The Founder Bottleneck: How to Build a Business That Grows Without You

Most entrepreneurs start their business for freedom — but end up becoming the bottleneck.

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad breaks down how to build a team that doesn’t just run the business, but actually grows it without you. He walks through the four stages of leadership development — Direction, Delegation, Duplication, and Development — and explains why many founders stay stuck managing tasks instead of building leaders. You’ll learn how accountability really works inside high-performing companies, how to identify and develop A-players, and why clear goals, transparent metrics, and leadership systems are essential if you want your business to scale beyond you.

If you want a company that performs even when you step away — this episode will show you how to build it.

About Brad Sugars
Internationally known as one of the most influential entrepreneurs, Brad Sugars is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and the #1 business coach in the world. Over the course of his 30-year career as an entrepreneur, Brad has become the CEO of 9+ companies and is the owner of the multimillion-dollar franchise ActionCOACH®. As a husband and father of five, Brad is equally as passionate about his family as he is about business. That’s why, Brad is a strong advocate for building a business that works without you – so you can spend more time doing what really matters to you. Over the years of starting, scaling and selling many businesses, Brad has earned his fair share of scars. Being an entrepreneur is not an easy road. But if you can learn from those who have gone before you, it becomes a lot easier than going at it alone.

Please click here to learn more about Brad Sugars: https://bradsugars.com/

Build a Business That Gives You More Time, Money & Life:
Get The $100M Playbook: https://go.bradsugars.com/100m-playbook-ebook

Transcript

Replace Yourself Monthly

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If I was to give you one task, it'd be look every month, look at one key area where you need to replace yourself. Freedom is the goal. The moment you stop being the bottleneck, you start being free is essentially what we're gonna look at today. You gotta have clear goals, you gotta have transparent metrics, and you gotta have consequences. So set clarity of goal. How many days could you be out of the business and it keeps growing, whether you are there or not? How many days could you leave for without performance dropping? So freedom starts when you're not the smartest person in the room. Welcome back to the$100 million entrepreneur podcast. The moment you stop being the bottleneck, you start being free, is essentially what we're going to look at today. So the team that runs without you or that can grow the business without you, not just run it, not just maintain it, not just sustain it, but how do you build a team that can actually grow the business without you? They need to be able to make decisions without you. The delegation and duplication are two different things. We'll get into that. Performance-driven culture, how do we get there? How do we have accountability and not just presence in the marketplace? So if you have that old mindset, if it is to be, it's up to me. That's often a killer of the growth. And I think you've already worked that out about me that that's a big part of what happens. So when we look at the four levels of leadership development, okay, so your leadership development, the development of your people, what is it that we need to do? Direction, delegation, duplication, development. Let's break that down. Direction. So when you start in business, it's kind of like direction is more of a management style sort of thing. So when you start in business, it's just you, you're the entrepreneur, you're the center of the business. You know, it builds to your first million, maybe even your first three million, comes because you're directing the people around you, if that makes sense. So that's why I like the uh the English term, the managing director type thing. You know, you're a manager and you're directing people around you uh with that. So from there we move to delegation, where now you're starting to build your people. Okay, you're not just telling them what to do and giving them the job. Once you move to delegation, you're see when it comes to delegation, you've got to build in training, you've got to build in a measure, and you've got to build in a system. So if you've got a system and training and a measure, then you've delegated properly, not abdicated to that person. But as you delegate, obviously they're growing in their skill set. You're moving away from I have to do it to we need to get it done. Then we move to duplication, okay? So duplication, if you read the book multipliers, it's like a this is where that starts, where you're building managers in your organization. So I know when we install the Action Coach Management System in companies, what we get to really see is that by being managed properly, people are learning how to manage. Okay, so by being in a management system, I'm learning how to be a manager and run the management system, if that makes sense. So that's where duplication of managers uh becomes a part of it. And that's where it requires you to step up to being a leader when we're at duplication. And then ultimately development. So you need to now develop leaders. Now, all of this can be built in-house, and I love seeing companies that build their team members up in-house, they train them, they build them. Now, sometimes if you're in a super fast growing business, you don't have time to build the people, you need to recruit new people to come into the company and uh build it that way. So if you're thinking about building a large company or if you're in a scale business, you need to build that leadership bench. You need to recruit that leadership bench. So we're gonna look at it from both angles because building that leadership team, building a team of people that come in, they see a management training, they see a process by which they can learn, they can grow, and they have a brightness of the future. They have a path in your organization is always a great structure for them to have. So, first things first, to do leadership, you have to have a framework. Now, what do I mean by a framework? Vision, mission, culture, objectives, key results, business plan. Like you have to have those things documented. It's impossible to lead without that framework. In fact, I believe the majority of leadership is that framework. By giving a vision, a vision, a mission, a culture document, and defining who you are and why you do what you do, where are we going? Why do we do it? Who are we? That's your vision, your mission, your culture documents. And then setting the structure, the plans, the objectives, the key results. Having those things in place is what allows leadership to be real. It's what allows leadership to happen. So when you look back and say, okay, management and leadership, and I and I know that somewhere in the late 90s, I think management became a dirty word, which I think is crazy. Management is about building competent, productive people, remember, okay? And leadership is about passionate and focused people. Without competency and productivity, without managers doing their job, building the people in the organization, you can't have great leadership. You need management to build competency and productivity, and you need leadership to build passion and focus. Okay, so your job as a leader is to build leaders. Now I get back to that thing if they need to make a decision without you. So when I look at what I do as a coach, okay, so imagine I'm coaching your business and we work together for an hour every week. We go over all your objectives, your planning, your strategy, all of those things. Or if you're at a very high level, we work together once a month, sort of thing. Well, here's the thing: what if I could teach you to become the coach of your business? In other words, you have someone who is the CEO ultimately, and you are the coach. One hour a week, you coach your CEO and they run the business. See, I always feel as a coach, I'm basically running your business as the owner per se. It's like very large companies have board of directors. You, your coach is sort of like your board of directors, a pseudo-board of directors, if that makes sense. So if we take a look at accountability now, because that's really where leadership kicks in. Below the point, if you go back and watch some of my other videos, you'll see above and below the point. Okay, below the point, we have three behaviors. This is what management works on. They work on um the blame, excuse, and denial. Okay, so watch my management versus leadership video. Above the point, we have uh ownership, accountability, responsibility. Well, management gets them to responsibility, it removes the negative behaviors, the negative structure of the organization. Leadership has to ask people to take accountability. Now you can't give accountability. People have to take accountability, okay? So they have to step up, they have to want to be the leader. Have you ever over-promoted someone? They didn't want to be a leader, but they got promoted into that position, and then you wondered why it didn't actually work for you. So the accountability triangle works this way: you've got to have clear goals, you gotta have transparent metrics, and you've got to have consequences. So set clarity of goals. I see a lot of leaders and managers are way too lazy. They give someone a task and they don't agree a time frame or a performance standard. You've got to have clarity of goals if you want clarity, if you want real performance, okay? Transparent metrics, we need to measure, okay, and they need to be obvious. They need to be out there for everybody to see. And then finally, there needs to be consequences of not hitting them, sort of thing. I was working with a client recently, and um, let's just put it this way: they would set lower goals, knowing that if they hit their annual goals, they go on their annual trip. Okay, so they'd always in negotiating the goal with the CEO, the owner of the business, they'd always negotiate goals that they knew they could achieve. It wasn't really a push. And and that way there was like, it's like we were building a system with no consequences, if that makes sense. So, how do we promote a player's first of all? Um understand this. Many of us over time have to let go of our emotional loyalty to B and C players. D-grade, you've definitely gotten rid of, that's just the way it is. And if you haven't gotten rid of D-graders right now, I would suggest now's the time to do that because you're telling the A's and B's that it's okay to be a D, right? Uh, when you do get rid of them, what does everyone say? Oh, about time you did that. Thank goodness you did that. That's you know what needed to happen. So when you have an emotional loyalty to B and C players, you retain average. Now, if I have a B player and I know they're a B player, it is my responsibility as their leader to let them know that I expect more of them, to let them know where I expect them to step up, to let them know how to become an A player, to build a training program for them, to build into that that if I am their manager, my job is to build their competency, my job is to build their productivity. So, you know, you've heard me talk about scoring your team members on productivity and uh uh uh on on capabilities and productivity, and you know that it's not really their score. If someone has a low capability score, it's the manager's problem. If someone has a low productivity score, it's the manager's problem. Okay? So we need to understand that to be able to allow B and C players to move on to an organization where they will be an A player. Now, how do you identify A players in your organization? These are the people that, and you can read so many books on finding and recruiting A players. I'm just gonna give you my three points around it that I look for. Number one, are they always learning? Are they always striving to learn? Not just what I want them to learn, not just my books or my teachings or what I recommend for them, but are they learning on their own right? Second, are they demanding more of themselves than I would demand of them? Like an A player wants to win more than I want them to win, sort of thing. They want to go out of their way, they want to do that. And third, do they bring others up around them? Okay, if those three things are present, usually I notice I'm getting an A player. Now, as I said earlier, they can't uh be given accountability, they have to ask for, they have to demand, they have to take accountability in the organization. You know, I I know that in historically, and and even I'll give you a really simple example of where this plays out. I had one gentleman who worked for me who came to me at one point and said, Brad, it's outgrown me. Now I'll be blunt, I'd noticed this, but I got stuck in the it's better the devil you know. It was like I don't want to have to take on the responsibility of pushing him further or moving him out and bringing someone else in. And uh that was just laziness on my behalf. I needed to step up and I needed to say to him, hey, we it's outgrown you right now. So either you're gonna grow and get ahead of this thing, or we're gonna have to move you to do something else and bring someone else in who is ahead of the game in this area. So let's think about independence. Independence happens when there is a great cadence of meetings. The weekly meeting with your team members allows them to know they don't have to come to you. That whole my door is always open is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You know, when I have a weekly meeting with people, they know they can bring it to me once a week. They know they don't have to interrupt me on small things. They know that, okay, I've got this big thing, I've got this big thing, I've got this big thing. Now, as my people get better, my C level executives, I've got some C-level execs, some CEOs, partners of mine running other companies. We only need to meet once a month. I got some C-level executives who I need to meet with every single week for a full hour, some who I meet every week for 20 minutes. It just depends on where they're at and how far I've built them, what my level of investment in them, my training, my building, my mentoring, my coaching in them has grown to. What I find is that in the beginning, it takes more meetings rather than less because you're building. Now, if you're that manager slash leader that is always giving them the answer, they have to keep coming to you. So you've created a trap for them. You've got to keep asking them questions. And it's never a question to get them to make the leap. It's generally a series of questions. So let's do the freedom test, okay? How many days could you leave for without performance dropping? How many days could you be out of the business? Could you be out 90 days? Could you be out 60 days, 30 days, 7, 14 days? How many days could you be out of the business and it keeps growing whether you are there or not? It's kind of like that freedom test. Um if I was to give you one task, it would be look every month, look at one key area where you need to replace yourself. Okay. Freedom is the goal of this series. Freedom is the goal of this season of the entrepreneur podcast. Okay. If we're to get to 100 million, we got to free up your time, free up your energy so that you can go into the growth mode that makes it happen for you and makes it happen for the business. So keep coming back, keep learning, keep studying, because you never want to miss a strategy that'll get you to a$100 million entrepreneur. Thanks for joining me on the$100 million podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.