How Principals Become The Bottleneck In Their Own Firm | The Blueprint Collective | EP 173

So today we're talking about principals being the blocker in their practice or, you know, how to grow when you're kind of the only one at the top.

Obviously, you can bring people in.

That's an option.

But if you're not thinking about that, what is your next move, and what are the things that stop you being able to grow your business that you see?

There's really...

And probably the biggest thing that I see is, particularly for founders, principals, people who kind of have built this thing from the ground up, it's their baby, people really struggle to let go and really struggle to trust other people can do it as good as them.

Like, there's this mentality that I see particularly founders, directors, you know, business owners, when they hit a ceiling in growth or ce- ceiling in profit or ceiling in revenue, there's usually, like, a mental thing there around, "This is my baby.

I, I can't trust other people on the team do it as good as me.

This is my brand, my reputation.

What if someone else stuffs it up?" And a lot of that's fear.

A lot of that's, um, you know, wanting to keep things small, controlled.

Uh, a lot of people in our industry are, quote-unquote, "perfectionists" and wanna get things right all the time.

So the thought of giving a client relationship over to a senior member of their team, letting someone run with an entire project without them kind of being involved is quite scary.

And so, yeah, the fear of letting go and the fear of, like, trusting others to do it as good as them is probably one of the main blocks that I see in terms of people being able to let go and focus on, like, you know, the big picture strategic direction of their business.

And is that the thing that you try and encourage your clients into? Y- you're talking about fear and control and that, that whole letting go.

How do you then coach someone or convince someone to let go a little bit of what they're holding onto to move forward?

Yeah, there's a n- there's a number of angles there.

Like, there's a mindset piece, which is, you know, we work with a lot of our clients on the mindset element, but there's the logical piece too.

So the mindset is, like, fear, "No one can do it as good as me.

What, what if I let go and they stuff it up?" But there's actually a really weird thing too where sometimes we see business owners intentionally hire staff that are not as good as them because they don't wanna be ever shown up by their staff or have someone else come into the business that's way better at them at a technical element.

And then when you start to show business owners that they're actually hiring people to make them still feel good about themselves, they're like, "Oh, I've been sabotaging my business.

Like, I should be actually hiring people that are way better than me because then I can just build myself out of those technical roles, and I get to focus on what I love, which is growing the business.

And I've got a whole team of," we call them eagles, eagles, not ducks, a whole team of eagles kinda running the technical elements of the projects, and the business owner gets to be freed up to, to do what they love.

So yeah, there's the mindset piece, which is just helping step consultancy owners through that, "Oh my gosh, I've been sabotaging myself.

Now it's time to let go a bit." But, like, a really nice logical thing to do is, and we, we run this with our boardroom members pretty regularly, is just two things.