Are you the bottleneck in your own company?
Every decision waits for you. Every proposal passes your desk. The company grew. Your calendar filled. And somewhere along the way you stopped being the engine and became the ceiling.
Chapter One of The CEO Parent is about that moment. It is called The Bottleneck at the Top, and most founders recognise themselves in the first two pages.
Nine pages. No sales pitch. Read it and decide for yourself.
What is in this chapter
It opens on a Friday afternoon before a family holiday, with two business calls, a car to load and a father who was physically present and mentally somewhere else. His youngest felt it before anyone said a word.
From there it moves into the pattern I see in almost every founder-led company I work with. The vision that once pulled everyone forward has quietly become the thing everyone waits for. The sales manager still sends the proposal up for approval, three months after being told he does not need to. The operations lead arrives with three options and no recommendation. Nobody doubts their own judgement. They doubt whether deciding without the founder is allowed.
Further in, a founder on holiday cannot stop thinking about a button on a screen, while his team is quietly solving the problem that actually mattered. That story left one word we still use to interrupt him.
And then the part most founders skip past: what it costs. Not the evenings, though it costs those too. What it costs the people who never get handed the real thing, and so never find out what they are capable of.
“Every time you answer before your team has finished thinking, you solve a problem and prevent a capability from being built.”
The CEO Parent Principle, Chapter One
Sjoerd Maas
I have spent more than fifteen years as the right hand of founders, helping fast-growing companies become less dependent on the people who started them. I am the founder of The Value Architects and the creator of the Value Acceleration Method.
I am also the father of two young sons, who taught me most of what is in this book without meaning to.
This book is not a parenting book. It uses parenting as a lens, because parenting holds up a mirror to your leadership that almost nothing else does. You see exactly what happens when you take over, when you fix instead of ask, when you solve instead of wait.
A diagnostic that scores how dependent your company still is on you follows later. The chapter comes first.
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