Why Founders Are Usually The Bottleneck In Their Business
Welcome to the Dave vs. Startups.
One of the biggest mistakes founders make is thinking they ARE the business.
Chris and I learned this lesson the hard way while building AppArmor back in the day.
Founders are usually the bottleneck in their own business.
Looking at things like:
Customer onboarding
Feature decisions
Implementation calls
If something needs to happen, it often has to go through the founder (or founders).
But if you're essential to every process, you don't own a business (please don’t come at me with pitchforks, but…).
What you own instead is a very high-paying job that you can never leave.
Here’s how Chris and I worked to solve this at AppArmor:
The turning point came when I realized how much time I was wasting on repetitive tasks that could be systematized.
Take customer onboarding as an example.
Every time a new university signed up for our campus safety app, they had to pick their features.
This meant endless email chains explaining the same options over and over.
So my brother Chris and I built what we called the "App Blueprint" (pretty awesome name, right? )
It was a simple spreadsheet with all our features listed out.
One tab showed all available features.
Another tab showed what their app would look like based on the buttons they chose.
We'd send this to new customers instead of doing everything manually.
This one tool saved us probably 75 emails back and forth with each customer.
It sounds basic, but it was a total game-changer for our efficiency.
The best part is, they might even still be using it now, years after we sold the company.
That's the sign of a system that actually works.
My brother always said:
Before you hire someone, make sure you've got systems in place for them to be successful.
That thinking applies to nearly every other area of the business, too, not just hiring.
It's way more profitable and easier to manage.
This became our philosophy.
I remember reading "Built to Sell" by John Warrillow during this time.
The cover shows a guy with his feet up on his desk. It immediately resonated lol.
Your company should be humming along without you.
Built to sell means you've built adequate systems where everything's just running.
You could not be there, and it works. And by the way, it's also profitable.
When we eventually went through the acquisition process, this systematic approach became one of our biggest assets.
Acquirers don't want to buy a business that falls apart the moment the founder steps away.
They want to see processes, documentation, and systems that ensure continuity.
We ended up selling AppArmor for 8 figures to a company that knew they could integrate our operations seamlessly.
The irony is the systems that made us less essential as founders made us more valuable to buyers.
Start building systems today, even if they're just simple spreadsheets with some automations or something on the back end.
Every process you can document and systematize now is one step closer to true business ownership.
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You can't grit your way to an exit. Thoughts?
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