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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.
"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
A Friday afternoon, two business calls and a son who felt it first.
It opens before a family holiday, with 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 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.
"This is a book every scale-up CEO should read before growth turns into chaos."
"The most valuable thing you can do for your business is learn to get out of its way."
"If you're a CEO ready to grow beyond yourself, The CEO Parent is the book you need."