Early in my coaching career I worked with a lot of entrepreneurs who just wanted to break 6 figures. Now my clients have much bigger goals. They have been making 6 figures for a long time but the million dollar mark has escaped them.
The primary reason for this is they think the strategies that got them to 6 figures will get them to 7 figures and that just is not the case. As a result they are the bottleneck, the ones who are limiting their own growth.
Maybe you can relate to one of these entrepreneurs who became the bottleneck in their business.
High Quality in High Demand
You provide a much-needed service to your clients. They like you, trust you and rely on you. Now you want to grow and outsource many of the key tasks and roles to your team of subcontractors (or employees) but your clients push back. Nope, they want you! They continue to work directly with you or require you as the lead on the project and you are stuck. You are the bottleneck.
The Superstar
You have a passion and/or strength for the service you offer. You mistakenly believe that getting down in the trenches every day is essential to train your team and build the trust of your clients. You personally take every customer service call that comes in – who else can better serve your clients, right? Every sales opportunity you personally handle – who else can sell your services better than you? You do such an excellent job that you generate tons of leads. But you are so “in the trenches” you can not pull up long enough to handle them. Now you are at a growth impasse – you can not manage it all if you want to grow.
The Fast Paced Visionary
You see exactly where you need to go with your business. You see what needs to happen at every step of the way. When you meet with your team you rattle off ideas, opportunities and tasks faster than a speeding bullet. The problem is: your team can not keep up. Somehow your ideas get lost in translation. What is so obvious to you is not obvious to them. Your great ideas never quite get implemented fast enough, so you feel that you are missing the boat (or they are just slow they could not possibly be right for your team.) You spend countless hours frustrated with the pace at which they are getting things done and at some point you just give up and start doing things yourself.
Any of this sound familiar? These are all seemingly harmless ways in which we have the illusion we are doing the right thing to grow, but what is really happening is we are stifling good strategies because we do not know how to execute them properly.
So, where are YOU being the bottleneck in your business? I want to hear from you.
Melanie Benson Strick is the Million Dollar Lifestyle Business Coach. If you’d like to learn more about how to get out of your own way and stop hijacking your success, you can download her new report, The CEO Factor Manifesto at TheCEOFactorManifesto.com.