The short version: Am I the bottleneck in my business? Often — though not in the way that question usually gets thrown around. It's rarely because you're lazy or incapable. It's that when the same problem keeps returning through different employees, different processes, and different circumstances, the pattern eventually points back to the leader. And the decision you keep not making is usually touching something in you that you'd rather not look at. That avoidance never shows up as a line item, but you pay for it every week — in stalled revenue, frustrated employees, and decisions that land too late to matter. The work isn't to try harder. It's to see what you've been busy not seeing.
He had a whiteboard's worth of reasons the project was stalled, and every single one of them was true. His integrator was out for twelve weeks after a car accident. A key hire fell through. The market got weird. He laid it all out for me, clean and organized, the way a smart founder does when he's quietly hoping the person across the table will nod and agree that this one isn't on him.
I didn't nod. But I also didn't tell him his reasons were excuses, because they weren't. The integrator really was gone. The hire really did fall apart. The market really did shift. Here's what I've learned, though, both from my own years in the CEO seat and from sitting across from a lot of founders since: all of that can be completely true, and you can still be the one thing standing between your business and what happens next. So I asked him the only question that actually moves anything. "That may all be true. What are you going to do about it?"
Fault is not the same as responsibility
This distinction matters more than almost anything else I coach. A customer can leave. An employee can resign with no warning. The market can collapse. A competitor can make a stupid pricing decision that drags you into it. None of that is necessarily your fault. But the moment it happens, it becomes your responsibility — because you're the one who has to decide what the business does next.
Fault looks backward and argues about who's to blame. Responsibility looks forward and asks what you own from here. Most stuck entrepreneurs are pouring enormous energy into the first question when the only one that changes anything is the second. You can have zero control over what happened and one hundred percent ownership of your response. That's not a burden. It's the door out.
And to be clear, sometimes the bottleneck genuinely isn't you. Sometimes it's capital, regulation, a supply chain, or demand that just isn't there yet — real constraints that no amount of leadership grit dissolves overnight. I have no interest in the version of entrepreneurship that tells you to work harder and stop whining. But when I see the same problem showing up again and again, through different employees, different systems, and different circumstances, I eventually stop looking at the circumstances and start looking at the leader. A one-time problem is an event. A recurring pattern deserves a mirror.
The Avoid-Dance
Here's what being the bottleneck actually looks like from the inside, and it's almost never sitting on the couch watching Netflix. Successful entrepreneurs are far too clever for obvious procrastination. Their avoidance looks productive. You reorganize the CRM. You rewrite the deck for the fourth time. You research another acquisition, book another conference, read another business book, build another spreadsheet, call five people about a problem you already know how to solve. You're moving all day long. You're just not moving toward the one thing that scares you.
I call this the Avoid-Dance: staying incredibly busy so you don't have to do the single uncomfortable thing that might actually change the result. It's doing the wrong thing beautifully. And the reason it's so hard to catch yourself in the middle of it is that from the outside — and from inside your own calendar — it looks exactly like work.
There's a picture I keep coming back to for this. Your cupboards are bare. You've got a dinner party coming — clients, payroll, a growth number you promised somebody — and there's no food in the house. Instead of getting in the car and driving to the store, you're standing in the kitchen polishing the sink. Look how clean the counters are. Damn it, the cupboards are still empty. The polishing feels good because it's motion and it's safe. The grocery run is the thing you're avoiding, and it's the only thing that feeds anyone.
What the Avoid-Dance actually costs you
I don't want to talk about this like it's a personal-growth exercise where the goal is to feel better. It shows up in the business every week. Every week you delay the conversation, the decision, or the delegation, you're paying interest on it. Revenue slows. Accountability across the team weakens, because people take their cues from what you tolerate. Your best employees get frustrated watching the obvious thing not happen. Rework piles up. Customers eventually feel it, even if they can't name it. Avoidance may never appear as a line item on your P&L, but you're paying for it every single day — usually in the exact freedom you started the company to create.
I know this because I did it
I'm not saying any of this from the sidelines. When I was running Diversified Industrial Staffing, I got very good at finding explanations for why things weren't working. My employees weren't committed enough. My customers weren't loyal enough. The economy wasn't cooperating. We needed better systems. Some of those things may even have been true.
But at one point I was $600,000 in debt, close enough to running out of cash that I wasn't sleeping, and I had to confront something a lot more uncomfortable than any of my explanations. What if I was the bottleneck?
That is not an easy place to look. As entrepreneurs, we love fixing the business, because the business doesn't argue back. The mirror is different. The mirror won't let you blame the economy, your employees, your customers, or the market. It just asks the question you've been busy avoiding: what if the thing that keeps recurring is recurring because of you? I eventually built that company into a six-time Inc. 5000 firm and exited it — but not until I was willing to stand in front of that question instead of out-working it.
The question underneath the decision
Here's where I think this stops being another article about procrastination and becomes the actual work. It's not enough to say "you're avoiding the decision, so make the decision." The more interesting question is why. Why is an intelligent, accomplished person — someone who has solved a hundred hard problems — avoiding this particular one they already know the answer to?
Because it's almost never really about the decision. The employee conversation you keep postponing isn't about the employee; maybe you're afraid of being disliked. The pricing increase isn't about the spreadsheet; maybe you're afraid customers will walk. The delegation isn't about org design; maybe control has always been where you feel safe, and handing it to someone else feels like free-falling. Letting someone go can stir up guilt. Admitting the strategy isn't working means admitting you were wrong. Actually looking hard at the P&L might force you to know something you've worked to avoid knowing.
On the spreadsheet, these all look like business problems. Inside you, they feel deeply personal. That's the part a business framework will never reach, and it's usually the part running the show.
This is also where a specific piece of research earns its place. Chris Argyris, who spent decades at Harvard studying how capable people behave inside organizations, described what he called defensive reasoning — the way smart, successful people unconsciously build airtight, perfectly rational explanations that protect them from having to examine their own role in a problem. That's the founder with the whiteboard. The integrator is gone, the hire fell apart, the market shifted — all true, and all quietly pulling double duty as reasons not to look at what he still controls. Argyris's finding, and my experience, land in the same place: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing these explanations. Intelligence doesn't protect you from the pattern. It just makes you better at defending it.
You being part of the problem is the good news
I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this message that lands as "you're a bad leader," and that is not it at all. If I tell you that you're contributing to the problem, I'm not handing you a verdict. I'm handing you leverage. If the constraint were entirely the economy or the market, you'd be at their mercy. The fact that you're part of it means you have real ability to change the outcome. That's not an indictment. That's agency. The best clients I've ever had all arrived at the same freeing realization: they were both the cause of the problem and the solution to it — and the second only becomes available once you're willing to own the first. That single shift is most of the reason executive coaching for founders works at all.
Owning the decision isn't the same as rushing it
One caution, because I don't want this to curdle into "make the big call by Friday, or you're a coward." Speed is not the same thing as courage. Some decisions genuinely need another conversation, legal input, real financial analysis, or just time to think — and taking that time is discernment, not avoidance. The line between the two is honest and simple. If more information could materially change the decision, go get it. If the information is already sufficient and you're delaying because the decision is uncomfortable, that's the Avoid-Dance wearing a lab coat. Nobody can call that difference from the outside. But you know which one you're doing.
What you're actually paying a coach for
That's usually where I come in, and it's worth being honest about what you'd actually be paying for. It isn't an hour on the calendar. You're paying for perspective when you're too close to the problem to see it clearly. You're paying for someone who knows your patterns, understands your business, has enough scar tissue to recognize what might really be going on, and is willing to say the thing nobody inside your company will say to your face. Sometimes that happens on a scheduled call. Sometimes it happens in a text at 7:00 on a Tuesday morning, when the decision is staring you down, and you need one honest voice before you move. That's most of what an executive coach actually does — not hand you information you don't have, but make it much harder to keep avoiding what you already know.
The one question to sit with
So here's the uncomfortable one, and then a second one that matters even more. Where in your business are the cupboards bare while you're busy polishing the sink? Name the thing everyone is quietly waiting on — the conversation, the decision, the delegation that's been sitting on your desk and only your desk.
Then go one level deeper: what are you afraid will happen if you finally make it?
The first question finds the behavior. The second one finds the reason, and the reason is where everything actually changes. A framework can tell you where the bottleneck is. Understanding what that decision is touching in you is how you stop becoming it. If you can't answer the second question — or you can, and you notice you've been polishing sinks to avoid it — that's worth paying attention to. And if a specific decision just flashed across your mind while you were reading this, let's talk.
Here when you need me, Todd
P.S. — You don't have to book anything formal. Just hit reply and tell me the one decision everybody's waiting on, and, if you're willing, what you're afraid happens if you make it. Sometimes saying that out loud to one person is the whole unlock. Let's get after it.
