July 15, 2025 • 12 mins
Are you cramming 40 hours of work into a 20-hour week? If you're the approvals queen, the Slack oracle, and the one everyone’s waiting on; you're not running a business, you’re babysitting one.
In this episode, I walk through the real cost of being the bottleneck (yes, even the invisible kind), and how to get out of it using a three-part delegation system that’s saving me, my sanity, and my business. If your team is stalling while they wait for you, this one's your wake-up call and your way out.
In this episode, you’ll learn…
- Why bottlenecking is quietly killing your momentum — and how to recognize it
- The 3-step Bottleneck Fix: Find your pattern, Name it + Delegate it, Design for autonomy
- How to use AI + systems to stop micro-managing without losing quality
- Why trusting your team has to come before they’ve “earned” it
This episode at a glance:
[0:17] - If you ghosted your business for 72 hours, would it grind to a halt?
[4:44] - You’re not lazy if you shift these behaviors — you’re legacy-minded.
[11:17] - The hidden cost of doing it all yourself isn’t just burnout, it’s blocking the growth you say you want.”
[12:00] - You don’t have to do it all to be the one who gets it done.
Resources and links mentioned in this episode:
- Join the AI for Founders LinkedIn Group
Weekly tools, prompts, and support to help you delegate smarter, scale with clarity, and build systems with soul.
Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Dawn Andre (00:01):
Ah, are you doing 40 hours a week in a 20 hour
window? Let me guess. You're theapprovals queen, the final call
on every decision and thewalking, Frequently Asked
Questions page for your entireteam. If you ghosted your
business for 72 hours, would itgrind to a halt? I asked that
(00:22):
question to my clients andfuture members of the AI
founders community, and theirresponses were brutal. Payroll
wouldn't run clients wouldn'tget their proposals, and lunch
orders would be chaos. Onefounder said, Honestly, I think
my team would just sit aroundand wait for me to answer. Slack
that sucks, lady friends, and ifit sounds familiar, this is the
truth. Every minute you spend asthe bottleneck in your business
(00:46):
is a minute your business isstuck and not growing, and
that's just five minutes ofreviewing, approving, deciding,
it starts to really add up. It'skilling momentum. It's quietly
costing you growth. So let'stalk about it.
You're listening to she's thatfounder business strategy and
time management for femalefounders, all powered with a
(01:07):
little AI magic. This is theplace that helps ambitious women
stop drowning in decisions andstart owning their CEO seat.
We're talking smarter delegationleadership systems that don't
collapse when you take a nap,and AI tools that actually
lighten your load, not add toit. I'm your host, Dawn Andrews,
and if your to do list is longerthan a CVS receipt, this episode
(01:30):
is for you.
Okay, here's what we're talkingabout today, you will finally
see the invisible tax you'vebeen paying that's dragging your
business down. It's you. I know.
I'm sorry. I wish I didn't haveto say that.
But let's get real.
If you're still the go to forevery approval answer quick
question, this is your wake upcall. I'm breaking down the real
(01:55):
cost of doing it all yourself,how it's quietly stalling your
growth, and what to do instead,without throwing a match in the
window of the car and letting itfly down the freeway on fire.
Let's get you out of thebottleneck stage and back into
the CEO seat where you belong.
This episode is personal for me.
Y'all. You may not know it, butbehind the scenes, there's a lot
going on over here. I am the momof two teenage boys, one who is
(02:19):
graduating and about to jumpinto the next part of his life,
and I am also the queen of thesandwich generation because I'm
caring for my elderly mom, andit's a lot. It's a lot to still
have time for me and still givefocus to the business, and I
still was being the one whoapproved every proposal, rewrote
(02:39):
every email and reviewed everyGoogle Doc Talk about
bottleneck. I mean, I'm less abottleneck, and I've been more
of a damn my team is talented,but I had trained them to wait
for me, and I had set up thesystems to wait for me, and it
reached a breaking point whileI'm trying to give my full
attention to my mom or even tosomething else in the business,
I'm still jumping back and forthediting things. In fact, it got
(03:02):
to a place where I tell my team,what do you need the most from
me in the next 15 minutes?
Because I would take care ofthings in between, in pockets of
time.
And that's what really hadme realize that I am not running
a business. I was justbabysitting it. And I see this
every day with the founders andbusiness leaders that I'm
coaching as well, maybe not asexacerbated as my situation is
(03:23):
in the current moment, but it'scosting us, and this is the
hidden cost of doing it allourselves. And when you do that,
and you really do that, yourteam's initiative dies, your
growth stalls, and yourcreativity is crushed under
constant context switching,because you're jumping from
thing to thing.
But there is away out. It starts with one
(03:46):
question, where are you thebottleneck? So here's what
helped me get out of this, andI'll share some other details of
this whole excavation andextraction process in the next
several episodes. Here are mythree steps for breaking the
bottleneck. Find your pattern.
This isn't just about time, it'sabout energy leaks. So be self
reflective. Take a look at whattasks get held up if you don't
(04:09):
touch them, what decisionsalways come back to you, and
what are you procrastinating on,even though you know your team
could help you.
Here is a storyof Emma. She's the founder of a
creative agency, and she wasspending time rewriting all of
her clients decks, not editingthem. She was actually rewriting
(04:32):
them, bullet by bullet. Wemapped her week, and we found
that she spent nine hours a weekfinalizing that is more than a
full workday of avoidablebottleneck behavior.
Here's thetakeaway, you're not lazy if you
shift these behaviors, you'relegacy minded. You can't scale
excellence if everything islocked in your head. So letting
(04:53):
go of that bottleneck andletting go of some of the
control means that you'reactually building a business
that lasts you.
So step two, name it anddelegate it once you have an
idea of those choke points.
Sowe talked about what gets held
up if you don't touch it, whatdecisions always come back to
you. And what do youprocrastinate on, even though
you know your team could helpyou that's naming it. So once
(05:15):
you name it, you can start todelegate it. If you know the
choke points, name them outloud, write them down. It does
two things. It externalizes thehabit, so it starts to make that
how you think and how you reactto your bottleneck situations.
Most importantly, it opens thedoor to solutions, solutions
that can be handled by yourteam, systems or AI. Start
(05:35):
small. For instance, approvingall invoices becomes setting a
$500auto approval threshold expenses
up to $500 somebody else canmake that decision, or whatever
your number is for yourbusiness, writing every client
email becomes creating a scriptlibrary. We're on LinkedIn, and
we're starting to use LinkedIn awhole lot more, and so I'm
creating a script library sothat my team knows what my
(05:58):
common comments, DMS, responseswould be, and they can make
their first pass at it, or justtake care of it all together.
And we have a brand voice, AIGPT, that they can also use to
help rewrite and respond tothings in my voice.
Anotherexample might be being the slack
Oracle, the person who is alwayson Slack becomes creating
(06:20):
certain office hours and ordecision trees so that other
people are responsible for amain portion of your decisions,
so that you don't stop theprocess.
For those of you thatmight be thinking, my team is
incompetent, or I'm surroundedby idiots, which I have heard on
my client calls, that is nottrue, and that's on you. What it
really means is your team isuntrained, or you're hiring
poorly, and either way, still onyou, you've been over
(06:44):
functioning, which makes itimpossible for them to step up.
If you are holding it alltogether all the time and always
the backstop, they're nevergoing to step up. They're not
going to show you what they'vegot. First, you've got to give
them space to try and fail andimprove. Here's an example. One
of our executives that we workwith was reviewing every piece
(07:06):
of content before it went live.
The amount of time that thishighly paid, high functioning,
like one of a kind executive wasspending on social media posts
was astonishing.
We built atrust ladder to start with low
risk tasks so that they couldreview together. We built a
(07:27):
custom voice GPT so that theirteam could put together drafts
of all of those posts beforethey went out, and all of the
content before it went out. AndI held this founder's hand until
they were able to build upenough confidence and trust that
their team was going to be okayand that the messaging that was
going out was going to be okay.
It took about a month, butfinally, they were out of the
(07:49):
day to day ops of all of thecontent and social media. If you
are a founder, and I say thiswith love, and I say this from
experience, you should not be inthe minutia of social media. It
is an entry point to yourfunnel, and it is not high
dollar value for what it is thatyou specifically do best.
Okay,last step design for autonomy,
(08:12):
not just for relief. Sodelegation isn't dumping. It's
not like, Oh, my God, thank Godthat's on my plate. It's
designing what systems willsupport your team making
decisions without you. Is it aracy decision tree? Is it a
communication workflow? Is itthose boundaries on how much can
be spent? Is it snippets ofconversation or GPT you can use
(08:35):
to make it work? Is it an autoworkflow you can build? Who
knows, but we can talk aboutthat. That's what I'm here for.
Think about it this way. Itcould be SOPs that are alive,
not buried in some notion stackor Google Drive. It is weekly
decision making meetings. Howwould you feel if every meeting
that you had actually crossedthings off the list helped you
(08:57):
decide and moved things forwardso that you didn't have to think
about them anymore, the kinds ofmeetings that you feel bad if
you miss them, if they have tobe rescheduled because they're
urgent and important, and it'swhere all of the magic happens.
Weekly decision meetings usingfeedback loops, so that you have
ways of sharing the information,having your team do it, and then
(09:19):
both of you getting back witheach other to determine, how did
that go? How was it for you? Howwas it for me?
And finally,using founder friendly AI tools
that handle 80% of thatrepetitive, administrative team
oriented work, so you can allfocus, not just you as the
executive or you as the leader,but even them in their
expertise, they can focus on the20% that matters. How about
(09:41):
that? This is a shift that we'vebeen making, and we've been
making it fast, and we've beenmaking it hardcore. Most of our
work is now running through AIworkflows, and I trust my team,
because not only did I buildthose systems that empower but
we built them together.
Together. I didn't just dump andrun if you're nodding along,
(10:03):
thinking, okay, but where do Ieven start? Start with joining
our community. We have dawn, theAI for founders group on
LinkedIn. It's where delegationmeets automation, all with heart
and AI magic. I'm droppingweekly prompts, tools, mini
scripts, recommendations to helpyou stop bottlenecking your own
(10:26):
brilliance.
So join us. The linkto the AI founders group is in
the show notes. We can't wait tosee you there, or you can find
us on LinkedIn at AI forfounders. Let's recap what we
did today. We helped youidentify your bottleneck
pattern. We named it so youcould delegate it, and we helped
you design it for Team autonomy,not just for short term relief
(10:48):
or a breather. This is yourhomework. Ask yourself today, if
I disappeared for three days,what would stop moving, and what
would I come back to after thatbreak? And then pick one of
those things to hand off thisweek, and if one of them feels
too big, pick a portion of thatone thing to hand off this week.
Not everything, not perfectly,just one thing. Start testing
(11:11):
this and come share your answersin the AI for founders
community. No shame, juststrategy. Because the hidden
cost of doing it all yourselfisn't just burnout. It's
blocking the very growth thatyou say that you want, and if
you're not growing, you'redying. Let's fix it one hand off
at a time.
Thanks for hanging out with metoday. If this episode made you
(11:32):
think or made you want tofinally hand something off.
Amen. To that. Leave a review.
Share it with your work wife, orDM me what you're letting go
this week. Send me a message onLinkedIn. And hey, I want you to
remember that you don't have tobe the one to do it all, to be
the one who gets it done. I'llsee you next time on she's that
(11:52):
founder. You.
Ah, are you doing 40 hours a week in a 20 hour
window? Let me guess. You're theapprovals queen, the final call
on every decision and thewalking, Frequently Asked
Questions page for your entireteam. If you ghosted your
business for 72 hours, would itgrind to a halt? I asked that
(00:22):
question to my clients andfuture members of the AI
founders community, and theirresponses were brutal. Payroll
wouldn't run clients wouldn'tget their proposals, and lunch
orders would be chaos. Onefounder said, Honestly, I think
my team would just sit aroundand wait for me to answer. Slack
that sucks, lady friends, and ifit sounds familiar, this is the
truth. Every minute you spend asthe bottleneck in your business
(00:46):
is a minute your business isstuck and not growing, and
that's just five minutes ofreviewing, approving, deciding,
it starts to really add up. It'skilling momentum. It's quietly
costing you growth. So let'stalk about it.
You're listening to she's thatfounder business strategy and
time management for femalefounders, all powered with a
(01:07):
little AI magic. This is theplace that helps ambitious women
stop drowning in decisions andstart owning their CEO seat.
We're talking smarter delegationleadership systems that don't
collapse when you take a nap,and AI tools that actually
lighten your load, not add toit. I'm your host, Dawn Andrews,
and if your to do list is longerthan a CVS receipt, this episode
(01:30):
is for you.
Okay, here's what we're talkingabout today, you will finally
see the invisible tax you'vebeen paying that's dragging your
business down. It's you. I know.
I'm sorry. I wish I didn't haveto say that.
But let's get real.
If you're still the go to forevery approval answer quick
question, this is your wake upcall. I'm breaking down the real
(01:55):
cost of doing it all yourself,how it's quietly stalling your
growth, and what to do instead,without throwing a match in the
window of the car and letting itfly down the freeway on fire.
Let's get you out of thebottleneck stage and back into
the CEO seat where you belong.
This episode is personal for me.
Y'all. You may not know it, butbehind the scenes, there's a lot
going on over here. I am the momof two teenage boys, one who is
(02:19):
graduating and about to jumpinto the next part of his life,
and I am also the queen of thesandwich generation because I'm
caring for my elderly mom, andit's a lot. It's a lot to still
have time for me and still givefocus to the business, and I
still was being the one whoapproved every proposal, rewrote
(02:39):
every email and reviewed everyGoogle Doc Talk about
bottleneck. I mean, I'm less abottleneck, and I've been more
of a damn my team is talented,but I had trained them to wait
for me, and I had set up thesystems to wait for me, and it
reached a breaking point whileI'm trying to give my full
attention to my mom or even tosomething else in the business,
I'm still jumping back and forthediting things. In fact, it got
(03:02):
to a place where I tell my team,what do you need the most from
me in the next 15 minutes?
Because I would take care ofthings in between, in pockets of
time.
And that's what really hadme realize that I am not running
a business. I was justbabysitting it. And I see this
every day with the founders andbusiness leaders that I'm
coaching as well, maybe not asexacerbated as my situation is
(03:23):
in the current moment, but it'scosting us, and this is the
hidden cost of doing it allourselves. And when you do that,
and you really do that, yourteam's initiative dies, your
growth stalls, and yourcreativity is crushed under
constant context switching,because you're jumping from
thing to thing.
But there is away out. It starts with one
(03:46):
question, where are you thebottleneck? So here's what
helped me get out of this, andI'll share some other details of
this whole excavation andextraction process in the next
several episodes. Here are mythree steps for breaking the
bottleneck. Find your pattern.
This isn't just about time, it'sabout energy leaks. So be self
reflective. Take a look at whattasks get held up if you don't
(04:09):
touch them, what decisionsalways come back to you, and
what are you procrastinating on,even though you know your team
could help you.
Here is a storyof Emma. She's the founder of a
creative agency, and she wasspending time rewriting all of
her clients decks, not editingthem. She was actually rewriting
(04:32):
them, bullet by bullet. Wemapped her week, and we found
that she spent nine hours a weekfinalizing that is more than a
full workday of avoidablebottleneck behavior.
Here's thetakeaway, you're not lazy if you
shift these behaviors, you'relegacy minded. You can't scale
excellence if everything islocked in your head. So letting
(04:53):
go of that bottleneck andletting go of some of the
control means that you'reactually building a business
that lasts you.
So step two, name it anddelegate it once you have an
idea of those choke points.
Sowe talked about what gets held
up if you don't touch it, whatdecisions always come back to
you. And what do youprocrastinate on, even though
you know your team could helpyou that's naming it. So once
(05:15):
you name it, you can start todelegate it. If you know the
choke points, name them outloud, write them down. It does
two things. It externalizes thehabit, so it starts to make that
how you think and how you reactto your bottleneck situations.
Most importantly, it opens thedoor to solutions, solutions
that can be handled by yourteam, systems or AI. Start
(05:35):
small. For instance, approvingall invoices becomes setting a
$500auto approval threshold expenses
up to $500 somebody else canmake that decision, or whatever
your number is for yourbusiness, writing every client
email becomes creating a scriptlibrary. We're on LinkedIn, and
we're starting to use LinkedIn awhole lot more, and so I'm
creating a script library sothat my team knows what my
(05:58):
common comments, DMS, responseswould be, and they can make
their first pass at it, or justtake care of it all together.
And we have a brand voice, AIGPT, that they can also use to
help rewrite and respond tothings in my voice.
Anotherexample might be being the slack
Oracle, the person who is alwayson Slack becomes creating
(06:20):
certain office hours and ordecision trees so that other
people are responsible for amain portion of your decisions,
so that you don't stop theprocess.
For those of you thatmight be thinking, my team is
incompetent, or I'm surroundedby idiots, which I have heard on
my client calls, that is nottrue, and that's on you. What it
really means is your team isuntrained, or you're hiring
poorly, and either way, still onyou, you've been over
(06:44):
functioning, which makes itimpossible for them to step up.
If you are holding it alltogether all the time and always
the backstop, they're nevergoing to step up. They're not
going to show you what they'vegot. First, you've got to give
them space to try and fail andimprove. Here's an example. One
of our executives that we workwith was reviewing every piece
(07:06):
of content before it went live.
The amount of time that thishighly paid, high functioning,
like one of a kind executive wasspending on social media posts
was astonishing.
We built atrust ladder to start with low
risk tasks so that they couldreview together. We built a
(07:27):
custom voice GPT so that theirteam could put together drafts
of all of those posts beforethey went out, and all of the
content before it went out. AndI held this founder's hand until
they were able to build upenough confidence and trust that
their team was going to be okayand that the messaging that was
going out was going to be okay.
It took about a month, butfinally, they were out of the
(07:49):
day to day ops of all of thecontent and social media. If you
are a founder, and I say thiswith love, and I say this from
experience, you should not be inthe minutia of social media. It
is an entry point to yourfunnel, and it is not high
dollar value for what it is thatyou specifically do best.
Okay,last step design for autonomy,
(08:12):
not just for relief. Sodelegation isn't dumping. It's
not like, Oh, my God, thank Godthat's on my plate. It's
designing what systems willsupport your team making
decisions without you. Is it aracy decision tree? Is it a
communication workflow? Is itthose boundaries on how much can
be spent? Is it snippets ofconversation or GPT you can use
(08:35):
to make it work? Is it an autoworkflow you can build? Who
knows, but we can talk aboutthat. That's what I'm here for.
Think about it this way. Itcould be SOPs that are alive,
not buried in some notion stackor Google Drive. It is weekly
decision making meetings. Howwould you feel if every meeting
that you had actually crossedthings off the list helped you
(08:57):
decide and moved things forwardso that you didn't have to think
about them anymore, the kinds ofmeetings that you feel bad if
you miss them, if they have tobe rescheduled because they're
urgent and important, and it'swhere all of the magic happens.
Weekly decision meetings usingfeedback loops, so that you have
ways of sharing the information,having your team do it, and then
(09:19):
both of you getting back witheach other to determine, how did
that go? How was it for you? Howwas it for me?
And finally,using founder friendly AI tools
that handle 80% of thatrepetitive, administrative team
oriented work, so you can allfocus, not just you as the
executive or you as the leader,but even them in their
expertise, they can focus on the20% that matters. How about
(09:41):
that? This is a shift that we'vebeen making, and we've been
making it fast, and we've beenmaking it hardcore. Most of our
work is now running through AIworkflows, and I trust my team,
because not only did I buildthose systems that empower but
we built them together.
Together. I didn't just dump andrun if you're nodding along,
(10:03):
thinking, okay, but where do Ieven start? Start with joining
our community. We have dawn, theAI for founders group on
LinkedIn. It's where delegationmeets automation, all with heart
and AI magic. I'm droppingweekly prompts, tools, mini
scripts, recommendations to helpyou stop bottlenecking your own
(10:26):
brilliance.
So join us. The linkto the AI founders group is in
the show notes. We can't wait tosee you there, or you can find
us on LinkedIn at AI forfounders. Let's recap what we
did today. We helped youidentify your bottleneck
pattern. We named it so youcould delegate it, and we helped
you design it for Team autonomy,not just for short term relief
(10:48):
or a breather. This is yourhomework. Ask yourself today, if
I disappeared for three days,what would stop moving, and what
would I come back to after thatbreak? And then pick one of
those things to hand off thisweek, and if one of them feels
too big, pick a portion of thatone thing to hand off this week.
Not everything, not perfectly,just one thing. Start testing
(11:11):
this and come share your answersin the AI for founders
community. No shame, juststrategy. Because the hidden
cost of doing it all yourselfisn't just burnout. It's
blocking the very growth thatyou say that you want, and if
you're not growing, you'redying. Let's fix it one hand off
at a time.
Thanks for hanging out with metoday. If this episode made you
(11:32):
think or made you want tofinally hand something off.
Amen. To that. Leave a review.
Share it with your work wife, orDM me what you're letting go
this week. Send me a message onLinkedIn. And hey, I want you to
remember that you don't have tobe the one to do it all, to be
the one who gets it done. I'llsee you next time on she's that
(11:52):
founder. You.
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