“Ask Dana.”
Two words. I gave them to a group practice owner on a call last week, and she needed a minute before she could say them back to me.
Here was the situation. She had hired a practice manager, Dana, specifically so she could stop fielding every question from the front desk and the clinical team. And yet the questions kept coming to her. Scheduling questions. Policy questions. Who-covers-what questions. All of them Dana’s job. And every time one landed in her inbox, she answered it, because she knew the answer and it was faster.
She thought she was being helpful. She even told me, in so many words, that she thought she was showing Dana she was doing a good job by lightening her load.
What her team was actually hearing was something else entirely: I’m better at this than Dana is. Keep coming to me. I don’t fully trust her with it.
Every single time she answered a question that belonged to Dana, she was reinforcing that message. Not out loud. Structurally. And Dana, who had already asked more than once whether a given task was hers or the owner’s, was starting to sound like a very frustrated employee.
When I laid that out, the owner’s whole reaction was one syllable: “Ew.”
That reaction is the point of this post. Most owners I work with are not bottlenecks because they are controlling or difficult. They are bottlenecks because they are kind, capable, and fast, and nobody ever showed them where that combination breaks a business. Here are the five places I see it hide most often.
Hiding place one: every question still comes to you
This is the “Ask Dana” problem, and it is the most common one.
If you have hired someone to own a part of the business, every question about that part has to go to them first. Not most questions. All of them. Including the drama. Including the “I just have a quick one” questions that feel faster to answer yourself.
The script is short. “Ask Dana.” If someone pushes: “That’s Dana’s job. If I answered that, I’d be undermining her.” The only time a team member comes to you directly is when the issue is with Dana herself and they have already tried to resolve it with her.
This feels rude the first few times. It isn’t. It is the only way your manager becomes a manager instead of a title on an org chart.
Hiding place two: you hired for a rate, not for the job
A chiropractic practice owner I work with had a front-desk coordinator entering daily numbers into the tracking sheets: appointments, inquiries, insurance checks, the works. The coordinator disliked the task, and a couple of significant errors had crept in.
The owner’s first read was a performance problem. The real problem was a role problem.
She was paying an entry-level rate for work that needed a mid-level person’s attention and accuracy. And more to the point, almost all of that work was number entry that software could do. Once we automated the data entry, the role matched the rate again, and the errors stopped being a personality question.
When a reliable person starts making mistakes on a task they hate, look at the role before you look at the person. The role is usually missing a system, not the person missing a skill.
Hiding place three: you built an approval bottleneck on purpose
A physical therapy clinic owner was writing up how things get done in her clinic and planned to route every update through one administrator for approval. Clean, controlled, sensible on paper.
Except: if updating a procedure means filing a request and waiting, most of your team will simply not bother. The write-ups go stale, the real process lives in people’s heads again, and the whole project fails without anyone noticing.
The fix was ownership, not approval. One owner per procedure, with the authority to update it. And the procedures themselves live in editable documents with version history, not in PDFs that nobody can search or change.
You do not need a gatekeeper. You need a name on every door.
Hiding place four: you handed off a system you never finished
This one is mine.
Whether I am handing work to a team member or to an AI tool, the biggest lesson I have learned is to build the system myself first. I don’t like doing it. I would much rather hand it off and move on. But when you hand off something half-built, that is exactly where things break or fall through the cracks, and then you are back in the middle of it anyway, except now with less visibility.
So: build it start to finish. Run it yourself a few times. Make sure you understand how it works and where it gets stuck. Then hand it over. One client who did this for her own reporting told me it helped her understand her business better than any dashboard had.
Hiding place five: you priced your own time at zero
A pilates studio owner got a quote to rebuild her website, decided she wasn’t going to waste money on it, and built it herself. She guessed it took ten hours. I guessed fifty. We settled on twenty.
Then we did the math nobody checks. Her session rate, multiplied by twenty hours, was more than the quote she had refused to pay. If she had spent those twenty hours teaching instead, she could have paid the designer and still come out ahead.
She was not saving money. She was spending the most expensive resource in the business and calling it free.
Your time has a rate. Apply it before you decide to do a specialist’s job yourself, and double your first estimate of the hours (at least), because it is always low.
The thread running through all five
None of these owners had a knowledge problem. Every one of them knew, somewhere, that she was the person everything ran through. What none of them had was a system with a name on it, so every question defaulted to her.
Spreading yourself too thin is not a character flaw. It is what happens when you take on more and more without an owner and a process behind each piece. The more you add without buttoning that up, the more of it comes back to you.
And here is the part that surprises people: fixing this is not another ninety minutes on top of your week. It is a swap. You are already spending those hours being the bottleneck. We are just moving them to the work that actually brings the money in.
Pick one of the five above and name an owner for it this week. Just one. That is how it starts to add up.
And if the hours you free up need to go toward finding clients, and that part has never felt reliable, join me for my free class, 6 Reasons You’re Not Getting Clients. I walk through the six reasons good practice owners stay stuck, so you can name the one that is actually yours and fix that first.
