Ask a leadership team what their priorities are and you’ll usually get a sensible answer.

Grow revenue. Improve customer experience. Reduce costs. Build better systems. Develop the team.

All reasonable ambitions.

Then ask what they’re actually working on.

There’s a new CRM implementation. A website redesign. Three product improvements. A recruitment drive. A reporting overhaul. A customer retention project. An internal process review.

And that’s before you get to the day job.

Individually, most of these initiatives make sense.

Collectively, they might be the reason nothing is moving quickly enough.

The problem isn’t always prioritisation

Most businesses know how to prioritise.

They have quarterly objectives, project plans, leadership meetings and lists of what matters most.

But prioritisation only works if something genuinely loses.

Too often, a leadership team agrees on its top three priorities and then continues working on everything else anyway.

Nothing gets cancelled. Nothing gets taken off somebody’s plate. Nobody wants to abandon something they’ve already invested time or money in.

So the priorities change, but the workload doesn’t.

And the business ends up with a growing collection of commitments that nobody has the capacity to deliver properly.

You haven’t prioritised. You’ve just ranked an overcrowded list.

Every initiative has a hidden cost

The obvious cost of a project is the time and money required to deliver it.

The less obvious cost is everything it takes away from other work.

A new initiative needs meetings, decisions, updates, management attention and people from different teams.

Those people are usually already working on something else.

So every additional project creates another set of competing demands.

Decisions take longer because the same people are needed in five places.

Projects move forward in small increments because nobody has enough uninterrupted time.

And leadership meetings become exercises in reviewing progress rather than making progress.

The organisation is busy. People are working hard.

But the amount of work actually getting finished doesn’t reflect the effort going in.

Starting work creates activity. Finishing work creates value.

The difficult part is deciding what to stop

Adding something to a priority list is easy.

Removing something is much harder.

Every initiative has a reason for existing. Someone proposed it, someone approved it and someone has probably spent months working on it.

Stopping can feel like admitting a mistake.

But an initiative doesn’t have to be a bad idea to be the wrong use of your resources.

It might have made sense six months ago. It might still make sense next year.

That doesn’t mean it deserves attention today.

A useful question for any leadership team is:

If we weren’t already doing this, would we choose to start it today?

If the answer is no, the fact that you’ve already started isn’t a good enough reason to continue.

The Stop List

Here’s a simple exercise for your next leadership meeting.

Give it 15 minutes.

1. Write down everything that’s in flight

Not just the formal strategic projects.

Include the smaller improvements, internal initiatives and commitments that consume time but rarely appear on the main plan.

Look for the work that has quietly become permanent without anyone deciding it should.

2. Challenge what deserves to continue

For each item, ask:

• Does this still support one of our most important outcomes?

• What happens if we don’t do it for the next 90 days?

• If we stopped, what capacity would we actually release?

Be specific about the third question. Stopping something that frees up no meaningful time or attention won’t solve much.

3. Stop, pause or finish

Choose three things that no longer deserve their current level of attention.

Stop work that no longer justifies its cost.

Pause work that matters, but not enough to compete with today’s priorities.

Finish work that’s nearly complete, rather than leaving another loose end behind.

Give each decision an owner, communicate it and remove the associated meetings, tasks and expectations.

Otherwise, you’ve just created another list.

The objective isn’t to stop three things for the sake of it.

It’s to create enough capacity to make meaningful progress on the things that remain.

Fewer things, finished properly

There’s a temptation in growing businesses to equate ambition with the number of things happening.

More projects. More initiatives. More plans.

But the businesses that execute well aren’t necessarily doing more.

They’re making deliberate decisions about where their limited time, money and attention will have the greatest impact.

And they’re prepared to leave perfectly good ideas on the table.

Because the alternative is a business where everything is important, everyone is stretched and progress feels permanently slower than it should.

Your strategy isn’t just what you choose to do. It’s what you’re prepared to stop doing.

PUT IT TO WORK

At your next leadership meeting, ask one question:

What are we currently doing that we wouldn’t choose to start today?

Find three answers.

Then do something about them.

COO in a Box. Practical ways to make growing businesses easier to run.

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In the early days, speed comes from simplicity.

A small team. Short conversations. Quick decisions. Everyone knows what’s happening, and when something needs doing, somebody picks it up.

You don’t need much structure because everyone is close enough to the work to keep things moving.

And it works.

The business grows. You hire good people. Customers keep coming. Revenue increases.

Then, gradually, things start getting harder.

Decisions take longer. People aren’t quite sure who owns what. Information gets lost. Teams start pulling in different directions.

The instinct is to fix what’s going wrong.

But often, nothing has gone wrong.

The business has simply outgrown the way it works.

Success has a shelf life

Every growing business develops habits that help it succeed.

Some become part of its identity.

“We’re entrepreneurial.”

“We don’t need lots of process.”

“Everyone just gets stuck in.”

“We’ve always been good at moving quickly.”

These are often genuine strengths. They’re part of what made the business successful in the first place.

But strengths are contextual.

A way of working that creates speed with eight people can create confusion with eighty.

Being flexible can become a lack of accountability.

Keeping everyone involved can become too many people involved in every decision.

Doing things informally can become a dependence on conversations that half the business never hears.

The behaviour hasn’t necessarily changed.

The environment around it has.

And that’s what makes this difficult to recognise.

The trap of protecting what worked

When businesses encounter growing pains, they often try to preserve the very things that are causing them.

A founder notices the business has become slower and insists on keeping things informal.

A team struggles with inconsistent decisions but resists introducing clearer responsibilities because it doesn’t want to become bureaucratic.

People complain about communication, so the business adds more meetings to recreate the closeness it once had naturally.

The intention is understandable.

Nobody wants to lose what made the business special.

But preserving the past isn’t always the same as protecting what matters.

Perhaps what made the company successful wasn’t informality itself. It was the ability to make decisions quickly.

Perhaps it wasn’t everyone doing everything. It was a willingness to help each other.

Perhaps it wasn’t the absence of structure. It was the absence of unnecessary complexity.

The principle is worth keeping. The way you deliver it may need to change.

That distinction matters.

You don’t have to abandon what made your business good.

You have to find a new way of achieving it.

Growth requires subtraction as well as addition

Most businesses approach growth by adding things.

More people. More meetings. More processes. More management. More software.

Some of those additions are necessary.

But growth also requires removing ways of working that no longer fit.

The weekly all-hands discussion that worked with twelve people may no longer be useful with sixty.

The informal approval process that once took five minutes may now hold up entire teams.

The expectation that everyone knows what’s happening may no longer be realistic.

These practices aren’t necessarily bad.

They’ve simply reached the end of their useful life.

The mistake is treating them as permanent features of the business rather than temporary solutions to a particular stage of growth.

The Expiry Date Test

Take 20 minutes with your leadership team.

Look at how the business operates today and ask three questions:

1. What worked brilliantly when we were smaller?

Think about how decisions were made, how teams communicated, how work was allocated and how problems were resolved.

2. Which of those things are now creating friction?

Look for repeated confusion, delays, unnecessary dependencies or activities that require increasing effort to produce the same result.

3. What principle were we trying to protect, and how would we deliver it today?

Don’t automatically throw away the old approach. Identify what made it valuable, then design a version that works for the business you’ve become.

For example:

• Keep fast decisions, but give teams clear authority to make them.

• Keep collaboration, but make ownership explicit.

• Keep transparency, but replace informal updates with reliable ways to share information.

Pick one practice that has outlived its usefulness and redesign it.

Not the whole business. Just one thing.

The bottom line

The business that got you here did its job.

It helped you find customers, build momentum and reach the next stage.

But there’s no reason to assume the same ways of working will get you where you want to go next.

The challenge isn’t to preserve everything that made you successful.

It’s to understand why those things worked, and be willing to change how they work.

Keep the principles. Change the practices.

That’s how you grow without losing what made the business worth building.

COO in a Box | Simple instructions for a better business.

One practical operating idea each week to help you run a better business, without hiring a COO.

A customer asks for something.

Sales collects the details and passes them to Operations.

Operations discovers something is missing and goes back to Sales.

Sales contacts the customer.

The answer comes back, but the person handling the request has moved on to something else.

Eventually, everything is ready.

The actual work takes 20 minutes.

The customer has been waiting four days.

Nobody has been particularly slow. Everyone has been busy. Each team might even be meeting its own performance targets.

Individually, everyone is doing their job. Collectively, the business is failing to deliver.

Every handoff has a cost

Most businesses organise themselves into teams, functions and responsibilities.

Sales sells. Operations delivers. Finance invoices. Customer Service handles problems.

That makes sense.

But customers and business outcomes don’t follow organisational charts. They move across them.

Every time work moves between people or teams, information, context and responsibility need to move with it.

When they don’t, you pay the Handoff Tax.

It shows up in four ways:

(1) Waiting: Work sits in a queue until somebody picks it up.

(2) Missing context: The receiving person doesn’t have everything needed to continue.

(3) Rework: Information gets checked, clarified or collected again.

(4) Ownership gaps: Everyone assumes somebody else is responsible for moving things forward.

A process with six handoffs creates six opportunities for something to go wrong.

And even when nothing goes wrong, each transfer introduces the possibility of another delay.

We optimise the boxes and ignore the arrows

When performance needs improving, businesses usually look inside individual teams.

Can Sales process enquiries faster?

Can Operations complete more jobs?

Can Finance issue invoices sooner?

But improving the performance of individual teams doesn’t necessarily improve the performance of the whole business.

Imagine a process involving three teams.

Each team takes one hour to complete its work.

That’s three hours of actual activity.

But there are two days of waiting between each stage.

The customer waits more than four days.

You could double the productivity of every team and save just 90 minutes.

The customer would barely notice.

Most businesses optimise the boxes. The friction lives in the arrows.

The more useful question isn’t always how quickly each team works.

It’s how efficiently the whole process delivers the outcome.

The Handoff Map

You don’t need a complicated process improvement programme to find these problems.

Choose one important workflow that crosses multiple people or teams.

For example, turning a signed customer agreement into a live service.

Map the journey from beginning to end.

At every point where work changes hands, answer four questions:

1. Who has it? Who is responsible for the work at this stage?

2. Who gets it next? Name the person or role receiving the work. Not just the department.

3. What must travel with it? What information, decisions, documents or approvals does the next person need to act without going backwards?

4. Who now owns it? When does responsibility transfer, and how does everyone know?

Then measure two things:

(A) Work time: How long does somebody actually spend completing the task?

(B) Wait time: How long does it sit before the next person starts?

The difference can be revealing.

You might discover that a task taking an hour to complete spends three days waiting to be picked up.

Or that incomplete information repeatedly sends work backwards.

Or that a request disappears because ownership was never properly transferred.

Now you can see where the process is actually losing time.

Remove the tax

Once you’ve identified the expensive handoffs, there are three ways to improve them.

1. Remove unnecessary handoffs.

Does the work genuinely need to move between these people? Could one person own more of the journey?

2. Make necessary handoffs complete.

Define what must be provided before work transfers. A clear definition of ‘ready’ prevents incomplete requests bouncing backwards.

3. Make ownership unmistakable.

A handoff isn’t complete because somebody sent an email or updated a status.

It’s complete when the next person has what they need and has accepted responsibility for what happens next.

The goal isn’t to eliminate every handoff. Specialisation and collaboration are necessary.

It’s to stop paying for transfers that add no value.

Try this on Monday

Pick one workflow where customers, employees or suppliers regularly complain about delays.

Trace one real piece of work from beginning to end.

Measure the time spent doing the work against the time spent waiting.

Find the handoff creating the biggest delay, then ask:

Can we remove it, improve what gets passed across, or make ownership clearer?

Fix that handoff first.

You might not need more people, a new system or another performance target.

You might just need to redesign the space between two people’s jobs.

Until the next BOX,
COO in a Box

One operating idea. Put it to work.

Things are taking too long.

Spreadsheets are multiplying. People are chasing updates. Approvals are slowing everything down. Teams have developed their own workarounds.

So somebody suggests a new platform.

It promises workflows, reminders, dashboards and maybe a little AI.

The demo looks brilliant.

The problem is that nobody has stopped to ask whether the underlying process makes any sense.

A bad process doesn’t become a good process because you’ve automated it. It just becomes a bad process that happens faster.

Technology is the tempting answer

When a business starts to grow, things that used to work begin to break.

There’s a useful rule of thumb called the Rule of 3 and 10. What works for 10 people often stops working at 30. What works at 30 needs rethinking by 100.

The informal approval process becomes a bottleneck. The knowledge that lived in somebody’s head becomes a problem when they go on holiday.

These are real growing pains.

And technology can absolutely help.

But buying software is often more attractive than doing the less exciting work of understanding why things have become difficult.

A new platform promises a solution.

Redesigning a process means asking uncomfortable questions about why people do things the way they do.

Guess which one gets more enthusiasm.

You’re often automating yesterday’s decisions

Most business processes weren’t deliberately designed.

They evolved.

Someone introduced an approval after a mistake. Another person created a spreadsheet because the existing system didn’t show something they needed. A third team added a check because they didn’t trust the information coming from the first two.

Each change probably made sense at the time.

Two years later, nobody remembers why half the steps exist.

But everybody follows them.

Then the business decides to automate the process.

The requirements document carefully describes every existing step, approval and exception. The technology team builds exactly what’s been requested.

You’ve just spent money making yesterday’s workarounds permanent.

The opportunity wasn’t simply to automate the process.

It was to question it.

Remove. Simplify. Automate.

Before introducing technology, put the process through three tests.

1. Remove it

Start with the most uncomfortable question.

What would actually happen if we stopped doing this?

Not every step creates value.

Some exist because of an old policy. Some duplicate work happening elsewhere. Others solve problems that no longer exist.

Ask:

• Does this step produce something somebody genuinely needs?

• Is it required for a clear commercial, customer or risk reason?

• Would anyone notice if we stopped doing it?

If a step doesn’t serve a useful purpose, removing it is better than automating it.

2. Simplify it

For everything that needs to remain, ask whether there’s an easier way.

Can information be captured once instead of three times?

Can one person own an outcome instead of passing it between departments?

Can routine decisions happen without unnecessary approvals?

Can ten variations of the same process become one standard approach, with exceptions handled separately?

This is where a surprising amount of improvement happens.

Often without buying anything.

3. Automate it

Now look at what remains.

If the process is clear, repeatable and necessary, technology can make a genuine difference.

Automate the predictable work. Make information available where it’s needed. Remove repetitive administration and unnecessary waiting.

Keep human judgement where it adds value.

The order matters.

Remove unnecessary work.

Simplify necessary work.

Then automate what’s worth repeating.

Don’t turn this into an excuse to avoid technology

There is an important distinction.

Sometimes the technology really is the problem.

A manual process might be perfectly sensible, but impossible to operate reliably at scale. A legacy system might prevent information from moving between teams. A business might need capabilities it simply doesn’t have.

In those cases, new technology may be exactly the right investment.

The point isn’t to resist software or AI.

It’s to understand the job you’re asking it to do.

You should be able to explain the outcome you want, the work that genuinely needs to happen and the problem technology will solve.

If you can’t explain those things, you’re probably not ready to write the requirements.

Run the process-before-platform test

Pick one process your business is considering automating or replacing with new software.

Take the last five times that process was used and follow what actually happened, not what the procedure says should happen.

Then ask:

1. Remove: Which steps could disappear without damaging the outcome?

2. Simplify: Where are we creating unnecessary handoffs, duplication or approvals?

3. Automate: Which remaining activities are frequent, predictable and worth automating?

You don’t need a six-month transformation programme.

Start with one process.

You might discover that you don’t need the software at all.

Or you might find that a much simpler process makes the software dramatically more valuable.

Either way, you’ve improved the investment decision.

The bottom line

Technology is a powerful way to scale the way your business works.

That’s precisely why you should be careful about what you ask it to scale.

Before buying another platform or building another automation, ask:

If we were starting from scratch today, would we design the process this way?

If the answer is no, fix that first.

Until the next BOX,
COO in a Box

One operating idea. Put it to work.

Every important KPI needs a second number that tells you what might be getting worse.

Tell a sales team to increase conversion and conversion will probably go up.

Tell a service team to reduce response times and responses will probably get faster.

Tell an operations team to increase output and output will probably increase.

That is the point of a metric.

But something else can move at the same time.

Discounting rises. Quality drops. Customers have to contact you again. Errors increase.

The metric improved. The business didn’t.

Metrics are instructions

The moment you attach a target to a number, you are not just measuring performance.

You are telling people what to optimise.

And most business outcomes have a trade-off somewhere.

Growth can hurt margin.

Speed can hurt quality.

Efficiency can hurt customer experience.

The problem is not the KPI.

It is the KPI on its own.

A useful way to fix that is to pair it with the thing you need to protect.

Primary metric + guardrail metric

The primary metric tells you what you want to improve.

The guardrail tells you whether you are improving it in the wrong way.

For example:

• Sales growth + contribution margin

• Conversion + cancellation rate

• Response time + repeat contact

• Orders processed + error rate

• Customer acquisition + retention

• Time to hire + 90-day retention

• Deployment frequency + production incidents

Take customer service.

Imagine the team reduces average response time from six hours to one.

Looks good.

But if repeat contacts double because agents are replying quickly rather than actually solving the problem, you have not really improved the service.

You have improved the metric.

The repeat-contact number exposes the difference.

That is what a good guardrail does.

Find the failure mode

You do not need a clever measurement framework.

For every important target, ask three questions:

1. What behaviour will this encourage?

2. If people get very good at improving it, what could get worse?

3. What number would tell us that was happening?

That third answer is usually your guardrail.

If you measure speed, what protects quality?

If you measure cost, what protects service?

If you measure growth, what protects margin?

The idea is not to stop people optimising.

You want them to optimise.

You just want the target to describe the outcome you actually care about.

Don’t create metric soup

There is an obvious way to ruin this.

Give every KPI five counter-metrics.

Now nobody knows what matters.

This is not an argument for bigger dashboards.

You do not need to pair every number you report.

Pair the metrics people are actively being asked to improve.

And the guardrail does not always need a target of its own.

Sometimes it is simply a boundary.

Grow revenue, provided contribution margin stays above X.

Reduce response time, provided repeat contact stays below Y.

Increase throughput, provided errors do not rise.

That is often enough.

Run the pairing test

Take the handful of metrics that get the most attention in your business.

The ones discussed every week.

The ones on the board pack.

The ones tied to bonuses.

For each one, ask:

How could somebody make this number look brilliant while making the business worse?

If there is an obvious answer, your KPI probably needs a partner.

The bottom line

Metrics shape behaviour.

So whenever you ask someone to improve a number, ask one more question:

What must not get worse?

Put that number beside it.

Until the next BOX,

COO in a Box

One operating idea. Put it to work.

Most businesses have a strange relationship with meetings.

A £10,000 contract gets questioned, approved and reviewed.

But putting eight people in a room for an hour every week can happen almost accidentally.

Someone creates the meeting.

It becomes recurring.

And six months later, everyone is still attending because it is already in the diary.

Calendar time rarely feels like spending. But it is.

A meeting has a price

Take a weekly one-hour meeting with eight people.

That is not a one-hour meeting.

It is eight hours of organisational capacity every week.

Run it for 50 weeks and you have spent 400 hours.

And that is before you count preparation, follow-up or the interruption created either side of it.

A simple way to expose this is:

Meeting Tax = people × duration × frequency

You do not need to turn every meeting into a financial model.

Person-hours are usually enough.

Once you see the number, a meeting that felt harmless can suddenly look quite expensive.

The problem is recurrence

Some meetings are enormously valuable.

A good 30-minute conversation can resolve something that would otherwise take three days of emails, messages and confused hand-offs.

The problem is not meetings.

The problem is that recurring meetings become permanent without repeatedly having to justify their existence.

The original problem get solved.

The team changes.

The work changes.

But the meeting survives.

What began as a temporary coordination mechanism to solve a problem or explore an opportunity quietly becomes part of everyone’s week.

Make every recurring meeting earn its place

Once a quarter, take the recurring meetings across the business and put each one through three choices:

1. Kill it

Remove meetings where:

• the main purpose is giving people information

• nobody can clearly explain what would break if the meeting disappeared

• attendance is mostly habit or attendees regularly skip it

• the same conversation could happen when there is actually something to discuss

Information does not necessarily need everyone to consume it at the same time.

Sometimes a short written update is better than a meeting.

2. Keep it

Keep meetings where having people together genuinely creates value.

The important question is not: “Is this meeting useful?”

Almost every recurring meeting can produce some useful conversation.

Ask instead:

Is the value created worth the collective time we are spending?

That is a much, but more valuable harder test.

3. Redesign it

Often the meeting should exist, but the current version should not.

Try changing one variable:

• eight people becomes four

• weekly becomes fortnightly

• 60 minutes becomes 30

• five agenda items become the two that actually require discussion

• the status update becomes a pre-read

• optional attendees stop being permanent attendees

You can often remove half the meeting tax without removing the meeting.

The smallest changes compound

Imagine five managers each attend four unnecessary hours of recurring meetings a week.

That is 20 hours of management capacity.

Every week.

Roughly 1,000 hours across a year.

No recruitment programme would casually add that much work to five people’s jobs.

But calendars do it quietly.

And the cost is not just the time inside the meeting.

Those hours are usually taken from the work that is easiest to postpone:

• Making a difficult decision before it becomes an urgent one.

• Coaching someone who is capable of more but needs your attention.

• Fixing the process that keeps creating the same problem.

• Talking to the customer who is quietly becoming frustrated.

• Writing the strategy everyone keeps saying they need.

• Improving how the business works.

This is why overloaded calendars can create a strange loop.

People spend so much time coordinating the work that they have less time to improve the work, which creates more problems that require more coordination.

Do the audit

Open the calendar for a typical week.

Ignore one-off meetings.

Look only at the recurring ones.

For each meeting, write down:

People × minutes × frequency

Then ask:

• What is this meeting actually for?

• What would happen if we stopped it for a month?

• Does everyone need to be there?

• Does it need to happen this often?

• Does the information need to be delivered live?

• Could we achieve the same outcome in half the time?

Then make a decision:

Kill. Keep. Redesign.

Do not try to create the perfect calendar.

Just remove the meetings whose cost is no longer justified by what they produce.

The bottom line

Meetings are not free because everyone’s salary is already being paid.

Time is the resource the business cannot replenish.

Every recurring meeting is a decision to keep spending some of it.

Put a number on the Meeting Tax, and make sure it is buying something worthwhile.

Until the next BOX,

COO in a Box

One operating idea. Put it to work.

Most businesses don’t suffer from a shortage of priorities.

They suffer from having so many that the word has stopped meaning anything.

Sales has seven. Operations has nine. Finance has six. The leadership team has twelve things marked “critical”.

Then someone adds another.

Nothing gets removed.

And everyone carries on.

The problem isn’t that the business has too much work.

The problem is that we’ve confused everything that needs doing with everything that needs changing.

The Rule of Three isn’t the workload

Take Finance.

It still needs to:

• run payroll

• pay suppliers

• produce management accounts

• manage tax and compliance

• maintain controls

• support the rest of the business

None of that disappears because Finance has three priorities.

Those are KEEP RUNNING activities.

The priorities are the small number of things Finance is deliberately trying to improve, fix or change right now.

For example:

KEEP RUNNING
Payroll. Accounts. Cash collection. Reporting. Compliance.

MOVE FORWARD

1. Reduce debtor days from 48 to 35.

2. Cut month-end close from ten days to five.

3. Introduce weekly cash forecasting.

That’s the distinction.

The Rule of Three isn’t the workload. It’s the change agenda.

Separate KEEP RUNNING from MOVE FORWARD

This works in almost every function.

Operations still has customers to serve, suppliers to manage, problems to solve and people to organise.

Its three priorities might be:

1. Reduce average customer response time below four hours.

2. Remove the five biggest manual hand-offs.

3. Launch the new service model.

Compliance still needs to monitor the business, maintain policies and complete regulatory work.

Its priorities might be:

1. Automate the highest-volume monitoring activity.

2. Close the three largest recurring control gaps.

3. Redesign mandatory training.

The point isn’t to pretend there are only three things happening.

It’s to make the three things that should be meaningfully different in 90 days impossible to miss.

Three at every level

The model gets more useful when you cascade it.

COMPANY

What are the three outcomes that matter most to the whole business right now?

TEAM

What are the three things this team must change or deliver to support those outcomes?

INDIVIDUAL

What are the three contributions this person needs to make?

Not every priority has to map neatly one-to-one.

But there should be a visible line between them.

Company → Team → Individual

If the company says retention matters but nobody in Customer Success has a retention-related priority, something has broken in the chain.

If Operations is focused on reducing cost while the company is prioritising growth at almost any price, you have the same problem.

Priorities are useful partly because they tell people what to do.

They are even more useful because they expose when different parts of the business are quietly heading in different directions.

Try the five-person test

Ask five people in the business:

“What are the three most important things we’re trying to achieve right now?”

Don’t let them open a slide deck.

Don’t let them check the project plan.

Just ask.

If you get five completely different answers, you don’t have a communication problem.

You have a priority problem.

The priorities either aren’t clear enough, aren’t few enough or aren’t repeated enough to survive contact with the working week.

And if the leadership team can’t agree on the answer themselves, don’t expect the rest of the business to.

Use three as a forcing function

There is nothing scientifically magical about the number three.

That’s not the point.

Three is useful because it forces a choice.

Seven allows everything important to remain important.

Three creates a conversation about trade-offs.

So take the current priority list and ask:

1. Is this KEEP RUNNING or MOVE FORWARD?

2. If it’s MOVE FORWARD, is it genuinely one of the three most important changes right now?

3. If we add this, what comes off?

That third question does most of the work.

COMMON MISTAKE

Adding a fourth priority because it is “also important”.

Of course it is.

Most things that make the list are important.

The question is whether they are important now.

CHECK

Can everyone name the three priorities without looking them up?

DONE LOOKS LIKE THIS

The business still has plenty to do.

But everyone knows which three things must move.

The bottom line

A priority isn’t everything that matters.

It’s what you have chosen to move ahead of the other things that matter.

Keep running the business.

Keep meeting the obligations.

Keep doing the work.

But make the change agenda small enough that people can actually remember it.

What on your current priority list is actually just an obligation?

COO in a Box

Run a better business. One operating idea at a time.

The Founder Bottleneck Test

Why so many decisions end up with the founder, and how to stop being the default answer.

Founders often worry that they are too involved in the business. Too many decisions, too many questions, too many things waiting for their approval.

The obvious conclusion is:

I need to delegate more.

Sometimes that is true.

But delegation is often treating the symptom.

The issue is usually that too many decisions don’t have an obvious home. When ownership, boundaries, or context are unclear, decisions tend to travel upwards.

And eventually, they land with the founder.

Why everything ends up with you

Imagine a team trying to make a fairly ordinary decision.

A customer wants an exception. A supplier asks for something slightly unusual. Someone wants to change a process. A project needs a decision that sits between two teams.

Nobody is completely sure what the right answer is, so someone asks the founder.

The founder gives an answer.

Problem solved.

Except the same thing happens again next time.

Slowly, asking the founder becomes the safest route whenever the answer isn’t obvious. Not because the founder wants control, and not because the team is incapable.

It happens because getting the founder involved has become the easiest way to get the decision made.

The Founder Bottleneck Test

Look at the decisions that reached you over the last week.

For each one, ask two questions.

1. Did this genuinely need me?

Was it:

• strategic?

• high-risk?

• difficult to reverse?

• something only I could decide?

If yes, fine.

2. If it didn’t need me, why did it reach me?

Usually the answer falls into one of four buckets:

Clarity
Nobody knew who owned the decision.

Confidence
Someone probably knew the answer but didn’t feel comfortable making the call.

Context
The information needed to decide wasn’t available to the person making it.

Constraint
A rule, approval step or process forced the decision upwards.

Those are four very different problems.

“Delegate more” doesn’t solve all of them.

Count the decisions that shouldn’t reach you

Most founders don’t count the decisions they make.

They just feel the weight of them:

• the questions

• the approvals

• the messages that start with “quick one”

• the things that seem to need their view before they can move

Instead of trying to measure all of that, ask one simpler question:

How many decisions reached me that shouldn’t have?

Every unnecessary escalation tells you something about how the company is operating.

Five questions about pricing might mean your pricing rules aren’t clear.

Three hiring approvals might mean managers don’t know their boundaries.

A constant stream of customer exceptions might mean the policy itself is wrong.

Repeated project escalations might mean nobody has clear decision rights.

The question isn’t:

How do I answer these faster?

It is:

Why did this have to come to me at all?

Fix the route, not the founder

When you spot a recurring escalation, don’t simply tell people to stop asking you.

Remove the reason they need to.

• If the problem is clarity, name the owner.

• If it is confidence, make the decision boundary explicit.

• If it is context, give people access to the information.

• If it is constraint, remove the approval step.

The goal isn’t to make yourself unavailable.

It is to make fewer everyday decisions depend on you.

Try this for one week

Keep a simple note called:

Decisions that shouldn’t have reached me

Whenever one lands with you, capture:

• What was the decision?

• Who brought it to you?

• Why do you think it needed your involvement?

Don’t overthink it.

At the end of the week, look for repetition.

You are not trying to create a perfect delegation framework. You are trying to find the places where ordinary decisions keep travelling upwards.

Pick the most common one.

Fix the cause.

A common mistake

Founders sometimes respond to this problem by disappearing.

“Don’t ask me. You decide.”

That sounds empowering.

But if people still don’t know the rules, context or boundaries, all you’ve done is remove the safety net.

Good autonomy isn’t the absence of leadership.

It is clarity without escalation.

The check

Ask yourself:

If I disappeared for two weeks, which decisions would stop moving?

Not the big strategic ones.

The ordinary, repeatable decisions.

Those are your bottlenecks.

Done looks like this

The business doesn’t stop asking you questions.

It stops asking you the same kinds of questions.

That’s the sign that decisions are starting to happen in the right place, without needing you in the middle of everything.

COO in a Box

Run a better business. One operating idea at a time.

Written anonymously by an experienced COO, co-founder and operator.

Growing businesses have a habit of fixing problems where they appear.

A customer waits too long, so we add another person to customer service. A project slips, so we add another status meeting. A team keeps making mistakes, so we add another check. Someone can’t make a decision, so the founder gets pulled back in.

Sometimes that works.

Quite often, though, we’ve just added more process around the real problem.

Because the place where friction appears isn’t necessarily the place where it starts.

The problem you can see isn’t always the problem you have

Imagine customers are waiting three days for answers to fairly simple questions.

The obvious conclusion is that customer service is too slow.

So you improve the acknowledgement email. Set a tighter response target. Maybe add another person to the team.

All perfectly reasonable.

But none of that tells you why the answer takes three days.

Look a little deeper and you might find something else going on.

The customer team receives the question but can’t answer it themselves. They send it to Marketing. Marketing sends it to Sales. Sales needs something from Finance. Eventually, somebody asks the founder.

Three days later, the customer gets their answer.

The customer sees slow service.

Inside the business, the work is bouncing between teams.

Underneath that, nobody clearly owns the decision.

That is the Friction Map.

The visible problem is often the end of the chain, not the beginning.

Three places friction hides

Most recurring friction sits in one of three places.

01 - CUSTOMER FRICTION

This is what the customer feels.

Waiting too long. Not knowing what happens next. Having to chase. Repeating information they’ve already given you. Finding something harder to buy, use or get help with than it needs to be.

Customer friction is usually the easiest to spot because customers tell you about it.

But it isn’t always where the problem starts.

02 - OPERATIONAL FRICTION

This is how the work behaves inside the business.

Work sits in queues. It changes hands unnecessarily. The same information gets entered twice. People create workarounds because the normal process doesn’t quite work. Things need checking, correcting or chasing.

This is often where the customer problem is actually being created.

03 - ORGANISATIONAL FRICTION

This is why the work behaves that way.

Nobody clearly owns the outcome. Two teams are working to different priorities. People need permission for decisions they should be able to make themselves. Important knowledge sits in one person’s head.

This is where a surprising amount of everyday friction begins.

The three categories are useful to understand but the more important thing is the relationship between them. Friction travels downstream. Diagnosis should travel upstream.

Start with a different question

When something keeps going wrong, the natural reaction is: How do we fix this?

Before answering that, ask: Where does this actually start?

That small shift changes how you look at the problem. If you fix friction too far downstream, you can end up making the symptom easier to live with without removing the cause.

A better customer email might make a three-day wait feel more professional. It still doesn’t make the answer arrive any faster.

A new workflow might move a request neatly between five people. It still doesn’t explain why five people need to be involved.

I’ve seen businesses build surprisingly sophisticated processes around problems that could have been stopped somewhere else.

YOU WILL NEED

• One recurring annoyance in your business

• 15 minutes

• Ideally, someone who actually does the work

Don’t try to map the whole company.

Pick one thing that keeps happening and annoys you every time it does.

STEP 01 - Start with the symptom

Write down what is actually happening, without jumping straight to the solution.

Maybe:

• Customers keep chasing us.

• Quotes take too long.

• Projects get stuck before launch.

• Refunds always need senior approval.

• People keep asking me the same question.

Be specific.

“Communication needs improving” tells you almost nothing.

“Every project needs three messages before anyone knows whether it has been approved” gives you something you can actually investigate.

STEP 02 - Trace it upstream

Now follow the problem backwards through the three layers.

Start with the customer or visible symptom.

Where is someone waiting, guessing, chasing, repeating themselves or doing work they shouldn’t need to do?

Then look at the operation.

What is happening inside the business to create that experience? Where is work waiting, changing hands, being entered twice, corrected or worked around?

Then look underneath that.

Who owns the outcome? Who is allowed to make the decision? Are two teams working to different priorities? Does someone need permission they shouldn’t need? Does critical knowledge live with one person?

Keep tracing until you reach something that, if changed, would remove some of the friction further down the chain.

That’s usually where things get interesting.

STEP 03 - Fix the highest useful cause

You don’t automatically need to fix all three layers.

And you don’t need to keep digging just because you can.

Sometimes confusing checkout copy is simply confusing checkout copy. Fix it.

Sometimes somebody is manually copying information between two systems. Fix the workflow.

Sometimes six people are involved because nobody is quite sure who is allowed to say yes.

That’s usually the point where I’d stop mapping.

The aim is to find the highest useful cause: the earliest sensible point in the chain where one change removes friction below it.

COMMON MISTAKE

Mapping the whole business.

Resist the temptation.

This does not need to turn into a transformation programme, a wall covered in Post-it notes or three weeks spent documenting every process in the company.

Take one recurring problem.

Trace it. Fix it. Then take another.

CHECK

Ask:

If we fix this cause, should the friction below it disappear without creating more effort somewhere else?

If the answer is yes, you’ve probably found the right place to intervene.

If not, keep tracing.

DONE

You should eventually be able to describe the problem in one short chain:

Customers wait for answers
because work keeps changing hands
because nobody clearly owns the decision.

Once you can see the chain, deciding what to fix becomes much easier.

Growing businesses naturally accumulate friction.

More people create more handoffs. More products create more exceptions. More teams create more dependencies.

You won’t remove all of it.

But you can stop building solutions around symptoms.

Next time something keeps going wrong, don’t ask where the problem is visible. Ask where the friction starts.

COO in a Box

Run a better business. One operating idea at a time.

Written anonymously by an experienced COO, co-founder and operator.