Are You Holding Your Service Business Back? How to Identify (and Fix) Bottlenecks - EP # 239

Are you the bottleneck in your own business growth? In this episode, Maggie breaks down the most common ways service-based business owners unknowingly slow down their own progress—and what to do about it. 

Learn how to spot where you’re holding your business back, why these bottlenecks happen, and get practical tips to fix them for good.

What You’ll Learn:

• 6 signs you might be the bottleneck in your business
• The crucial business skills every owner needs to scale
• How to shift from provider to CEO mindset
• The power of clarity and fast decision-making
• Delegation, team empowerment, and why letting go fuels growth
• How to keep your business moving (even when you’re not in the room)

Action Step:

Ready to break through your bottlenecks? Book a complimentary consultation with Maggie here https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call-1 and start scaling with more freedom and less overwhelm.

For more client wins and resources, check the testimonials and blog at https://www.stairwaytoleadership.com/

Transcript

hello. Hello my dear Diamond Effect podcast listeners, welcome to the next episode of the podcast 239 and today, I wanna help you answer the questions that many service-based business owners have, is to, how do I stop being a bottleneck in my business?

Because quite often as you start growing a service business, you are the main service provider, and then of course, you're wearing. All the other hats of chief marketing officer, CEO, the financial person, the admin person, and so on. And of course, as we're doing everything on our own. Our business can grow only as far as our skillset goes, or capacity to manage things and just human capacity.

There's only 24 hours in a day, and there's only so much you can do in a day on a week. But [00:01:00] even as your business grows and you start hiring people. You can still be a bottleneck if you don't lead your team and structure your business with certain systems and technology that it can operate without you having to touch everything.

Because

without you, to answer those questions first, of course, we need to recognize when you're being the bottleneck and then what to do about it. So today I wanna talk about six instances that I see business owners being bottleneck, center business, and I'll share quick, tools or quick advice or quick tips,

stop doing that so your business can grow and you also can live a life outside of your business and just help it expand without you getting overwhelmed or burnt out.

Okay, so let's go. One of the biggest thing I see that [00:02:00] stops. Businesses from growing is actually gaps in the skillset that you as a business owner have in order to allow the business grow. And usually those are not skills to provide the service, but rather business skills. Many business owners start business because they're passionate about their industry, about the area of.

F expertise that they have with which they help clients, right? So you might be a general contractor and you love construction or your health and wellness practitioner, and you love helping people through your therapy or massage or, spa treatments or whatever. Or you might be a professional organizer or a designer, and you'll love to see your clients' transformations and joy when they see beautiful house, clean, organized, nicely decorated, and so on.

And you come [00:03:00] into. Entrepreneurship without realizing that there are actual business skills. That you need to acquire and learn. Because for example, if you don't have sales skills. Converting potential leads into clients will be very hard.

You'll convert way less of them and therefore that will slow down your growth. If, for example, once you start growing and you overcome that. And then the next thing might be, okay, now I have a team and I don't know how to lead them. I'm lacking people leadership skills. And when that happens, you'll realize that it's very hard for you to find the right people, to retain the right people,

very often I see business owners complain and blame other things that it's like people are not good or that it's the economy and that's the client, when in reality it's just their skill gap. And I find it [00:04:00] amusing sometimes when we realize at the logical level that hey, interior design, let's say it's a skillset, and I acquired it and there was a time when I didn't know how to do it, and now it's.

I'm a master at it, or we understand that if we wanted to win Olympics in swimming, we would have to learn how to swim. Not just at the recreational level, but at the professional level with techniques and mastery of that skillset. But yet we go into entrepreneurship very often without recognizing that there are skillset that you need to master.

And more than. Recreational level to get some serious results. So I'll give you an example from my corporate role in difference the skillsets made.

About 10 years ago, maybe a little bit more, I was in one of the roles in corporate leadership. So about 10 years ago. I was in one role, a facility manager role, and I got a phone call from [00:05:00] my former boss saying to me, Maggie, there is this team in our company with, in a department who, where their manager was let go because they weren't performing and the team wasn't performing.

And that was like a sixth or eighth manager in the past two years. And my boss told me. I'm tired of that team underperforming and really not doing a great job because my team has to collaborate with them and they really need a skilled people leader. Would you consider applying for that position now that it's vacant and I was starting to think that the role I was in was kind.

Ending for me in a sense where I got what I wanted out of it and I was ready for a move and I applied for that manager position, which I got, and within year and a half I turned [00:06:00] that team around. With the same people who used to be blamed for not being effective, for being bad employees, for making all the mistakes and all the things where they weren't really liked in the corporation because there are low performance, created many issues, not only in their own department, but outside of it.

And I was able to turn that around and create a really high performing team. Mostly with the same people hiring couple more because they were understaffed turn them to the point where their confidence as employees in themselves grew. They collaboration as a team grew and that allowed the broader team to grow and be ready for scale.

So it created the foundation for. Further scaling and the only thing that changed was the skillset of a manager, right? So business skills is a [00:07:00] real skill, and when asset business owner and CEO, you're lacking that skill, the results you will be getting, whether it's through your team or whether it's if you're a solopreneur doing everything yourself will be so much worse.

Because you don't have a skill, and it has, it's not to undermine your ability because I believe we can all learn. Any skill we want, we don't need to be super talented or gifted. I believe that my leadership skills, I truly acquired them and learned them throughout my career that I wasn't some magically gifted person, but I took them seriously.

I took training, mentorship courses, and so one that allowed me to be skilled. So it's just to tell you that. As a leader of your business, you owe it to your business to identify this gaps in the skillset that you have. [00:08:00] That might be that. Block from for your business to grow and just go after and fill those gaps, whether it's through courses, through books, through a coach like myself.

I'm really passionate and big about teaching my clients skills that they need for their business to grow right now and in the future because this is the thing that makes them true. Leaders that creates. Their resilience and the resilience for their business for any economic times, because if I'm skilled, I can swim even in the rough water and do well, maybe a bit slower, but still do well, and that means them independent.

So my clients get results. In their business and keep growing their business so long after they stopped coaching with me because they learned the skills. So no matter [00:09:00] how you acquire them, first you need to identify what are the skills that I'm needing that are creating a current issue or current issues in my business that are preventing me from the growth and I need to.

Focus and commit and invest in myself and grow as a leader, and that will remove the block. So that was number one. Number two, how do you stop being a bottleneck in your business is when you are clear on your. Trajectory on the most important aspects in your business. So then that allows you to make strategic fast decision.

Very often businesses stall because the owners lack clarity on where are they going, and with that, what's important to focus on. And I talked about it in depth in episode [00:10:00] 237 from January 30, 23rd this year. It's not such a old episode that I highly recommend you go and listen to. But here what I'll talk about is that lack of clarity creates your inability to make decisions.

Not because you're not able to, but because you don't have a foundation and a filter through which you can run each scenario or situation you're in front and make a decision one way or the other rather than stay in indecision. Indecision stalls progress. And when the progress is stall, your business is not growing right?

It's stuck.

Now, what I wanna say about decisions is that. I often coach my clients on being worried to make decision because they wanna pick the right perfect decision. And I always tell them in [00:11:00] business, there's never 100% challenge, proof, issues proof, decision. Perfect. There is just better decisions and worse decisions in terms of the consequences or results they create.

And how we know which decision is better for us is by being clear on the business trajectory, on what we're choosing, to go after what we're marketing for our clients. What is our mission? What are our goal for this year, and all those things. Otherwise, when you don't have clarity, you do end up with analysis paralysis or really stalling and having many unmade decisions, which will always stagnate progress in your business.

Also when you lack clarity and you have a team that often translates in you sending the team on a bit of a goose chase when there is a [00:12:00] lot of stop and go, they start doing this because you think that's the project they should undertake, and then you change your mind because you're not sure of your decision and you send them somewhere else,

people don't like to do work that then they cannot finish. Or people don't like to put time and effort in something that they cannot see the fruits of their efforts. It makes their work meaningless. So if you direct your team to different things that they never finish and there's a lot of chaos, that's very demotivating and that's one of the reasons you might be losing your best.

Team members or why new people don't stay for too long. Your indecision, your lack of clarity definitely will affect your team if you have one. Clarity speeds things up,

and it doesn't mean that when you're clear, you have to make rush decisions, but you can make fast strategic, well [00:13:00] thought through decisions because clarity on the most important things in your business gives you a filter for decisions. Do I highly recommend you listen to podcast 237 from January 23rd.

When I was an entry level employee, I was a customer service representative who was taking calls from across North America. About challenges happening in different buildings. There were retail buildings, there were corporate buildings, and whether there were toilets overflowing or cars driving into the buildings, or just simple things like opening a door for somebody who locked themselves out of the office.

What was my role? Being clear on processes that we followed to determine which call was more urgent than other, allowed me to do my job well, but also make very fast decisions because sometimes the calls that were coming. We're [00:14:00] critical and there was some level of risk and a danger to the buildings if the calls weren't addressed fast, right?

So that clarity of what was important, what was my role, how to make certain decisions, allowed me to be very effective and very speedy. And therefore, we were able to process a lot of calls in a very short time. So that's just to tell you that. The clearer you are, the easier it is to make decisions. The faster you make them and the better they are, and that's how your business moves faster.

Okay, number three. When you are thinking like a service provider, not CEO of the business and leader of the business, that's when you are also a bottleneck. Because as a service provider, you probably only focus on what's in front of you today or maybe this week, right? So which clients to serve, which project to [00:15:00] focus on?

What is the next tasks in front of you, the meeting you have tomorrow, and all those things, but in order to move your business forward faster and create certain leaps of growth, there needs to be strategic thinking and focusing on priorities that are never urgent, that never have to be done right this moment.

But when you work on those projects, that will move your business forward much faster. So whether it's, for example. New marketing funnel, whether it's reviewing your sales process and seeing where you have the gaps and what do you need to tweak and change so that your conversion goes faster rather than repeating something you've learned over and over, but then you have a leaky bucket and let's say half of the client.

Or whether it's taking time and create a strategy for hiring the right person or implementing new [00:16:00] technology that will save you hours and hours of time, eliminate errors, or whatever that is, right.

So thinking and making decision like a CEO. Is a critical shift that has to happen in every business owner in order to scale. And the longer you wait to acquire those skills to create certain habits that allow you to pause and think strategically about your business this slower, the more you postpone more of a scale scaling of your business.

Number four, when you're so busy that you don't have time to focus on business development in a by mean you don't have time to do any, marketing, any relationship buildings. You're just like, oh, I have this client. I need to serve them. I need to issue those invoices. I need to, send those emails or [00:17:00] respond to these emails.

Deal with this. So you are so busy that you never stop and you.

You are so busy that you pause your marketing for months, whether it's networking, whether it's social media, whether it's call, reach out, whatever it is. And then of course when you just focus on serving current clients and the task at hands and you pause marketing and sales, then in a few months you.

Hit a ball in your business and yes, then you go back to marketing and selling. But that will take you another two or three months to bring up the revenue. So you are a bottleneck when you do the, I'm delivering service and then I don't market and sell, and then I don't have any business.

So I market and sell for, a couple months and then I get busy again and so on. Part of it is really. Managing your days and times and being effective and [00:18:00] in charge of your schedule. The second part of it, knowing and understanding when it's the time to hire, right? When you are so busy with clients and they're coming on a regular basis that you're realizing I don't have time to do business development.

Now it's the time to. Think about help and whether it's an administrative help, whether it's a contractor that can help you deliver the service or whatever. It depends on your business, on your strengths, on your goals and so on. So it's very, it can be very different

but it's definitely scaling doesn't happen. On your own right, you will need to hire help, and knowing when to hire and pausing to think that through and start taking steps towards getting that help is very important.

Another way. I see business owners become bottlenecks in their business when they're a bit of control freaks and no decision is made without their involvement, especially when they already have a team where at least some team members would be capable of, taking on some decision making and directing others.

And let's say being in charge of their respective [00:19:00] areas of expertise, right? So when everything has to go through you, while you already have some competent support, is that you can't go on vacation without being attached to your phone and email. You can't rest when you're sick, bedridden without having to look at your email and your phone call,

your business moves slower because if your staff needs to wait hours or sometimes a day or whatever it is, even when you are there present, but everybody's busy, it slows things down. And in business and growth, speed is very important. It's a critical thing. And so being able to. Properly delegate to your team members.

Being able to define their roles and their areas of decision making, and then having also a plan for the day to day when you are present, but also having a plan when you are [00:20:00] away. Backup what decisions, who makes what? What happens in certain emergencies, and defining those processes, setting those systems.

Will break your business free from you having to be there, having to be involved in every single thing, and it will speed up your growth.

So again, just an example from one of my last, doing more junior executive roles when I was in corporate. As our department grew, I started delegating certain decisions to my managers and my team leads and my senior team members, right? So when I was a manager and I was, team was smaller, I was involved in the hiring, where at first I did everything in hiring and then.

Once I had a team lead, I delegated the initial stages of hiring to them, and then I just got involved in that. End stages of the hiring to make sure that every [00:21:00] candidate was, aligned with our culture and so on. But as our team grew, I delegated completely the hiring of the entry level positions to my managers, and a team leader.

I wasn't involved in it at all because I trusted my closest. Colleagues and of course my reports to do the good job and how I trusted them because I mentored them and I taught them as the business grew, I give them opportunity to hire and give them feedback and coach them and say that I knew they would do a good job and I didn't have to get involved.

The only time I got involved in hiring, if we're hiring for more senior positions and this, it's the same, I would be involved. Only at the very ending late stages of that process. You can do that too as a business owners, and you should be [00:22:00] doing it gradually as your business grows to start removing yourself from the frontline most basis sort of decisions.

Whether it's hiring, whether it's process improvement and so on. And then keep your energy and mental capacity for the decisions and things that make the most impact, on the business. Okay. And then the last instance I wanna talk about when you might be the bottleneck of your business is when you don't listen to your employees.

You don't. Allow them to bring to you their ideas, their creativity. You just tell them what to do, exactly how you want it, and they just follow your steps. Almost a like robots without their own input and creativity. The power of having help and employees [00:23:00] is not only that they can do the work that now you don't have to do, and it frees you up as a CEO to do you know.

More impactful things on the business and be more strategic about it, but also because you are hiring them for their brain, for their creativity, for the experience, and an outlook that they bring to the table that you don't have just because they're different human beings. I can't. Even stress how important it is.

I've seen it in my career, whether it's in my own business or as a corporate leader, where my team members would bring ideas I would've never came up with, would see certain need for improvement much faster, especially if they're the one doing the work, interacting with the customers more often or just involved in certain things that you are not involved yourself, they will see signs of challenges [00:24:00] or areas for improvement much faster than you'll ever see.

So I was just talking with a business owner yesterday about their journey and she gave me that very example just as she was. Starting, to opening a location, a health and wellness clinic, and one of the employees to be in the health and wellness clinic came to see the space with her and suggested that she opened a wall in one of the areas and she said, you know what?

It would have never occurred to me to do that. So glad I listened to her and I did that when this space was still under renovation and preparation for opening, because now it gives me so much more flexibility as to how I can arrange this space, what I can do with it during business hours, outside of business hours, and so on.

So listening to people and not needing to be right all the time and not needing, having the best answer [00:25:00] all the time, especially when you have team members. It's not a sign of weakness. First of all, it's a sign of. Self-confidence and having the security when you know you don't have to have all the answers, and leaning onto others who are passionate about what they do, who want the business to succeed, because hopefully you hire the right people and using that power to create something much bigger than just.

Individuals in the business, right? The power of a high performing team is that when it works really well together, the output or the results are created and way bigger than if you took everybody and started working individually, not as a team. So I hope this episode gave you clarity on where you might be a bottleneck in your business and

how to fix that. And if you need help in identifying whether that, or figuring out, what [00:26:00] is next or how do I go about removing myself from certain aspects of my business, whether it's through hiring, whether it's through empowering your team, whether it's through acquiring some skills, I am happy to help.

Book a complimentary consultation with me through the link in the show notes. Have a fantastic week and see you next week. Bye.