The Un-Bottleneck Playbook: How Founders Create Leverage Without Losing Control
Building a team can be... painful.
And I don’t mean because the people part of business is usually the trickiest. I mean because building a team is full of stops and starts…and if you’re anything like me, stops and starts are just the absolute worst.
Yesterday I told the story of how I actually bolt in the other direction when I anticipate an incoming hallway hug from my husband in the middle of the work day. Why? I like hugs, but I hate being stopped or slowed down. It hurts, in my bones!
Which is why the first mindset shift I want to talk about when it comes to un-bottlenecking yourself is this:
Embrace the stops and starts. No matter how painful they feel.
The first time I experienced what it really meant to create leverage through delegation, I wasn’t trying to “build a team” or “scale a company”—I was just trying to get 5 or 10 hours a week of my life back.
This was in my Retro Sno era, my first business baby, the shaved ice shop I started with my neighbor in 2012. My first foray, as a 27-year old, into building a brand and yes, building a team. The real-world MBA I earned through (actual) blood, sweat, and tears.
Back then, a year or so into this business, there was no exit strategy, no pitch deck, no…plan. All I wanted was for this thing to work, but also to have some semblance of my life back.
I wanted to not end one work day just to immediately begin a new one. At the time, I’d wrap up a full day of events (my record was 17 hours straight on the truck), then spend the evening responding to emails, making the staff schedule, updating the flavor of the week on the website, and more.
The all-consuming pace was good and necessary for a season—but there came a time when that season needed to end.
The frontline team was in a good place. We had Team Members, and we had Team Leads. But when it came to back office stuff, I didn’t have a full-time role to hire for—or even a clean part-time one. All I had was:
An inbox that needed more attention than I could give it
A team schedule that wouldn’t build itself
Flavors of the week to promote
There was no tidy box for these random tasks keeping me behind my laptop until 9pm. There was no bow to put on a neat little job description.
These tasks only took an hour or two a day. But they lived rent-free in my head all the time.
And I didn’t know what to do that wasn’t
Hiring someone the business couldn’t afford
Continuing to work two full-time jobs—thus staying my business's bottleneck forever
I didn’t know the “right” choice, so I made “a” choice. I wanted anything but #2.
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I started by asking one of the team members who was full time on the truck to use the first hour of her shift for admin work. There were a few repeatable tasks I thought I could create rules and best practices around. Low judgment calls without much guesswork, stuff that just needed somebody’s time and attention.
In some ways it worked, and in other ways it didn’t. It worked because it was getting done, payroll didn’t change, and I wasn’t the one doing it.
It didn’t work because while the work was “off my plate,” it still wasn’t being executed in the way I really needed. After that first hour of admin work, this team member was then busy on the truck for the rest of the day. So we were still missing sales opportunities because we weren’t responding to emails fast enough.
But here’s the magic. In the time it took me to discover what “didn’t work,” I’d used my extra time and headspace to set rules and best practices in a new area. Another unlock.
The new area was ordering and inventory. So when I went back to revisit the admin issue, I could think about it in an entirely different way. Now I had enough on the "new plate"—admin, ordering, inventory—to justify a 15–20 hour/week role. It was finally enough work (and structure) to find someone good and give them something stable and clear.
One small step for me, one giant step forward for the business.
But progress has a way of creating new problems.
The new structure was a step in the right direction, but with it came a different set of issues: the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.
Splitting the roles made sense on paper, but in practice we realized we didn’t have any processes in place to make sure the right information got to the right people at the right times. We had no communication structure (yet) to keep the wheels on (pun intended).
Results included orders placed without enough cherry syrup, shift swaps that led to no shows, and invoices going out way too late.
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Since then, I’ve watched this exact struggle play out with client after client (especially when there's one team in “the field” and another in the office).
Here’s what I’ve learned:
There’s no perfect way to un-bottleneck yourself. No clean handoff. No secret formula.
Just a series of small steps—and a few missteps—that help you unlock a little time, again and again. Those little chunks of time? They stack, and they stack, and they stack. They add up to real capacity, real leverage, and real freedom.
You’ll ask questions like:
Who should own this?
When should they do it?
Will it get done the way I do it?
And the answer will often be: Who knows? Just start somewhere. Pick something, and when you find a better way, change it then.
The real shift is understanding that at this stage, un-bottlenecking yourself is not about perfection, it’s about iteration. You’ll likely try three versions that don’t work before you land on the one that does.
But you’ll never get there if you don’t start somewhere.
In 2 weeks I’ll be talking about what I’ve learned from my second business about un-bottlenecking myself, something I didn’t have the opportunity to learn way back in 2012: Leveraging fractional expertise. Have it delivered to your email inbox by signing up at https://www.untangleyourbiz.com/newsletter.
