven, self-sustaining business that can eventually run without the owner, and what changes in the relationship with your accountant when you get there.
Recognising that you are the bottleneck in your own business is not a comfortable realisation. It is, however, a very useful one. It means the thing that is holding the business back is also within your control to change.
If the patterns described here are familiar, the first step is a conversation. We work with business owners at exactly this point of transition, and we would be glad to help.
Get in touch: carthyaccountants.co.uk/contact
