Superhero Syndrome: Are you the bottleneck in your business?

Are you the bottleneck in your business? You might be suffering from Superhero Syndrome. Business financial advisor, Brad Turville from BJT Financial, explains how to get out of your own way to help your business thrive.

I regularly see businesses that are key-person-dependent and it is usually the business owner. You might resonate with this.

With the business dependent on you to run and operate, this requires a commitment of time and energy but also presents a number of constraints:

What if you want to take a holiday?
What if an unplanned event happens?
What if you want to work less hours and generate the same financial results?
What if you want to grow the business without working 24/7?

One of the main reasons you can’t do any of these right now is because you are the bottleneck. You are getting in your own way and resisting to let go.

Superhero Syndrome

I first heard the term ‘Superhero Syndrome’ by someone named Chris Ducker and he uses this term to describe entrepreneurs and small business owners that try to do everything themselves. It’s a category we all fall into and we say things like, “In the time I show someone else to do it, I could have done it myself.”

To navigate the path ahead, I would want to get clear on a few things:

What is your business plan and where do you want to take it?
What do you want personally, with your family, with your lifestyle, with your wealth creation?

This simple exercise can present a disconnect between the business side and personal side. Perhaps the business can’t deliver on what you want personally? Or there might just be a gap between where it is now and where you want it to be.

Break the dependence cycle

The natural flow on from the business and planning work would be to understand the numbers and the current organisational chart and how it needs to grow and evolve to build the business and lifestyle you want.

I do a lot of work coaching the owners of accounting firms. They, by default, have quite a good business model however many have grown in such a way where the business is heavily-dependent on them and they work crazy hours. What I commonly see is accounting firms with under-resourced administration team members. The accountants are doing too many administrative tasks and low-skill and repetitive work. Just by hiring a proficient administrator they could delegate one to two hours of work that they are currently doing to them.

If we look at the math on that, delegate two hours of current daily workload x 5 days per week = 10 hours freed up per week.

A saying I really like by Dan Sullivan is: “Not how, but who?”

So, question yourself on whether the time, mind and financial commitments to your business are giving you what you want. If not, what are you going to do about it?

A lot of the time it will involve you getting out of your own way.

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