Every custom builder hits this wall. You’re working harder than ever, but your business feels stuck.
Projects drag on, profits shrink, and you’re constantly firefighting.
Every decision, every client conversation, every site issue lands on your desk. While you’re micromanaging every detail, your competitors are scaling, winning bigger projects, and actually enjoying their businesses.
You’re working 70-hour weeks, heading for burnout, and your team calls you a helicopter parent. Projects blow out because nothing moves without your approval. You’re strangling your own growth.
You’re not broken. You’ve just never learned the systematic way to step back without everything falling apart. There’s a proven method to go from bottleneck to business leader.
Duayne and Amelia break down exactly why this happens and share the incremental approach that’s transformed hundreds of builders.
Watch the video now, or read the transcript below. Be sure to also subscribe to the Live Life Build YouTube channel.
Amelia
Have you ever looked at how things are going every day in your business and wondered if you’re the bottleneck?
If you’re the one that is stopping everything from getting done, you might be saying to yourself, I can’t trust my team to do anything, but that might actually mean that you’re the bottleneck.
Duayne
If this is you, and you’re running your business like this, and you possibly think you are the bottleneck, then this is leading towards burnout.
You’re probably creating a lot of tension in the business, and you’ll often feel that your team and everybody around you is a problem, when in reality, it’s actually you.
- You’re not allowing your team to grow
- You’re not giving them permission
- You’re not allowing your clients to understand or set expectations.
All those types of things are part of you being a bottleneck in your business,
Amelia
We find too we had one of our members come to us, Anthony, and he said, he joked that his team used to call him a helicopter parent, because he was always on site, micromanaging everything.
And ultimately, all that was happening was it meant that nothing could flow smoothly. Everything had to go through Anthony, and everybody was held up because they had to wait for Anthony’s “okay” on things for work to occur.
And that was just making Anthony more stressed. It’s a very common occurrence, and I see builders just go…
“Well, this is terrible. I’m just burning out here. I can’t do this anymore. I might as well go and work for somebody else, because this just isn’t working.”
This is how you end up with a business that gives you freedom, grows your profits, and delivers quality homes to your clients.
– Duayne
Duayne
This also ties back into the no time thing, if you’re in that mindset that you have to be controlling everything, you can’t let yourself be trusted like that. I think that’s a huge one as well.
Like you, you haven’t allowed your team to do things on their own, so you feel you can’t trust them. There’s no doubt about it, there’s going to be points in your business where letting go of things is going to cost you a little bit of money.
And we talked to our ELEVATE members about this all the time, but if you don’t take that step back and give your team permission to grow, to try things, people are always going to make mistakes.
Every single human in the world makes mistakes, but you have to give people permission to be able to make those mistakes and learn from those mistakes, and then grow as a team, and that is the only way you’re going to be able to step back and not be that bottleneck in your business.
It’s the same with your clients. If you feel that you’re the only person in your busines that can:
- talk to your clients
- have discussions with them
- do your site meetings
- quote the work,
… all these things, you will be holding your business back, and you’ll be adding a lot of unnecessary stress to your plate.
Amelia
I think it’s really interesting, because builders can hear… ”Okay, fine, I’ll let go. I’ll let them make mistakes”.
And then what they do is they go completely to the other end of the scale, and it’s almost like they chuck their team just totally in the deep end.
And instead, what we teach our members is the importance of doing it incrementally, creating systems and processes, setting expectations and ensuring that your team knows that they have the support that they can access should they need to.
It’s not about just chucking them out of the nest and hoping that they fly.
It’s actually about giving them the guidance and the structure so that they can know they’ve got somewhere to go, but they can also feel empowered to make their own choices on site, and know that they’ve got a structure behind them and somebody to check in with, should they need to.
And that incremental way of letting go and stepping back from your business then actually grows leaders within your business that can help you be able to scale what you do.
Duayne
And this is how you’ll end up with a business that gives you freedom to grow your business, to make more profits and deliver quality homes to your clients.
From Bottleneck to Business Leader
If Anthony’s story resonates with you – if you recognised yourself in that “helicopter parent” description, this is one of the most common challenges we see with custom builders, and it’s exactly why we created the systematic approach taught inside ELEVATE.
The transformation is possible. Our builder members regularly go from working IN their business every day to working ON their business. They build teams they can trust, systems that work without them, and businesses that give them the freedom to grow.
- Inside ELEVATE, you’ll discover:
- The incremental delegation framework that protects your profits while empowering your team
- Proven systems for client communication that don’t require your constant involvement
- How to develop leaders within your business who can scale what you do
- The exact processes our members use to step back without everything falling apart
Learn More About ELEVATE here.
Because your business should work for you, not the other way around.