Growing a business is one thing, but building a business that can run without its founder is another challenge entirely. Too many entrepreneurs become the biggest obstacle to their own growth. They hold on to every decision instead of building the systems, teams and leadership needed to scale.
On the latest episode of Business Trends Today, Jennifer Gore, CEO and Founder of Evergreen Business Coaching, joins us to discuss what it takes to build a business with lasting value that doesn’t need daily owner involvement.
Why founders become the bottleneck
According to Gore, scaling a business requires systems thinking. She believes that owners need to ask whether their current way of operating still works if the business doubles in size. They also need to know who would do the work if it did.
"There has to be a system and a way of doing business that is beyond just the owner."
Founders start out wearing every hat because they have no other choice. They lack the leverage or the cash to hand work off to someone else. But the problems a business faces change at each revenue stage. Many owners keep running the company the same way that got them to the last stage.
That habit becomes a liability at the exit stage. A company evaluating an acquisition is really evaluating whether the business can function without the person who built it.
The one-week test
Gore challenges the business owners she coaches to leave for a week and see what breaks. She ran the experiment on herself years ago. She engineered a seven-month maternity leave by working the business down piece by piece so it could function without her.
Most owners resist the idea out of trust issues, fear of delegation or perfectionism, Gore said. She treats it as an operational problem rather than a personal one. Owners can document most of what they do instinctively and turn it into a repeatable process.
Gore’s own team produced the same revenue while she was away. That forced her to question what her daily presence was actually adding. Owners can override systems and get things done quickly. Employees have to follow the process that’s in place. That can slow things down, but it builds consistency the business can rely on.
A business that depends entirely on its founder is vulnerable to anything that pulls that person away. That includes a family emergency, an illness or any other unplanned event. Stepping back from daily operations also frees the owner to focus on strategy and where the business is headed. Without that shift, owners stay stuck in minutiae the operations team could handle instead.
The four numbers every owner should track
Owners should know four metrics on a rolling basis rather than relying on instinct, according to Gore.
- Marketing: How many prospects are contacting the business
- Sales conversion: How many of those prospects are qualified leads, and how many convert into paying clients. Without this number, a business can’t tell whether it has a marketing problem or a sales problem
- Production: Whether the business can deliver on what its sales team sold. Just as important, whether it’s producing more than the sales pace can support
- Finances: How much revenue is coming in, whether that work is profitable and whether the business is actually collecting it
Gore recommends checking pace against goals by the 15th of each month. A business forecasting $100,000 in monthly revenue that’s sitting at $20,000 by the 15th has a real problem. That problem needs attention immediately, not in a month-end report that arrives too late to act on.
None of this works without a willingness to keep making changes. The businesses that scale are the ones whose owners treat every problem as something to fix for good. Owners build that approach one system at a time. It’s what turns a business into something that can grow, and eventually sell, without the founder holding it up.
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