You added a second shift so the shop could grow.
So why does every question on both shifts still come to you?
A setup guy wants you to look at the first piece before he runs the lot. The front office needs your number on a quote. A customer won’t commit to the job until he hears it from the owner. The hot job waits until you get back from the floor.
By the end of the day you’ve touched forty things, and the work only you can do (the big accounts, the next machine purchase, the plan for next year) is still sitting there.
That isn’t a staffing problem. It’s a bottleneck. And in most job shops, the bottleneck is the owner.
What a bottleneck actually is
A bottleneck isn’t a lazy crew or the wrong person.
It’s one person every decision has to pass through.
When that person is you, your shop can only move as fast as you can answer. Add two more machinists and you haven’t added capacity. You’ve added two more people waiting at your office door with a print in their hand.
I learned this the hard way. When my books started to sell and I got booked on more stages, I started to get more email. A lot more email. Soon more than half my workday went to answering it.
And I finally saw it. My business simply couldn’t grow if I was the one writing the books, giving the keynotes and answering every email.
The two sentences that keep owners stuck
When I ask owners why they don’t hand more off, I hear one of two answers.
“I don’t have anyone to delegate to.”
Or, “Nobody quotes it as well as I do.”
Listen to the second one. It isn’t really about your people. It’s about the voice in your head that says nobody can be trusted with it.
So you take the work back. You re-check the setup sheet at 7 p.m. You redo the quote your estimator already sent.
And that creates a circle. You don’t have anyone to delegate to, so the shop doesn’t grow fast enough, so you can’t afford the right foreman, so you don’t have anyone to delegate to.
Why working harder makes it worse
Most owners answer the bottleneck by putting in more hours. Sixty-hour weeks. Saturdays. A vacation with the phone in your hand.
Here’s the trap. The harder you work, the more everything runs through you. Your people learn that the fastest way to get an answer is to wait for you. So they stop deciding.
That’s not a business. That’s a job you can’t quit.
Put a number on it
Here’s the step almost every owner skips. They never put a dollar figure on the bottleneck.
So ask yourself this: How much money will it cost me this year if I don’t remove these bottlenecks?
Count the jobs that sat waiting for your approval while a machine stood idle. Count the hours you spent on work your estimator or lead could have done. Count the quotes that went out late because they waited for you.
Once you see that number, the bottleneck stops being a feeling. It becomes a decision.
Three questions to find your bottleneck this week
**1. What did I do this week that someone else in my shop could have done?** Write down every task. Don’t argue with the list yet.
**2. Which decisions stopped at my desk, and how long did each one wait?** A decision that waits two days for you costs more than the decision itself.
**3. What am I afraid will happen if I hand this off?** Usually the honest answer is “they’ll make a mistake.” Then ask: what does that mistake cost, compared to what my bottleneck costs every week?
Start with one decision, not a system
You don’t need new ERP software or a fifty-page operations manual.
Pick one recurring decision that comes to you every week. First-piece sign-off on repeat jobs is a good place to start. Write down how you make it. Hand it to one person. And then don’t take it back when they do it 90 percent as well as you would.
(I’ve written more about how a small business owner gets out of the middle at noahstjohn.com/business-coach-for-small-business.)
One of my clients, Scott Z., a business owner, put it this way: “I can now work 12 hours a week and make more money than I made last year working 70+ hour weeks.”
He didn’t get there by working more hours. He got there by stopping being the place every decision had to go.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Noah St. John is the #1 bestselling author of 27 books published by HarperCollins, Hay House and Simon & Schuster. Known worldwide as The Caveman Conversion King™, he’s helped his clients add more than $3 Billion in sales since 1997 by following his coaching advice. Take the free Caveman Quiz at NoahStJohn.com
