Mike Andes argues that owners who insist on having all the answers become a bottleneck. When every decision funnels through one person, companies stall around 8-12 employees and $1-1.5M revenue. Growth requires changing structure, not just working harder.
You think that having all the answers makes you the boss. It actually makes you the bottleneck to your business's growth. You built an octopus business. Every arm leads back to the head. And if you were to get whacked, everything falls apart. Admin comes back to you, operations come back to you, sales come back to you. And you're like, oh, no, I delegated. I have an estimator, I have an office manager. But every time something wrong happens, every time a customer complains, every time a job goes off the rails, they come back to you looking for answers. That's why so many home service business owners stall out at about 812 employees and around 1 million to $1.5 million in annual revenue, because everyone's reporting back to them. And even in the military, they only allow six to eight people many times to report to one general manager or to one leader. And in this case, when it comes to your business, if you have 10, 12, 13 employees, you can juggle that by working 14, 16, 18 hour days. But eventually it catches up with you when you start trying to grow past that simply because you can't work enough hours to manage effectively, when every single person reports back to you.
