Owner dependency
“If I take a week off, the phone doesn’t stop.”
If every important decision, customer issue, sale and approval eventually lands on your desk, the business has a ceiling, and so does your life. Owners who have built teams that run without them can tell you what they had to stop doing to get there. The room will also notice, kindly, when you say you want to delegate and then keep pulling the work back.
You might recognize this if…
- Vacations are working trips.
- Your team waits for your approval on routine decisions.
- Key customers expect to deal with you personally.
- You’re the only one who knows how certain things work.
Questions the room might ask you
- Which decisions could someone else make with clear guardrails?
- What would break if you were gone for two weeks?
- Which customer relationships need to be shared?
- What are you holding onto because you enjoy it, and what because you don’t trust anyone else with it yet?
What happens when you bring owner dependency to the room.
You put it on the table
You lay out the situation in your own words, with the numbers and history that matter. Ten or so owners give it their full attention.
Questions before advice
The room asks questions like the ones above until everyone, including you, understands the real issue. Often that’s where the breakthrough happens.
Experience, not opinions
Owners who have faced something similar share what they did and what they would do differently. No competitors sit at the table, so nobody holds back.
You make the call
The group doesn’t run your company. You decide what to do, with a lot more perspective than you walked in with.
Say it out loud
You name your next step before you leave. Next month, the room asks how it went.
One responsibility to hand off, and a plan for making sure it sticks.
Want a head start before the call? Take the Operating Level Scorecard →
Related conversations
Prefer to work on owner dependency privately instead of in a group? I also do this one-on-one (opens JeffreyRands.com in a new tab).