The 3 Barriers That Stop Business Owners Stepping Back (Even When They Want To)

There comes a point in every business where the owner stepping back becomes beneficial for everyone involved.

It enables the owner to have a life and spend time on the things that energise them.

It enables the team to become autonomous and drive results.

It necessitates the systemisation of the business, making it more scalable, consistent, and sellable.

The impact of systemisation and increased employee motivation means customers get a better, more consistent experience.

Yet, aside from:

- All of the obvious benefits
- The fact that owners invest a significant amount of business revenue into a team
- The reality that owners are often exhausted and want to do less

They still find it incredibly hard to step back.

As a result, owners get stuck in a downward spiral. You lose passion for the business. Your energy drops, which means you stop driving the business forward or looking after yourself. The business you created for fun, freedom, finances, and fulfilment starts to feel like a cage.

Owners feel this way because they can’t see a path to making the business less reliant on them. You tell yourself a story that you’re stuck in this thing for the long run. That untrue story makes you feel depressed and slowly damages your business.

I’ve helped small business owners step away from their businesses for over five years. In that time, I’ve identified three common barriers that keep owners stuck in this place. By recognising and overcoming them, you can move from having a business and team that own you to having a business and team that work for you.


Barrier one
Fear of it all falling apart if you step back

You’ve probably, inadvertently, built your team and business to depend on you. That’s ok. It’s part of the process. Highly experienced serial entrepreneurs don’t do this, but they’re a tiny minority of business owners.

Your business is a Frankenstein monster held together by you. You’ve got your fingers in every pie. It’s complicated, messy, and you’re the only one who truly understands how and why it works.

This is normal. And it’s fixable.

When you don’t think about the challenge in the right way, you convince yourself it’s not worth fixing. You stay stuck in a business you don’t enjoy and that can’t scale. The data shows this is the reality for most small business owners.

There are three cues to work through that override the safety-seeking part of your mind that’s currently keeping you stuck.

Step 1: What happens if nothing changes?

What will happen to you and your business if everything stays dependent on you in one and three years’ time?

On autopilot, the human mind seeks safety and avoids risk. This question helps your mind see that staying where you are is actually riskier than taking action.

It also helps you realise something uncomfortable. Your biggest fear, that everything will go wrong if you step back, is far more likely to happen if you don’t step back.

Caveat - if your honest answer is that you’ll still enjoy the business, don’t take action. But you wouldn’t be reading this if that were true.

Step 2: 80 percent is good enough

Your mind tells you that nobody else can do things to your standard, so you can’t step back. This again comes from fear. Fear that if you’re not delivering and overseeing everything, standards will drop, customers will complain, and everything will fall apart.

This is where the 80 percent rule helps.

Your standards are exceptionally high. If others can deliver at 80 percent of your level, things will be more than fine.

Your job isn’t to turn people into you. Your job is to help them deliver at 80 percent of your level and apply their own flair. Five people operating at 80 percent will always outperform you on your own.

Step 3: Mistakes aren’t the issue

When you step back and let others step up, mistakes will happen. That’s guaranteed.

Staying where you are to avoid mistakes makes no rational sense, but the risk-avoiding part of your subconscious doesn’t care about logic.

So accept that mistakes will happen and recognise that people are more forgiving than you think.

Explain to your team that mistakes will happen and that it’s ok, as long as the same mistake doesn’t happen twice.

This shifts the culture away from fear and towards learning and systemisation. When mistakes occur, they get owned, analysed, and turned into processes that stop them happening again.

Work through these three cues, repeatedly if needed, and you’ll override the thinking that’s kept you stuck for too long. You’re now ready to address barrier two.


Barrier two
No systems or processes that define good

No business owner enjoys moaning. Yet many spend a huge amount of time frustrated with how their team are doing, or not doing, things.

You constantly intervene, quality check, and fix messes. You feel like most conversations with your team involve complaints or corrections. Eventually, you tell yourself it would be easier to just do it yourself.

I see this constantly, and in 99 percent of cases the root cause is the same. You haven’t made it clear what good looks like.

How much time do you think a McDonald’s manager spends telling staff they’ve made burgers incorrectly or added the wrong amount of fries? Hardly any.

Not because they employ superhuman staff. Because they’ve defined what good looks like and built systems that make achieving it easy.

When your team don’t know what good looks like, they’ll interpret it differently to you. They’ll make mistakes and do things that frustrate you.

The outcome is always the same. You step in, feel stressed, complain, and end up micromanaging.

The alternative is simple but uncomfortable. Get clear on what good looks like.

Whether it’s a role, a project, or a specific task, improve how you communicate what great actually means. Where possible, translate this into numbers. I’ve developed a framework called the MATCH model that shows you how to do this. You can watch a video on it here.

Once this is in place, your team know the standard. Your role shifts from finder and fixer of problems to coach, when needed.


Barrier three
Not engaging your team

The final hurdle is a lack of genuine engagement.

Paying people and telling them what to do is not enough. Pay alone only drives attendance, no matter how big the pay cheque is.

Engage your team and they’ll go above and beyond. Engage your team and they’ll actively help remove you from the business.

Fail to engage them and they’ll do the bare minimum. Any change you try to make will feel like wading through treacle.

So how do you engage your team?

There are many ways, but two are consistently effective in small businesses.

1) Run PDPs - Personal Development Plans

Run PDPs with your leadership team three to four times a year. Show them you care about their goals and they’ll care about yours. Then have your leadership team run PDPs with the wider team.

You can get our PDP process and training FREE here.

2) Run quarterly planning days

Hold a quarterly planning day and involve your team. Take a full day to review performance and plan the next 12 weeks.

This gives your team a voice, shows you value their input, and focuses everyone on what actually matters. It also gets people out of the day-to-day and helps them connect differently.

You can download our quarterly planning day flow FREE here.

Overcome these three barriers and you’ll be well on your way to a business that can run without you. We’ve helped clients fully step away, sell businesses, go backpacking for 90 days, and move countries.

These three barriers, and the solutions outlined here, are what work every time.

Fully removing yourself from day-to-day operations takes around 12 months. But with the right systems, you can reduce your working week by at least two days within 90 days.

I’ve created a walkthrough guide showing exactly how to do that here.

Remember, your team and business can and should work for you, not the other way round.