How to Overcome Decision Bottlenecks in Business Growth

Your instinct says: “We need to hire more people.” But what if that’s not the real bottleneck?.... One founder I worked with ,who leads a 12-person SaaS team, was stuck in a growth plateau. Leads were coming in. The team was skilled. But everything still had to go through her. She was exhausted. And scaling felt impossible… unless she doubled headcount. But here’s the shift that changed everything: “It’s not about more people. It’s about clearer systems.” Here’s the 4-step framework we used to scale operations, without hiring: 1. Inventory hidden friction: ↳ We tracked 7 days of internal workflows. ↳ The result? 30% of her team’s time was spent clarifying tasks they’d already “completed.” 2. Redesign roles around outcomes, not tasks: ↳ We stopped assigning to-dos and started assigning ownership. ↳ Each role owned a result, not just a checklist. 3. Install decision thresholds: ↳ Her team was escalating every minor choice. ↳ So we introduced a simple decision-making filter: → If the cost is under $250 and reversible, decide without her. → If not, bring it to weekly ops sync. 4. Automate the “check-in” loop: ↳ We built a Monday morning briefing template that team leads submit weekly. ↳ She stopped chasing updates, and started making strategic decisions again. The result? ✅ She scaled her client capacity by 40% in 90 days, with the same team. Hiring wasn’t the answer.... System clarity was. What’s one area in your business that feels stuck; where you keep thinking, “We just need more help”? Drop it in the comments, and I’ll walk you through it in a LinkedIn Systems Jam Session. I help small business owners install scalable systems so their teams can grow, without growing their stress. #systems #leadership #business #strategy #ProcessImprovement

Enterprise decision making is breaking down. I don't think it's because leaders are necessarily slow. But rather because the ground keeps shifting. Every team sees a new demo. Every week, another release. Every quarter, the strategy changes. Again. The result isn’t agility. It’s exhaustion. I'm beginning to see this signals coming from inside banks - CIOs stuck comparing LLM wrappers and orchestration platforms. Almost endlessly. - Security teams buried in unverified endpoints and versionless agent chains. - Finance teams asked to budget for tools that didn’t exist a month ago, and might be gone by next quarter. We're starting to see operators afraid to commit, knowing the stack will change before the rollout is done. Meetings multiply. Confidence erodes. Decisions get pushed. Nothing ships. This isn’t a tooling problem. It’s an operating model failure. Most institutions are optimize for high quality, low frequency decisions. They're optimized for stability, not volatility. Designed for control, not change. But increasingly, if you think about today’s environment - The number of options is infinite - The performance frontier is unstable - The half life of a good choice is weeks, not years That mismatch creates paralysis. I'm seeing three failure patterns emerge 🧱 The Bottleneck Bureaucracy Risk processes kill innovation before it starts. The safest answer is always... Wait. 🌀 The Perpetual Pilot Dozens of tests, nothing scaled. Every pilot outdated before it ends. ⚓ The Legacy Anchor A decision is made. And frozen. New, better paths are ignored to avoid disruption. Each model fails in a different way. But all fail to keep up. So what’s the fix? ✅ Make smaller, faster decisions, reversible by design ✅ Shift from delivery to continuous capability testing ✅ Evaluate performance in real time, not quarterly ✅ Treat decisions as learning loops, not final bets In this world, success isn't about picking the perfect tool. It’s now about building the muscle to adapt when the tool changes tomorrow.

An equation every entrepreneur lives by: Success = Crisis + Growth — When the challenge is too great for your skill level — that’s when overwhelm occurs: - You start feeling like an imposter - You lack the clarity you used to have - You feel inadequate and too inexperienced for the task BUT it’s a great opportunity to get support and level up. I know because I was forced into this state of overwhelm when I had to lay off 100 people — that was my biggest business crisis. We went from a team of 100+ employees to a lean of 45-50 people. And the margin for error with such a small team was very low. But the PRESSURE that created made me focus on making sure our team was as dialed in as possible. They were: - Aligned with core values - Clear on needle-moving tasks - Making highly-intentional decisions And that team-wide clarity on our vision is how we wound up selling $10m again the next year but with 1/3 of the team and less than 1/2 the overheads. That was only the beginning of being able to thrive as such a lean team — from there we managed to: - Raise salaries - Hold company events again, after office socials etc. - Hire consultants to help with the vision and management and recruiting With such a lean team we could invest more into our information capital and the people we had. After learning from MIT and the EO Masters and being surrounded by over 80 entrepreneurs doing $1-$100 million in sales every year around the world, I realized how much my co-founder and I were learning. We had so much information that we were trying to teach our team (micro manage) instead of empowering them with the resources we’d learned about to help them: - Come to their own conclusions - Hone their decision-making instincts - Act on their own accord to replace us as “teachers” (the bottleneck) So, instead of hiring more people, we had to figure out how we could empower them. From that point on, we bought Kindles for all the management, launched an internal book club and reviewed the chapters as a group every 15 days to extract lessons. This way they had all the information that we (as founders) were reading and learning from. And in that way, our team was composed of a lean group of “mini-founders”; not managers on a completely different page than the founders. Reaching such a high level of success while being so lean happened because we were so aligned and able to really focus on what moved the needle. Our darkest times of CRISIS lead to unbelievable adaptation and growth. The key lesson there: Don’t resist uncertainty and overwhelm… Growth happens when you start doing the things you’re not qualified to do. — Enjoyed this? Repost ♻️ to your network to share, and follow Ignacio Carcavallo for more.

🤷 Something I’ve learned about decision-making recently… While conversing with our clients, friends, and various individuals at conferences, businesses, and occasionally with someone seated next to us on a flight, a curious trend emerged: in today’s whirlwind of rapid changes and overwhelming choices, it seems we’ve collectively encountered decision-making paralysis. The sheer volume of options, combined with the unpredictable outcomes of our choices, has left many feeling lost in a sea of uncertainty. It’s no longer just about choosing between A or B; it’s about grappling with the consequences in a world that seems to be shifting beneath our feet. This indecision isn’t a sign of weakness; instead, it’s a natural response to the complex, uncertain, and interconnected environment we navigate daily. However, here’s the twist: avoiding decisions doesn’t shield us from change’s impact; it simply hands control over to circumstance. The key to reclaiming our power lies not in seeking certainty but in becoming comfortable with uncertainty. We must embrace the art of making informed decisions without the guarantee of perfect outcomes. This entails gathering what we know, recognizing what we don’t (and distinguishing between the “knowable and unknowable unknowns”), and taking a step forward, armed with the courage to adjust as we progress. To overcome this decision-making dilemma, it takes more than just well-intentioned encouragement from upper management. It requires us to approach business in a fundamentally different manner. Instead of primarily focusing on getting the strategy right and then executing linearly against the plan (remember the traditional “five-year plan”?), leaders should establish the direction by identifying and communicating the organization’s North Star. They ought to empower their teams to advance step by step in the defined direction, continually gathering insights and data that inform the plan for the subsequent steps. Inch by inch, allowing for ongoing course correction – a concept our friend Corey Ford refers to as the “drunken walk of the entrepreneur.” Next time you find yourself stymied by indecision, remember your North Star and inch forward. As Northwestern University professor Dashun Wang points out in his seminal paper “Quantifying the dynamics of failure across science, startups and security,” your ability to “fail fast” (and, of course, learn along the way as well as incorporate those learnings into the next iteration) is not just prescriptive but descriptive of future success. #leadership #decisionmaking #uncertainty #strategy

One of the worst things you can do in your business… Dum dum dum 🥁🥁🥁… Be a bottleneck. The alarm buzzed, it was 5pm. Time to pick up the kids. What? But I haven’t done anything on MY list today! NOTHING. How was that possible? I'd been behind my computer since 8am. I had the tired eyes, and empty La Croix cans to prove it. So where the heck did the time go? Looking back on my day I realized that all I did was answer questions and review things. While it was necessary, it certainly didn’t do anything to grow the business, which is my goal. Having a bottleneck in your business is like a big traffic jam. No one can get where they are trying to go. It makes people late, frustrated, and cranky. And I was freaking ALL of these things at the end of this day. I had built a company where my team couldn’t get their jobs done without me being at the center of every question or decision. When your business is set up this way it makes your growth PAINFULLY slow. It will hold you back, or even cause you to fail. Chances are you didn’t start your business so you could spend all your time directing traffic. Here are 3 easy steps to follow to get rid of the traffic jam in your business: 👉 Write everything down👈 Document your processes and procedures. AND the commonly asked questions. AND customer service responses. This can be in a SOP (Standard Operating Procedures), a FAQ list, or a video recording that walks your team through the process. The key here is that you create it once, and then as your team grows, they can refer to these documents or videos vs. taking up your precious time. 👉 Use organizational tools👈 Use a tool that logs all your to-do’s, manages your workflows, and designates who is responsible for each task. We use Asana and it has been a GAME CHANGER for our productivity and workflows! These don’t need to be fancy or expensive. Asana has a free version, and Google Sheets works here too. 👉 Communicate well👈 Don’t keep everything in your head. This doesn’t work for anyone. Whether it’s giving feedback on how you want the job done. Or being super clear on what your team's responsibilities are. If it’s only in your head. It’s not helping anyone. Especially YOU! What's something you can delegate to avoid being a bottleneck?