Every business eventually reaches a point where growth slows. More customers are coming in, employees are busier than ever, and everyone feels like they’re working harder, but somehow the business isn’t moving faster. 

When that happens, it’s tempting to blame the most obvious problem: “We need another employee,” “Our software is outdated,” or “Sales just need to work harder.”  Some of those might be true.  

But bottlenecks rarely have a single cause. They usually fall into one of four categories. 

People Bottlenecks

This is the most common, but it’s often the hardest to recognize and can be a difficult one to change. Maybe it’s that employee who’s been there forever and knows everything, or maybe it’s that you, the owner, feel like all or most decisions need to go through you. You are distracted by the dozen emails per week involving permissions, decisions, and approvals of sometimes small, mundane details. Or maybe you have a more difficult problem: you hired that one employee or gave an old one new responsibilities….and it’s not working out well.  You are involved too much in their day-to-day, and it seems like their training / onboarding is taking forever. 

This means you’re over reliant on individuals instead of systems.  

Some warning signs: 

  • Vacations are stressful.  
  • Sick days create chaos.  
  • Employees say, “Ask Jim.”  
  • The owner can’t take time off.  

Solutions:  

Solutions to the people-bottleneck revolve around 3 things: 

  • Build documented processes 
  • Cross-train employees, OR at least cross-train on critical, day-to-day operations that always go through that one guy. 
  • Delegate decision-making where appropriate. As much as possible, get decision-making out of your hands. Or, to phrase it better, make it so that only the most fundamental, strategic decisions are taking up your time. You know that’s an aspirational goal more than an immediately achievable one, but the closer you can get to that, the closer you are to a business that operates day-to-day without you….which is what you want. 

Process Bottlenecks

The other major significant bottleneck is the process bottleneck.  The situations for this vary widely but usually fall into one of two categories. Either this process is a modestly complex one that your team performs many times per day or week, OR this is one of those complex processes that is vital to your business even if performed less routinely. For a service business, maybe it looks like a fairly common fix, but one which your teams perform differently. Maybe your other employees keep calling that one guy over and over to see how he completed this task.  

Warning signs: 

  • Constant firefighting, hiccups, or delays for the same operation or procedure 
  • Frequent “workarounds” OR everyone just calls Jim to do it. 
  • Everyone has their own way of doing things.  
  • Tasks fall through the cracks.  

Solution:  

As we’ve said before, establishing clear, effective processes that address the bulk of what you do day-to-day (as much as possible, anyway) goes a long way in freeing up your time, making operations smoother, and preventing constant snags or firefighting.  

Technology Bottlenecks

Obviously, in our business, we see this all the time.  Many times it’s the proverbial frog in the boiling pot of water – over time, hardware and networks get slower and more clunky until they are genuine problems.  The typical reaction here is to go out to Big Tech Box Store and buy a piece of hardware off the shelf, OR, in some cases to get Google or ChatGPT’s help to buy a piece of hardware that may or may not make sense in your network. Or, that seemingly tech-savvy gets things working again after an issue arises, only you to find out later that temporary workaround created massive complexities in your network (we see this ALL THE TIME). 

Warning signs: 

  • Employees complain about slow computers or network. 
  • Internet outages, network failures, or hardware /software hiccups halt productivity.  
  • Security requirements make simple tasks difficult. 
  • Multiple systems store the same information. 
  • People invent manual workarounds.  

Solution:  

The solution here is simply that you need the right hardware which is robust and appropriate to your situation.  You need cybersecurity and software maintenance plans / awareness.  You need a clean, effective network rather than a tangled collection of workarounds.  If you can’t do that yourself or don’t have the time, you need an IT Managed Service Provider to do it for you. 

Decision Bottlenecks

This goes back to the first bottleneck, but deserves to be mentioned by itself.  Many growing businesses unknowingly create these bottlenecks where everything requires approval. Every customer issue goes to the owner. Every purchase needs a meeting. Every exception becomes a discussion. Eventually, leaders spend their entire day answering questions instead of leading the business. 

Ironically, the company becomes less agile as it grows. 

Warning signs: 

  • Employees wait for permission.  
  • Managers become overwhelmed.  
  • Decisions take days instead of hours.  
  • Leadership works “in” the business instead of “on” it.  

Solution:  

Business owners need to plan and execute delegating decisions.  This is obviously easier said than done, and as we said above, it is an aspirational goal.  Ideally, you the business owner need to be making decisions only on the biggest, most important, strategic decisions.  Day-to-day decisions should be off your place.  That means defining who’s in charge of what, documenting policies and procedures, and encouraging employees to make routine decisions.  It’s not realistic for your average SMB owner to be like Jeff Bezos, making decisions only about the most vital decisions regarding the future of his company.  But it is realistic for you to spend more of your time on those decisions rather than mundane ones which don’t require your experience and expertise. 

Closing

As businesses grow, complexity grows with them. New employees, new customers, new software, and new responsibilities all introduce opportunities for work to slow down. The businesses that scale successfully aren’t necessarily the ones with the most people or the newest technology.  Rather, they’re the ones that identify bottlenecks early and address them before they become habits.