Your Business Can’t Scale While You Email

You may have heard me speaking of this before, but a few years ago, I hit a wall. 

It was summer of 2018. We had been in Portugal for two years, the World Cup was on, there was glorious weather and we had family staying with us.  Everyone, but one, was in the pool and keeping an eye on the Portugal v Iran match.  The one person who wasn’t was me.  I was at my desk, where I had been since 6am, clearing work that had built up and was growing rather than shrinking.  The family visit passed, I barely saw them, and I had to accept that the wall I had hit, meant I had to take a long hard look at what I did next.

At that stage every email, every invoice, every piece or work, every client decision ran through me. I told myself it was about maintaining quality. Really, it was a terrible combination of control and fear of delegation.

Every day I’d wake up earlier and earlier, log on before breakfast, and finish late at night feeling drained and guilty: drained because I couldn’t keep up, guilty because I was still letting things slip and making my family suffer. My head was always in the business, even when I was trying to switch off.

The hard truth? I had built the business in a manner that would deliver more freedom to move country and live a different less pressured life than when I was employed. Instead, it had ironically become my cage and I was imprisoned without any chance of parole. The truth was simple: I wasn’t leading a business at all; I was managing my own limits.

Serena and Starbucks

Even elite performers fall into the same trap.

Serena Williams, arguably the greatest female tennis player of all time. After dominating her sport for years, she also tried to be everything at once: supreme athlete, living brand, investor, entrepreneur, mother. She had extraordinary and admirable drive, but even she admitted that juggling all those roles left her completely exhausted. “I’m super hands-on, and that’s both my greatest strength and my biggest flaw”  (from a Vogue interview).

Ditto for Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO I spoke about a few weeks ago regarding the impact he had when he returned in 2008 to rescue the company.  He did it by diving into every detail from store design to product decisions to team training. It saved Starbucks, but it burned him out personally. In his book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, he admits the company couldn’t grow again until he rebuilt a leadership team and stepped back.

Different worlds maybe, but the same lesson I learnt: you simply cannot scale control.

Why This Happens

All founders start by doing everything out of necessity. There simply is no-one else and, at first, everything needs doing. But, this becomes a bad habit, and the habits that once kept you alive eventually start to hold you back:

• You start to equate control with care: letting go feels like lowering standards.
• You find reassurance in being busy even when it’s reactive, not productive.
• You fear delegation means dilution, when in truth, it’s multiplication.

When every decision routes through you, you become both the safety net and the ceiling.

The Impact

Financial:

• Growth slows because all approvals and ideas depend on you.
• Profit suffers because founder time isn’t scalable.
• Opportunities die in the queue, waiting for your attention.

Personal:

• Decision fatigue leads to burnout.
• Creativity declines as your brain ends up almost permanently stuck in admin mode.
• Relationships outside work suffer as you’re present, but not available.

The hardest truth: your business won’t be the size it is because of market conditions.  It’ll be smaller than it should be because of YOU and YOUR dependence.

The CFO Lens

Identify the Bottlenecks

List every task that stops in your business without you. Then mark which ones actually require your expertise and experience.  Delegate everything else,  That is why I now rely on so much from my Executive Assistant for example.

Delegate with Clarity

People don’t fail because they can’t do the job, they fail because the goal was too fuzzy. Define what your good looks like so others have a possibility of meeting your standards, or indeed exceeding them. Don’t write them off without supporting them.

Create Visibility, Not Dependency

Use dashboards and processes to monitor results, but not to meddle and micromanage.

Teach How You Think

Explain your reasoning, not just your conclusion. That’s how you enable replication of your judgment and understanding in situations.

Redefine Leadership

The goal is not to do more. It’s to build a business that performs well without you, leveraging freedom elsewhere in your life.

Closing Thought

“When you’re building a company, you can’t hold on too tightly. You have to trust the people you hire to carry your vision forward.” Howard Schultz

Letting go isn’t a weakness. It’s a strong sign of leadership.

Serena Williams learned that to keep winning, she had to stop playing every match in her life.  Howard Schultz learned Starbucks could only grow when he trusted others to lead.  I learned that freedom doesn’t come from control, it comes from saying yes to the right things only and placing trust in my team.

The day you stop being the busiest person in your business isn’t when you lose control.  It’s the day you finally start leading and building again.

PS: Next week, we’ll shift from personal capacity to financial resilience — how to decide how much cash buffer your business really needs to get a good night of sleep through uncertainty.