Founder Bottleneck

Forty hours a week at $200/h. That's $416k a year, and only if you never take a day off. Jenna runs a 1:1 coaching practice: 25 sessions a week at $200 each. That's her ceiling. More demand just means a longer waitlist—demand and ideas don't move the number; her hours do. When you're the only one who can deliver the work, sign the client, or make the call, growth has a hard ceiling. You can't scale a ceiling.

What breaks

Hiring without systems. Marcus hired an ops manager to "take things off his plate." He had no runbook—no written process for how decisions got made or how work flowed. Six months later he was spending 10 hours a week in syncs and Slack, and only 2 in the weekly review he'd planned. The ops person was waiting for decisions he'd never written down; he was re-explaining the same things every week. Build repeatable processes first, then add people. Get documentation and SOPs in place before you hire, or you'll spend more time explaining than doing—and quality will slip.

Delegating the wrong things. Priya delegated her "easy" client calls to an associate but kept the proposal and the close. The associate had no script; clients got inconsistent messages. She should have started with low-value, high-repeat tasks: calendar, proposal drafts, invoicing, follow-ups. Keep strategy, key relationships, and the close until you've written down how you do them. The goal is to free the hours that multiply, not to empty your calendar tomorrow. Delegate the work that repeats; keep only you can do until you've captured how you do it.

Pretending the ceiling isn't there. David filled every slot for 18 months. Revenue went from $15k to $28k/month. Then he got sick for two weeks. Revenue dropped to zero—no systems, no one else who could deliver. He came back and capped at 50 hours; revenue flatlined. The bottleneck doesn't disappear because you work harder. It shifts when you change what you do (strategy, key relationships, visibility) and what others do (delivery, ops, follow-up).

What good looks like

First bottleneck is usually the one that eats the most of your week. For many domain experts that's delivery: you're in 18 client sessions a week. After productization and delegation, you're in 6—the key relationships and sign-offs—and an associate runs 12. You step in for the high-leverage moment (sign-off, key relationship, positioning call). Second is often operations: invoicing, scheduling, client comms. One VA with a simple runbook for those three things can clear 10–12 hours. Workflow automation and one part-time or fractional hire is enough to start. Third is usually "only I can sell this"—which means you haven't documented how you sell. Once you have a scope document, a clear offer, and a discovery script, someone else can run the first conversation and you do the close.

Find the one thing

Last week you spent 8 hours on invoicing and follow-ups. If that ran without you, you'd have 8 hours for the next bottleneck or for sales. That's your first bottleneck to break. Use constraint theory: find it, fix it, then find the next one. No need to fix everything at once. If you free 10 hours and spend 2 of them on the next fix, you're still 8 hours ahead—and the next one gets easier because you're not exhausted.

Where to go next