August 05, 2025

The Bottleneck Is You - How Founders Accidentally Break Their Own Businesses

10 minutes

Most businesses don’t stall because of bad strategy, they stall because the founder becomes the bottleneck. In this episode of 10 Minute Masterclass, Trey Sheneman uncovers the four common ways founders accidentally slow down their own growth and shares simple frameworks to help you delegate, prioritize, and free your team to scale beyond you.

Key Takeaways

Founders often become the lid on their own business – the good news? You can fix it.

The 4 founder bottlenecks:

Decision Bottleneck – Nothing moves without your approval. Solve with decision rights and a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed).

Communication Bottleneck – You’re the go between for every conversation. Solve with meeting rhythms, scorecards, and project management tools like Asana or ClickUp.

Task Bottleneck – You say, “They won’t do it like I will.” Solve with buyback rate thinking (focus on $1,000/hr tasks only) and strategic delegation.

Priority Bottleneck – You’re the only one who knows what’s important. Solve by teaching your team to prioritize using OKRs, Rocks, and non-fatal decision making opportunities.

Growth past $2–3M requires shifting from founder-led to systems-led leadership.

The founder’s real job? Vision, strategy, and building leaders – not doing all the work.

Timestamped Highlights

[00:00] – Most businesses stall because of founder bottlenecks, not bad strategy.

[01:30] – The silent killer of scale: being a founder-led business past $3M.

[03:00] – Bottleneck #1: Decision overload. Install decision rights.

[04:00] – Bottleneck #2: Communication traffic jams. Fix your rhythms and tools.

[06:00] – Bottleneck #3: Founder as task martyr. Calculate your buyback rate.

[08:00] – Bottleneck #4: Priority hoarding. Teach your team to decide and own goals.

[10:00] – Weekly challenge: Audit yourself – where are you the bottleneck?

Sponsor: Live Well Vacation Club LiveWellMembership.com

Want to work with Trey and his Team? Then go to Herald: 🔗 Herald – https://www.weareherald.co/ Want to connect with Trey for a follow up question?

Find him on LinkedIn: 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/treyshen/

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By Trey Sheneman

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