By Jason Tassie, Business Growth Expert & Co-Founder of Know Your Business
Many small and mid-sized construction businesses will one day reach a point where growth appears to slow for reasons that are difficult to explain. In a large number of cases this might not be down to the market or competition, it’s something far more common and far more human: the founder bottleneck.
Owner-led businesses often begin with speed and quick growth – decisions are made quickly and pricing is agreed on the spot. Problems are solved through experience rather than process. In the early stages, this hands-on approach is usually a strength. Customers receive direct attention, quality stays high and momentum builds naturally around the founder’s drive.
However, the qualities that help a business start are not always the ones that allow it to scale.
As the organisation grows then it gets more complicated. Staff require more guidance and increasing customers create operational pressure, and financial decisions carry greater consequences. When every meaningful decision still flows through one person this is the founder bottleneck: This might be approving quotes or resolving disputes – the growth of the business becomes limited by that person’s time.
In construction and other project-based sectors, this is a really obvious issue.
Founders often come from trade backgrounds, and we know that reputation is built on personal standards and having direct oversight. Letting go of that is risky, especially when margins are tight and mistakes are costly. However, there are still risks if you try to keep being at the centre of everything. Opportunity is lost not through poor work, but through constrained capacity.
If you have quotes sat there waiting for approval or hiring slows down, over time the business becomes reactive rather than intentional. Revenue may plateau and the founder’s workload often becomes unsustainable.
Importantly, this is not a leadership failure. It is a structural stage that many growing businesses encounter. The challenge is not whether the founder is capable, but whether the business model still depends too heavily on a single point of control.
Breaking the bottleneck rarely requires massive change and effort. But it has to happen slowly over time, you have to shift toward systems and shared responsibility.
The first step is visibility. Founders need clear, simple information about the business performance (cash flow, pipeline, etc) presented in a way that supports quicker, more confident decisions. Without this, delegation feels unsafe because control is replaced with uncertainty.
Hiring strong people is necessary but not enough on its own. Delegation only works when authority and accountability are properly understood. Your team needs to properly understand the scope of their decision-making and the standards expected of them.
True operational resilience comes when responsibility is distributed throughout the entire team – and supported by process, not personality. At that point growth is no longer limited by the founder’s availability; it is enabled by the organisation’s capability.
Document your routine decisions: pricing frameworks, supplier choices or project processes, that way they no longer require constant founder involvement. This does not remove oversight; it simply moves it to a higher, more strategic level.
Financial discipline also plays a role. Businesses that rely entirely on founder judgement for spending often experience uneven growth, so give trusted team members some authority on financial decisions (set guides and limits) and see if faster decisions are made.
Solving the founder bottleneck does not mean the founder becomes less important; it means that the business becomes less fragile and more capable of growth.
If you do have a founder bottleneck, its not a sign that a business is failing. It is telling us that the business has reached a new stage, and that to progress, the founder must recognise that growth now depends less on doing more personally and more on building something that can operate effectively beyond them
This shift also reduces personal risk in terms of your wellbeing. When a company’s performance is inseparable from one individual’s time, energy and availability, pressure builds up quietly until it becomes burnout.
Long hours and the inability to switch off are often treated as normal in founder-led businesses, but they are rarely sustainable.
Distributing responsibility through trusted people and clearer processes will give you that space founders need to think clearly, recover properly and lead for the long term.
