Why I Became the Bottleneck in My Own Company — and What I Had to Change to Finally Scale

Originally published in Entrepreneur Magazine on May 29, 2026

In my first tech company, I stayed too deep in execution for too long — still closing deals, managing sales and operating in the weeds even as the business scaled — until I realized the very habits that built early success were the same ones limiting its long-term growth.

When I was running my first tech company, I made a costly mistake: I kept acting like the sales manager — even as the business scaled to nearly 100 employees, multiple headquarters and active acquisition conversations. I’d find myself hopping on sales calls in hotel lobbies between investor meetings and exit planning sessions, still trying to personally close deals as if the company depended entirely on me.

I was the classic “everything founder.” Most entrepreneurs start this way out of necessity. When you bootstrap a company, you are sales, marketing, operations, customer service, product and sometimes even facilities support. It’s a rite of passage — but it’s also the trap that eventually slows you down.

Looking back, I’m confident the company’s exit would have been significantly larger if I had stepped out of day-to-day execution earlier. The advice is simple but true: work on the business, not in it. The hard part is knowing when — and how — to actually do that…