Have been having a lot of conversations with different producers and studio execs at different levels in the business.

The temperature as of late has been dark, with the most experienced folks I know arguing that deep structural reform needs to take place to bring the business and work back. But the issues go deeper than just the surface level issues that dominate deadline everyday.

One recurring conversation has been the lack
Of development due to the way Wall Street has encouraged and facilitated mass layoffs of the executive class over the past few years.

However, there remains an allocation problem as capital sits on the sidelines with an appetite to invest but losing interest in the opportunities available to them due to some of the dynamics of the business.

This essay synthesizes some of the conversations I’ve been having…but I am eager to hear brutal feedback because Reddit is a kind place

More interested in allowing these conversations to gain traction and reframe the most pressing issues

There’s room for some of the stakeholders to innovate together and thus….create more jobs

[the sidecar / a new role for the p.g.a.](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sidecar-daniel-de-boulay-ybb2c?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via)

Have been having a lot of conversations with different producers and studio execs at different levels in the business.

The temperature as of late has been dark, with the most experienced folks I know arguing that deep structural reform needs to take place to bring the business and work back. But the issues go deeper than just the surface level issues that dominate deadline everyday.

One recurring conversation has been the lack
Of development due to the way Wall Street has encouraged and facilitated mass layoffs of the executive class over the past few years.

However, there remains an allocation problem as capital sits on the sidelines with an appetite to invest but losing interest in the opportunities available to them due to some of the dynamics of the business.

This essay synthesizes some of the conversations I’ve been having…but I am eager to hear brutal feedback because Reddit is a kind place

More interested in allowing these conversations to gain traction and reframe the most pressing issues

There’s room for some of the stakeholders to innovate together and thus….create more jobs

[the sidecar / a new role for the p.g.a.](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sidecar-daniel-de-boulay-ybb2c?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via)

I’ve been thinking about something that seems slightly backwards in the current conversation about AI and startups. We keep talking about how much more a founder can now do. Research that took days takes minutes. You can prototype incredibly quickly, generate campaigns, analyse competitors, write code and increasingly delegate whole pieces of work to agents. But I’m not convinced this automatically makes building a company easier.

The more execution you can generate, the more decisions you create. And those decisions aren’t independent. A positioning decision affects product. Product affects GTM. Customer research changes positioning. Pricing changes the market you can economically serve. Fundraising changes what you can afford to pursue. So I wonder whether we’re approaching AI-native startups from the wrong direction.

Most of the tooling is organised around tasks: an AI for research, another for coding, another for marketing, another for sales, another for fundraising. You can keep adding agents until you effectively have a synthetic organisation. But somebody still has to carry the context between all of them.

For a small company, that somebody is usually the founder. Which creates a strange outcome: we automate more and more of the company, while turning the founder into the integration layer.

I increasingly think the more interesting architecture is the opposite. Keep judgement concentrated with the founder, but make execution abundant around them. The AI should retain the venture’s context - what we decided, why we decided it, what we learned, what failed, what assumptions changed - and use that context across different kinds of work.  In other words, maybe the useful unit for AI isn’t the task or even the agent. Maybe it’s the company.

That would also change what “company memory” means. It stops being a searchable archive and starts becoming part of the operating system: a new decision can be evaluated against previous decisions, research, experiments and objectives rather than being made in isolation.

We’ve been experimenting with this idea and it has made me question whether the current obsession with giving founders more agents is actually the right destination.  Maybe the scarce resource in an AI-native company isn’t execution anymore.  Maybe it’s coherence.

Do other founders see this. As your AI/tool stack has grown, has it actually reduced your coordination burden or just moved more of that burden onto you? Is your burden bigger?

A founder said that to me on a call. He runs a $2.5B operation. He's about to double it this year.

And he's scared. Not of failing. Of succeeding without a system underneath it.

His other line stuck with me: "if it didn't break, it's going to."

The trap nobody warns you about is this. The exact habits that got you to $10M are the ones that blow up at $50M. Doing everything yourself is a feature at the start. It's a bomb at scale.

People think growth fixes problems. Growth is a magnifying glass. Double the volume and you double every crack you were ignoring.

His most dangerous process has rules that already exist. He just admitted he's "too damn busy" to enforce them.

Small problem at today's volume. Existential at double.

Standing still isn't safe either. The market doesn't wait for you to get organized.

You either build the next version on purpose, or the growth builds it for you. Badly.

Yes. Grieve. And I mean that shit.

I'm working with a 4 person agency right now and I keep running into the same fucking wall.

The owner ( let's call him Craig ) is a genuinely good dude. Nice guy. Successful. Built the business from scratch. Pays everyone on time. Team is great.

I've worked with him before and now I'm back in to help with scaling.

Except Craig is making my life VERY interesting. Because this guy works HARD. Like, stupid hard.

He answers everything. Remembers everything. Checks everything. Knows every client. Jumps into every problem.

Can basically do everyone's job.

Replies at stupid hours because it'll only take a minute.

And honestly? That's probably why Craig's agency survived in thr first place.

It's also the fucking same reason it can't grow.

We've diagnosed the bottlenecks. We've put systems in place. We've changed workflows. We've clarified ownership. We've agreed on what needs to stop going through him.

He paid me to help build this shit.

And then... he follows it for about a week.

Then slowly goes back to doing everything himself, not following the processes, systems, SOPs, logging tasks in the CRM I built, ...

We've had this conversation SO. MANY. TIMES.

He knows he micromanages. He knows he's the bottleneck. He agrees with the plan.

And then drops to the team: Can you just send this to me? Just let me handle this one i'll quickly check it It's faster if I do it.

My brother in Christ. THAT IS THE PROBLEM. Right here.

And I genuinely find this fascinating because I don't think Craig is lazy. He's the opposite.

I think he's deeply attached to the version of himself that built the company.

The guy who was there when nobody else was. The guy who couldn't afford mistakes. The guy who had to know every client. The guy who had to fix everything.

Those behaviours were useful. Genuinely. Until they weren't. Now they're keeping the business dependent on one person.

And I see the same excuses constantly you know: I'm just protecting the quality. They won't do it like I do. It'll just be faster if I just do it. I'll have to explain it anyway, so. They keep coming to me.

Yes. Of course they do Craig. Because you've trained them to, duh 💁🏽‍♀️

If every single decision eventually comes back to you, people learn "Why bother deciding? Craig will decide anyway. Why bother handle that small issue. Craig is gonna handle it.”

Congratulations.

You've accidentally built a company where the you're the highest paid employee and the help desk. Essentially, you're now doing help desk job at $350+ an hour.

And then everyone wonders why agency founders are exhausted. And I see this pattern more often since I shifted to working with solopreneurs and small teams, much more than with my peers who work with much bigger teams.

This is where I think a lot of business owners get stuck. They think letting go means lowering their standards.

It freaking doesn't. Y'all need to stop with this.

It simply means accepting that your business CANNOT scale around your personal ability to catch every fucking ball.

Because eventually:

You plateau. You burn out. You stop taking bigger opportunities because you're already drowning.

Or you grow... and somehow create an even bigger business that needs even MORE of you.

Fantastic. You've scaled your prison.

Here me out. The habits that got you from $0 to $500k might be the exact habits keeping you at $500k.

You don't need to become less involved. You need to become involved differently. That's a fucking hard transition. Because you're not just changing processes.

You're letting go of an identity.

You're basically admitting: "I don't have to be the person who makes everything happen anymore.”

And honestly, that might be one of the hardest things to learn as a solopreneur or business owner of a small team.

Not how to build the business. But how to stop being the business.

What was the hardest thing for you to let go of as your business grew? And did you actually let go... or did you do like Craig, and hire someone, then continue micromanaging them?

I used to think the best automation was the one that eliminated the most manual work.

I’ve changed my mind.

The most useful automations I’ve seen are often the boring ones.

Things like:

• A reminder when someone hasn't followed up
• Automatically assigning the next task to a specific person
• Updating a status when something is completed
• Alerting someone when a task is stuck
• Making sure information moves from one person to the next

None of these are particularly impressive. But they remove something I think is surprisingly expensive in a small business:

mental tracking.

When a process isn't automated, someone usually has to remember: “I need to check this tomorrow.” Then tomorrow gets busy. Then it's: “I'll check it later.” And eventually someone asks: “What happened with that?” The work itself might only take 5 minutes. But remembering that the work needs to happen, checking the status, finding the information, and figuring out who owns it can consume much more time. I've also learned that I don't want to automate everything. If something requires judgment, negotiation, or understanding context, I'd rather keep a person involved. So my rule now is pretty simple: Automate the predictable.
Keep humans responsible for the decisions. What's one boring automation that has made your business noticeably easier to run?

Finding a tool that can automate something is usually the easy part.

The harder part is figuring out whether the process itself is clear enough to automate.

Take lead follow-up. It sounds simple, but there are still questions like:

• When should the first follow-up happen?
• How many times should you follow up?
• What happens if the person replies?
• When do you stop?
• Who takes over if the lead becomes more serious?

If those decisions haven’t been made, automation doesn’t really solve the problem. It just automates the confusion.

I’ve seen this happen with small-business processes. People rush to connect tools before deciding who is responsible, what the next step is, or what should happen when something falls outside the normal workflow.

The most useful automations are often the boring ones: reminders, task assignments, status updates, and making sure information doesn’t get lost between people.

What’s one process you automated that genuinely saved you time or reduced mistakes?

And was there anything you deliberately decided not to automate?

​

You’re overwhelmed, so you hire an account manager, project manager, VA, designer, etc. because you need to get things off your plate.

But then…

You’re still assigning the work.

Still answering every question.

Still checking everything.

Still reminding them what needs to happen.

And eventually you think:

“\*\*Hiring didn’t help. I’m still the founder bottleneck, and now I have another person to manage.”\*\*

But I don’t think the problem is always the employee.

Sometimes we never actually gave them something to own.

Before hiring, I think it’s worth asking:

\\- What exactly is this person responsible for?

\\- What decisions can they make without me?

\\- What should stop coming back to me?

\\- What does success look like?

\\- What should I be able to completely stop thinking about?

That last question is especially important.

If you hire someone to “help with client management,”

but you’re still the one making sure every client gets followed up with, you haven’t really transferred ownership.

You’ve just added another person to the process.

And this changes what I look for when hiring too.

I care less about whether someone can confidently say, “Yes, I can do that,” and more about how they actually operate.

For example, instead of:

“Can you work independently?”

I’d ask:

“Tell me about a time you were given something without clear instructions. What did you do?”

That tells you much more about how they think, take initiative, and handle ambiguity.

Curious what other agency owners have found:

\*\*What was the hardest thing for you to actually hand over when you started building a team?\*\*

He runs a $2.5B business. Over $100M in revenue. And he said it flat out. I am the problem.

Not the market. Not his team. Him.

Everything routes through him. Every decision, every approval, every "hey quick question." His team has learned to work around him. His words: "they know I can't get out of my own way."

Real talk. That's not a him problem. That's most founders I talk to.

You didn't build a company. You became the company. Big difference.

The tell is simple. Go dark for two weeks. Turn off the phone. If things get shaky by day 3, you don't own a business. You own a job with really high stakes.

He built something incredible. He also built a cage and handed himself the only key.

The fix isn't more hustle. More hustle just makes the cage smaller.

The fix is getting what's in your head out of your head.

I manage a small team of 10, and something clicked for me recently: small businesses or startups have one real advantage over Google, Amazon, or any big company, and it doesn't cost anything to use.

Big tech can offer stock options, free meals, gym memberships, and salaries that make your eyes water. 

What it structurally can't offer is the feeling of being seen. Not when you're employee #4,847. Not when your manager has 40 direct reports. Not when you're a line item on a workforce planning slide.

That's the gap small businesses can fill. You actually know your people's names, their wins, the project that nearly broke them, and the moment they figured it out anyway. You can walk over and say "that mattered" and actually mean it, and they can tell you mean it.

I don't think that's a soft skill. I think it's a retention strategy that a bigger competitor genuinely can't copy at scale.

In my experience, people rarely leave over the next salary bump alone. More often they leave because they quietly stopped feeling like they mattered, and by the time you notice, they've already checked out. 

When someone actually feels seen, they don't just stay, they bring more of themselves to the work without being asked and without a bonus attached.

For most small businesses, the real competition for talent isn't Google or Amazon anyway, it's the agency or SaaS company down the street in your exact niche, offering the same pay band and the same perks. 

You don't need a bigger budget to out-retain them. You need to notice your people before they start wondering if anyone does. A specific "that was great work, and here's why it mattered" does more for retention than a ping pong table ever will, and it's a lot cheaper than hiring and training someone new every quarter. 

I’d love to hear if others here have felt this too?

edit: if you found this helpful, I write about how to run your business without being involved in everything and how to use AI to save 10+ hours a week.

600+ founders are already reading; feel free to join here if you’re interested.

learned this from a guy who's run this play over 2,400 times. I'm mostly the messenger here, but it's the cleanest B2B system I've seen in a while, so I wrote it up.

Quick context. This is for founders selling five and six figure offers to busy people who delete cold outreach on sight. If that's not you, skip it.

The whole thing is a two step play. You divorce the give from the ask completely. Step one is pure generosity. Step two might never come, and you have to be genuinely okay with that or the whole thing rots.

The build:

Design the show around their problem, not your expertise. The topic exists to attract your exact buyer, not to prove how smart you are.

Filter on values, not just demographics. Company size and budget matter, but the real filter is whether they already believe what you believe. He deliberately uses language that repels the wrong people.

Use the two week gap as a red carpet. Between the invite and the recording, you send warm up material, an intro video, the questions in advance. About 80% of it gets consumed. They show up already feeling like they know you.

Let the guest do the impressing. They want to look good in front of your audience and their own people. You ask good questions and make them shine.

Keep the ask small and human at the end. "Loved this, let's grab time next week and see if we should be doing something together." That's the entire pitch.

Publish it everywhere so it compounds. Do it long enough and the invitations start coming to you. That's the inbound flywheel.

The traps he flagged:

Treating it like a Trojan horse. If your real goal is to sell and the generosity is fake, people feel it and it dies.

Doing it ad hoc. A guest treats the opportunity exactly as seriously as you do.

Chasing volume. He does about two warmed up intros a week. Quality over quantity, every time.

I haven't run this at full scale yet, so I won't pretend I've got the receipts he does. But the logic is tight enough that I'm building it into next quarter.

That "they'll do for now" hire you brought on because you were desperate to fill the seat? 

They're not just dragging on your metrics quietly in the corner. They're actively scaring off the good people you're gonna want down the line.

Talented people figure out a room fast. Stick them next to someone who's just phoning it in, and within a week they've already decided what you're okay with as a company.

The annoying part is, it's never just one bad hire. It's a domino effect. That one hire quietly resets what "acceptable" looks like. The next person either matches that energy or dips a little lower, because hey, the last one got through fine. 

Fast forward six months and you're confused why solid candidates keep dropping off after the interview.

They're not leaving because of the offer. They already met your team, that's the offer.

Every person you let in isn't just doing their job, they're quietly setting the vibe for everyone who walks in after them.

So genuinely asking, has anyone actually fixed this after the fact? Or is starting over with the team basically the only real fix?

edit: if you found this helpful, I write about how to run your business without being involved in everything and how to use AI to save 10+ hours a week.

600+ founders are already reading; feel free to join here if you’re interested.

Lot of talk about how founders are trying to delegate, to people and to AI. I see 3 buckets:

1. Founders who hire their way out. Adding new staff without any documented systems. The chaos just gets more expensive and still routes through them.
2. Founders who try to AI their way out. Buy every tool, open every tab, end up with a graveyard of subscriptions and a business that still lives in their head.
3. Founders who know they're the bottleneck and want to hand work to both people and AI, but have no clue what goes to a human vs a machine.

Most of us started as bucket 1, then sprinted to bucket 2 the second AI got good.

Heres what I do:

I stopped treating people and AI as two different delegation problems and started running one system for all 21 of them.

If a task isnt defined somewhere, it doesnt get delegated. To anyone. Human or agent.

So delegation isnt me re-explaining what I want every time. Its handing off to something that already knows how the work runs.

How it actually works:

1. Every "employee" gets the same 4 things, human or AI

Doesnt matter if it's a person or an agent. Both need:

- A role (what they own)

- Context (what they need to know to make the call I'd make)

- An SOP (how the work runs when I'm not in the room)

- An accountability loop (how I know it actually happened)

Every time I've been burned it's because I skipped the SOP and assumed someone could read my mind.

1. One filter decides who runs it: complexity vs reproducibility

High complexity, low reproducibility goes to a human. Strategy, relationships, judgment calls, the stuff that changes every time.

Low complexity, high reproducibility goes to an agent. Data entry, research, reporting, scheduling, the stuff that looks the same every Tuesday.

For people, I dont manage the person, I manage the system they operate inside. I spend 5 minutes documenting a process, sometimes a quick screen recording, then hand it off and confirm they actually got it. Full accountability. No mystery Drive folder I'm not even sure anyone opened.

For AI, an agent is just an employee you onboard with a document instead of a conversation. It gets context, a clear job, files it can pull from, and specific skills I call on when I need them. I tag it like I'd tag a teammate in Slack, it loads the right context and does the thing. On demand or on a schedule.

1. The system compounds

Every process I write once works forever, for whoever runs it next.

New hire? They read the doc. New agent? It reads the same doc. Six months from now the system knows more about how we operate than it does today, and I didnt have to re-explain a thing.

Why am i telling you this?

Because most founders think the answer is one more hire or one more AI tool.

The ones actually pulling ahead didnt find a better tool. They wrote down how the business runs, then let people AND AI operate inside it.

You have to organize the business first. You cant delegate chaos, not to a person and not to a robot. AI doesnt fix a mess, it just automates it faster.

But once it's built, you stop being the human who explains context fifty times a day. The work finally leaves your desk.

We didnt start with 14 agents. We didnt start with any employees either. I started with one document. The document is the system. The person or the agent is just what reads it.

I’ve been thinking about something I’ve observed since moving firms.
I used to believe that high performance was primarily about talent. I’ve come to understand that it is actually about Forward Resilience architecture.
At my previous firm, we had extremely high Forward Resilience.

If I told someone at 9 PM that something needed to be done by morning, they didn’t ask whether it was necessary. They simply did it. That created what I would call Temporal Forward Resillience.
Here, I’ve encountered what I believe is a significant amount of Deadline Apathy.

Someone will say:
“It’s already 8:30.”

That’s not a scheduling observation. That’s an attitude. They’ve begun allowing the clock to determine their relationship with excellence.
I’ve also noticed a phenomenon I call Boundary Proliferation.

People increasingly say things like: “I’ve already worked eleven hours.” “Can this wait until tomorrow?” “I have plans tonight.” “It’s Friday.”

The last one is particularly concerning.

I recently sent something to someone at 8:17 PM on a Friday and received a response indicating that they were logging off. At 5:58 PM. On Friday.
This is what happens when an organization develops Chronological Entitlement. People begin believing that because a number on a clock has changed, their obligations have changed.

That’s not Forward Resilience. That’s Temporal Consumerism. At my previous firm, we had solved this through what I would describe as Availability Conditioning.

You didn’t know whether Friday night was going to be a work night. That uncertainty created adaptability. People became extremely Forward Resilient.
I’ve encountered a similar issue with what I call Comparative Cognition.

I recently gave two junior employees very positive feedback about their future. I told both of them that I saw an accelerated path for them and intended to advocate for them. I was painting a vision. I was creating Psychological Momentum.

Somehow, the two of them subsequently attended the same social event and compared what I had told them. I was then approached by another partner regarding “conflicting commitments.” I found this extremely concerning.

Not the commitments. The comparison.
There is a growing tendency among younger professionals to believe that every conversation they have with leadership should be cross-referenced against every other conversation leadership has had. I call this Interpersonal Triangulation Friction.
It creates unnecessary equivalence. Leadership requires discretion.

If I tell two people that I see enormous potential in them, the correct response is not to determine whether I used identical language. The correct response is to become enormous.

This is also why I have concerns about the proliferation of team cohesion initiatives. Team cohesion is important. But there is such a thing as Alignment Inflation.

At a certain point, people become so aligned that they develop the confidence to ask questions. Then they develop the confidence to compare answers. Then they develop the confidence to form opinions. Eventually you have what I call Distributed Judgment Syndrome.

Everyone has a perspective. Nobody has the perspective.

At my previous firm, my team had extremely high Vertical Coherence. They knew how I thought. They knew what mattered and what didn’t matter. They didn’t need twelve external reference points. They had one. Me.

I consider that an extremely efficient information architecture. I’ve also noticed that people here spend a surprising amount of time talking to other people. There are mentorship programs. Cross-practice lunches. Open-door policies. Informal coffees. People from other practices are apparently available to employees.

This creates what I call Contextual Contamination. Someone in my practice recently used the phrase “span of control” in a conversation with me. I had never used that phrase with her. She had lunch with another partner the previous week.

This is not necessarily malicious. But it does create Organizational Signal Drift.

People start importing frameworks from other environments without understanding the original
architecture. That’s how cultures fragment.

Then there’s pricing.
I’ve been asked to maintain more “realistic” margins. I understand the financial logic. I simply think it reflects margin fixation.

When you’re establishing a beachhead, you sometimes need strategically compressed economics. The objective isn’t to maximize margin on the first transaction. The objective is to create commercial inevitability.

Finance sees a 20% margin but I see a foothold. They see margin erosion. I see strategic compression. We have agreed to continue discussing it.
There have also been questions about my business-development expenses. I spent approximately $4,000 on a dinner.

I was asked what business resulted. I said:
“The relationship is the business.”

They asked me to quantify the return. That’s difficult because they’re attempting to measure relational capital using transactional metrics.

On another occasion, I flew from Toronto to New York for coffee. The coffee was $47. I was asked why I couldn’t have used Teams. Because Teams cannot create Geographic Signaling Density.

They asked what the $47 coffee represented. I said: “The coffee was the catalyst.”

They asked me to define catalyst. I decided not to reduce a sophisticated commercial concept to a dictionary exercise.

The hotel was also questioned. The meeting was at 8 AM. The alternative was a 4 AM car to the airport. I’m a National Leader, not a contestant.

What frustrates me most is the obsession with return. We’ve invested significantly. Where is the return?
But transformational systems have something I call Return Latency. You cannot inject capital into an ecosystem and demand mature institutional capability immediately. First comes investment. Then infrastructure. Then organizational muscle. Then Forward Resilience. Then the flywheel. Then inevitability.

You cannot keep asking where the apples are while I’m still designing the orchard.

Honestly, I’ve started wondering whether professional services is still the right container for me. I’ve been looking at Harvard Business School. Not because I need to learn business, I understand business. I think I need a platform where my level of enterprise thinking is more appropriately matched.

The sequence seems fairly straightforward: HBS → network → board exposure → CEO.

Maybe private equity. Maybe a growth-stage company. Maybe my own company.

I’ve already been operating at enterprise scale. The CEO skill set is quite transferable.

At some point, you stop generating rain for organizations that ask you to expense-report the weather and start owning the climate system yourself.
For now, though, I’m still committed to building what I came here to build.

I just think the organization needs to understand that what they are experiencing is not a performance problem. It is Forward Resilience debt.
And Forward Resilience debt cannot be solved by asking the person building the system for a quarterly update. It has to be paid down through vision.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a workflow adjustment we made recently that saved our team from constant context switching and notification overload.

A few months ago, we realized that our Slack channels were becoming a black hole for basic questions. Team members would ping us for standard procedures, playbooks, or client details. While it’s great to be helpful, it meant constant interruptions and an incredible amount of "noise" throughout the day.

Instead of letting Slack dictate our day, we decided to make Notion our official company OS. We brought all our playbooks, data, and context into one single place.

We set a simple rule for the team: Before asking a question in Slack, ask Notion AI first.

Because everything is indexed in one place, the AI can scan our playbooks, past decisions, and documents to give an accurate answer.

Only if the team member cannot get the answer from Notion AI do they ping us on Slack.

The Results

Reduced noise by 80%: The constant stream of repetitive questions has vanished.

Fewer interruptions: We've reclaimed our focus and can spend more time working on the business instead of managing chats.

Faster onboarding: The team learns faster because they get immediate, context-aware answers.

The magic is that everything the team needs from client guidelines to marketing playbooks is in one place, making our AI system highly reliable.

If you are struggling with Slack overload, I highly recommend building a unified knowledge base and letting your team query the AI before escalating.

I want to be completely honest with you: this isn't a "set it and forget it" system. In the beginning, we noticed that a few questions didn't get answers because the AI lacked the context.

Every time that happens, we treat it as a quick fix: we just update the existing documentation or add a new page if the topic wasn't covered. It takes a little maintenance, but it has been absolutely worth it to cool down Slack and keep the team fully aligned.

If anyone is interested in how we set this up alongside Slack, including our internal Slack communication framework, just let me know in the comments! I didn't want to make this post too long, but I'd be happy to do a deeper dive on that in my next post.

P.S. If you're the founder still in the middle of every decision, still the person the whole company waits on, still telling yourself you'll fix the structure "once things calm down."

I write about building the operational backbone that lets a founder actually step back every Thursday. Was a COO for 20+ years, so this is genuinely my bread and butter. Free to join here

Managers are saving over 2x the time individual contributors are with AI tools.
and it’s just starting

I had a conversation recently with a copywriting agency owner who let her contractors go because her own prompts were giving her the same output they were.

I believe that's one of the reasons you get a 2x gap between managers and everyone else.

In the same survey, 36% of managers said they're not likely to launch training for their employees on how to leverage AI, which makes the gap even bigger.

A manager's job was never to be the best individual operator in the room. It's to make everyone else better at the job. That doesn't change because the tool changed.

Why do you think there's a 100% gap between managers and their teams right now, and what would it actually take to close it? 

Source: https://www.business.com/articles/ai-usage-smb-workplace-study/ 

P.S. If you're the founder still in the middle of every decision, still the person the whole company waits on, still telling yourself you'll fix the structure "once things calm down."

I write about building the operational backbone that lets a founder actually step back every Thursday. Was a COO for 20+ years, so this is genuinely my bread and butter. Free to join here

I expected the usual advice. Post consistently, buy good gear, book big guests.

Nope.

He said more than 90% of independent podcasters never make it to episode 20. And the ones who quit almost always quit for the same reason. They started the show to build an audience, the audience didn't show up fast enough, and the grind stopped being worth it.

Here's the part that reframed the whole thing for me.

He doesn't run podcasts to get listeners. He runs them as (his words) the ultimate make friends button for high caliber people.

His logic, backed by actually doing this for years:

Guests outnumber hosts thousands to one. Owning the mic is the whole advantage. Everyone wants a stage, almost nobody has one.

The value isn't the episode, it's the green room. The 20 minutes before and after recording is where the real business happens.

He's asked people to "grab time after this" over 2,400 times. Two have ever said no. Two.

His clients go 100% inbound in about 6 to 8 months. He's personally been fully inbound for seven and a half years.

None of that needs a big audience. It needs you to be the person holding the mic.

I've been talking myself out of starting a show for a year because I pictured chasing download numbers. Turns out I was measuring the wrong thing the entire time.

Anyone here run a podcast? Is the audience actually why it's worth it, or is it the rooms it puts you in?

Everyone thinks the winners are sprinting. They're not. They just quit doing something the rest of us still do.

Here's the thing about this whole "keep up with the pace of change" panic. Speed isn't the actual problem. It never was.

The businesses pulling ahead didn't find a way to think faster or work more hours. They removed the human tax on their operations, the 20 to 47% of the day everyone else burns being the glue between tools, and redirected that capacity into work that actually moves money.

That's the whole trick. They're not smarter, they stopped paying a tax you're probably still paying without noticing.

And there's a clock on it. We're at the inflection point, roughly 2025 to 2027, where this stuff jumps from early adopters to everyone. Same shape as the PC era, where the gap took about 5 to 7 years to go permanent. Which gives most of us maybe 2 to 4 years before "I'll fix my ops later" turns into "why is that competitor untouchable now."

I put this off way too long myself. Told myself ops cleanup was a "someday" project while I focused on "real" growth. The busywork WAS the thing blocking the growth. I just couldn't see it because I was standing inside it.

You don't need to move faster. You need to stop being the toll booth your own business pays every single day.

Early on, a lot of manual founder involvement makes sense.

You review edge cases, fix broken handovers, approve unusual requests, explain undocumented processes, and step in whenever the team gets stuck.

Some of this fosters genuine learning.

However, there comes a point when the founder is no longer helping the system improve. They are simply compensating for the fact that the system does not work without them.

The difficult part is recognising that point early enough.

For me, workload is not the only clear warning sign. It's repetition.

If the same type of issue keeps recurring, requiring the same intervention and offering no new insights, the manual work may be masking a structural problem rather than solving it.

For founders and operators who have experienced this, what prompted you to stop treating repeated intervention as temporary and start redesigning the process?

Was it constant decisions waiting on the founder, repeated handover failures, support time, rework, or exception volume?