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This article is part of the America's Favorite Mom & Pop Shops series. Read more stories
If you’ve ever worked for a mom-and-pop business, as well as a startup, you may have noticed some striking similarities. Founders often like to make choices straight from the gut and they have a hand in almost every decision.
Every March, we celebrate National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day, the scrappy founders who bet on themselves and start something real. But Harvard Business School researcher Noam Wasserman found that within three years, half of these founders are no longer running the company they started. For many, the business outgrows the way they ran it. The informal systems and gut calls that worked early on start to work against the team as the company grows. The founder at the center of every decision often stops being an asset and starts being a bottleneck.
Signs you’ve hit the ceiling
Does this sound familiar? I once worked with a founder who had to be copied on every email and asked about every decision. When a key hire was struggling, a client was about to walk or cash was tight, nobody wanted to talk to the boss. Issues got passed around until they became too big to ignore.
Here’s another early signal that the founder is a bottleneck. When someone joins and has to spend their first two weeks figuring out who actually has authority over what, there’s a structure problem. A few things founders hear regularly at this stage:
“I didn’t know who to ask”
“I thought you wanted to approve that”
“I was waiting to hear back from you”
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