Judy bakes amazing cakes but her business stops growing because she's doing everything: baking, hiring, marketing, taxes, invoicing. When the owner becomes the bottleneck, the business caps out. Nate Tilley says you have to delegate or teach others if you actually want to scale.
Have you ever heard about the cake baker's dilemma? Okay, so this is when you have Judy, who's really good at baking cakes, and everybody in her friends and family says, judy, you're so good at baking cakes, I think you should start a cake factory. Okay, so Judy starts a cake factory. She starts baking cakes, and all of a sudden she's got all these customers coming in because everybody loves her cakes. Her business is booming. Now, Judy is stressed as ever, because literally, she's here, she's making cakes, she's making cakes. But now she's got to worry about staffing, she's got to worry about marketing, she's got to worry about tax, she's got to worry about invoices, she's got to worry about software, she's got to worry about all these things that a business owner has to worry about. And what happens is the business will usually cap out at the capacity of the owner. So a lot of businesses struggle to grow simply because the owner and the founder becomes the bottleneck because they don't know how to remove themselves from the baking cake process. Now, if Judy's able to teach somebody how to bake cakes just like her and she can handle that from an administrative and executive standpoint and run her organization, whole business can boom. However, a lot of business owners just got in because they love baking cakes. So if you're a business owner and you feel like you're stuck at a plateau and you've tried things and it hasn't worked, I challenge you to look at trying something different if you're actually trying to grow, okay?
