I spent 4 years as the bottleneck in my own business.
I called it leadership.
It wasn’t.
In 1984, a physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt published a book that changed how the world thinks about systems.
His core insight was simple:
– Every system has one constraint.
– One point where everything slows down.
– One hiker setting the pace for the entire trail.
He called it the bottleneck.
Here’s what no one tells you about founder-led businesses:
Most of the time, the bottleneck isn’t a process.
It’s the person at the top.
I was that person.
My business couldn’t move faster than I could carry it.
My capacity was the ceiling.
My comfort was the constraint.
Being needed felt like being valuable.
It wasn’t.
It was expensive.
I call it the Bottleneck Tax.
You pay it in slow decisions.
In stalled growth.
In the next version of your business that never gets built.
On the weekends that disappear because the machine can’t run without you.
The fix isn’t working harder.
It’s being willing to become less necessary.
The most valuable thing I ever did for my business was make myself less essential to it.
That took 4 years to figure out.
Removing yourself as the bottleneck is how you buy back your time. Time is one of five dimensions I write about every week.
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Where are you still the bottleneck and what’s it actually costing you?
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