Business Growth Brief · By Leanne Reichhoff
I’ve outgrown my role in my own company more than once.
I don’t mean I’ve outgrown Re3. I mean the role I needed to play at one stage of the business wasn’t necessarily the role I needed to keep playing in the next one. And lately, I’ve had the feeling that I’m there again.
I can build websites. I can manage ads. I can write copy. I can work through SEO. I can jump into a project and figure out most things that need to be figured out. I’ve spent years learning how to do these things, and I’m still very capable of doing them.
But being able to do something isn’t necessarily a good reason to keep doing it.
My best work today happens when I’m sitting across from a business owner or leadership team, asking questions, seeing connections across different parts of the business, developing strategy, building relationships and helping determine where we need to go next. That’s where my experience across so many different areas becomes especially valuable.
The more time I spend buried in execution, the less time I have for the work I’ve grown into. And I think this is something a lot of founders eventually have to face.
5 Signs You May Have Outgrown Your Role
1. You’re spending most of your time doing things other people could do.
This one can be difficult because you may still be very good at those things. You may even be better at them than the person you’re asking to take them over, especially if you’ve been doing the work for years.
But there comes a point when Can I do this? isn’t the most useful question anymore. The better question is, Am I still the right person to be doing this?
There are plenty of things I can do inside Re3 that I don’t think I should be spending my time doing anymore. Every hour I spend doing one of those things is an hour I’m not spending somewhere that may matter more.
2. Everything still seems to come back through you.
You delegate the work, but then you rewrite it, redesign it, fix it, finish it or spend so much time overseeing it that doing it yourself starts to feel easier. I’ve experienced this one plenty of times, and I don’t think there’s always one simple explanation for it.
Sometimes it’s a delegation problem. Sometimes it’s a team problem. Sometimes it’s a standards problem. Sometimes you haven’t given someone enough context to do the work well. And sometimes, if we’re willing to admit it, we haven’t actually let go of the role as much as we think we have.
Whatever the reason, if everything continues to depend on you touching it before it can move forward, it’s worth paying attention to.
3. The things only you can do aren’t getting enough of your time.
There are responsibilities someone else can eventually take off your plate. Then there are things that are much harder to transfer: your relationships, vision, leadership, judgment, experience and understanding of where the company needs to go.
Those things shouldn’t continually get whatever time is left after you’ve answered the emails, fixed the problem, reviewed the deliverable and jumped into another project.
For me, this has become one of the clearest signs that something needs to change. I don’t necessarily need to work less. I need more of my working time going toward the things where I bring the most value.
4. You’re increasingly drawn toward a different kind of work.
Pay attention to what gives you energy and what you find yourself wanting more time to do.
I’ve realized I want to spend more of my time with people. I want to be in leadership conversations. I want to understand businesses deeply, see connections other people may not be seeing, develop strategy, make introductions, build relationships and help determine what happens next.
I can spend an afternoon fixing something on a website. I probably always could. But I don’t want some of my best working hours going toward a website problem simply because I happen to know how to solve it.
That shift is telling me something about where my role is headed.
5. Your business needs something different from you now.
The version of you who built the company may not be the version of you who needs to lead its next stage. That’s not a rejection of everything you used to do. Those skills, decisions and long hours may be exactly what got the business where it is today.
But as the company changes, the founder’s role has to be allowed to change too.
I think we can sometimes hold onto an old role because we’re comfortable there. We know we’re good at it. We know how to measure whether we’ve accomplished something. And handing parts of it to other people can be uncomfortable, especially when they won’t necessarily do things exactly the way we would.
Staying there can feel safer than figuring out what we’re supposed to become next.
When Your Role Changes, Your Business Usually Has Too
When a founder outgrows a role, it’s rarely the only thing that has changed.
The company has probably evolved around them. The clients may be different. The team is different. The services have changed. The way people buy has changed. The company may have become more complex, while parts of the business are still operating the way they did several years ago.
Many of the companies we work with come to us because they’ve outgrown their brand, website, or marketing. What we often discover together is that those things are connected to leadership, customer experience, operations, sales, positioning, and other parts of the business that have evolved too.
If your business feels different than it did a few years ago, it may be worth looking beyond the most obvious thing that needs to change.
I’d love to connect and learn more about what you’re building, what’s changing, and where you’re headed next.
