Don’t be the Bottleneck for your own Business Growth!

I came across a picture online that perfectly illustrates a CEO or Founder struggling to let go of control. Not everyone can make the transition that I’m about to describe, but doing so is essential if you want your business to flourish, your team to excel, and everyone to become key contributors to the journey.

Starting and growing a business is a process. Your role as CEO or Founder must evolve as your business progresses through critical stages. Adapting to these changes will give your company the best chance of success, and help you build long-term value that you can eventually realise.

In the startup phase, you (or your co-founders) are typically doing everything and maintaining tight control. You’re validating your business model, ensuring there’s a market for your product or service, and refining it based on customer feedback to achieve the right product-market fit. You’re also working with suppliers to ensure you have a unique offering, managing purchasing volumes, pricing, and lead times – or perhaps you’re operating a drop-shipping model where the manufacturer delivers directly to customers. At the same time, you’re likely dedicating hours to developing a business plan, figuring out how much you need to sell, at what price and margin, to achieve the profit and return on investment you’re aiming for.

Once you’re confident the business is ready, you launch and enter the early growth phase. You learn from those initial sales and refine based on customer feedback, but at this stage, a key question arises: how would you handle rapid growth if your business suddenly took off?

I learned this lesson during one of my early ventures, Regency Food Services, which eventually became the model for Bidfood in Australia when we successfully sold the business to them in 1999. I was the CEO holding the business back by trying to control everything. We recognised that we needed to stay ahead of the emerging quality standards in the industry, so we embarked on the process of obtaining the ISO 9001 Quality Management System certification. This required us to document procedures, processes, and job descriptions for everything we did in the business – essentially creating a handbook for how the company operated.

ISO certification is externally accredited and audited, but today there are plenty of software platforms available to create your own internal Quality Management System (QMS). Importantly, don’t feel you have to write every job description or procedure yourself – the best people to do this are the ones doing the work. Use templates and collaborate with your team to get it done efficiently.

In my early twenties, as I was still learning what it meant to be an entrepreneur, I had a major realisation: I no longer needed to personally respond to every query from staff about what to do or how to do it. Instead, I could point them to the procedure they had helped write and encourage them to follow it. If something new came up, they could add it to the procedure.

This freed up so much time. The queue of people outside my office dwindled, we gained consistency across the business, and most importantly, we reclaimed our time to focus on the areas where my brother and I added the most value. We were able to build a strong leadership team and delegate authority to them, allowing them to build their own teams. What we learned was this: you cannot grow a business until you learn how to let go, establish systems, and delegate authority. In doing so, you create a "Platform for Growth."

With my last business, ZEN Energy, we implemented these lessons from day one. It was crucial, as we experienced rapid growth – from $1 million to $5 million, then to $20 million, and eventually to $70 million. It was extraordinary, but we maintained consistency throughout the business, which is ultimately the key to success.

So, don’t become the bottleneck to growth. Instead, build a platform for growth. By doing this, you create a business where the value lies in the system, not in you. This will allow any future acquirer to continue building on the value you’ve created.