She's That Founder: Business Strategy, Time Management and AI Magic for Impactful Female Leaders

073 | The Hidden Cost of Doing It All, A Wake Up Call for Female Founders

• Dawn Andrews • Season 2 • Episode 73

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Are you cramming 40 hours of work into a 20-hour week? If you're the approvals queen, the Slack oracle, and the one everyone’s waiting on; you're not running a business, you’re babysitting one.

In this episode, I walk through the real cost of being the bottleneck (yes, even the invisible kind), and how to get out of it using a three-part delegation system that’s saving me, my sanity, and my business. If your team is stalling while they wait for you, this one's your wake-up call and your way out.

In this episode, you’ll learn…

  • Why bottlenecking is quietly killing your momentum — and how to recognize it
  • The 3-step Bottleneck Fix: Find your pattern, Name it + Delegate it, Design for autonomy
  • How to use AI + systems to stop micro-managing without losing quality
  • Why trusting your team has to come before they’ve “earned” it

This episode at a glance:

[0:17] - If you ghosted your business for 72 hours, would it grind to a halt?

[4:44] - You’re not lazy if you shift these behaviors — you’re legacy-minded.

[11:17] - The hidden cost of doing it all yourself isn’t just burnout, it’s blocking the growth you say you want.”

[12:00] - You don’t have to do it all to be the one who gets it done.

Resources and links mentioned in this episode:

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Dawn Andrews:

Ah, are you doing 40 hours a week in a 20 hour window? Let me guess. You're the approvals queen, the final call on every decision and the walking, Frequently Asked Questions page for your entire team. If you ghosted your business for 72 hours, would it grind to a halt? I asked that question to my clients and future members of the AI founders community, and their responses were brutal. Payroll wouldn't run clients wouldn't get their proposals, and lunch orders would be chaos. One founder said, Honestly, I think my team would just sit around and wait for me to answer. Slack that sucks, lady friends, and if it sounds familiar, this is the truth. Every minute you spend as the bottleneck in your business is a minute your business is stuck and not growing, and that's just five minutes of reviewing, approving, deciding, it starts to really add up. It's killing momentum. It's quietly costing you growth. So let's talk about it.

Dawn Andrews:

You're listening to she's that founder business strategy and time management for female founders, all powered with a little AI magic. This is the place that helps ambitious women stop drowning in decisions and start owning their CEO seat. We're talking smarter delegation leadership systems that don't collapse when you take a nap, and AI tools that actually lighten your load, not add to it. I'm your host, Dawn Andrews, and if your to do list is longer than a CVS receipt, this episode is for you. Okay, here's what we're talking about today, you will finally see the invisible tax you've been paying that's dragging your business down. It's you. I know. I'm sorry. I wish I didn't have to say that.

Dawn Andrews:

But let's get real. If you're still the go to for every approval answer quick question, this is your wake up call. I'm breaking down the real cost of doing it all yourself, how it's quietly stalling your growth, and what to do instead, without throwing a match in the window of the car and letting it fly down the freeway on fire. Let's get you out of the bottleneck stage and back into the CEO seat where you belong.

Dawn Andrews:

This episode is personal for me. Y'all. You may not know it, but behind the scenes, there's a lot going on over here. I am the mom of two teenage boys, one who is graduating and about to jump into the next part of his life, and I am also the queen of the sandwich generation because I'm caring for my elderly mom, and it's a lot. It's a lot to still have time for me and still give focus to the business, and I still was being the one who approved every proposal, rewrote every email and reviewed every Google Doc Talk about bottleneck. I mean, I'm less a bottleneck, and I've been more of a damn my team is talented, but I had trained them to wait for me, and I had set up the systems to wait for me, and it reached a breaking point while I'm trying to give my full attention to my mom or even to something else in the business, I'm still jumping back and forth editing things. In fact, it got to a place where I tell my team, what do you need the most from me in the next 15 minutes? Because I would take care of things in between, in pockets of time.

Dawn Andrews:

And that's what really had me realize that I am not running a business. I was just babysitting it. And I see this every day with the founders and business leaders that I'm coaching as well, maybe not as exacerbated as my situation is in the current moment, but it's costing us, and this is the hidden cost of doing it all ourselves. And when you do that, and you really do that, your team's initiative dies, your growth stalls, and your creativity is crushed under constant context switching, because you're jumping from thing to thing.

Dawn Andrews:

But there is a way out. It starts with one question, where are you the bottleneck? So here's what helped me get out of this, and I'll share some other details of this whole excavation and extraction process in the next several episodes. Here are my three steps for breaking the bottleneck. Find your pattern. This isn't just about time, it's about energy leaks. So be self reflective. Take a look at what tasks get held up if you don't touch them, what decisions always come back to you, and what are you procrastinating on, even though you know your team could help you.

Dawn Andrews:

Here is a story of Emma. She's the founder of a creative agency, and she was spending time rewriting all of her clients decks, not editing them. She was actually rewriting them, bullet by bullet. We mapped her week, and we found that she spent nine hours a week finalizing that is more than a full workday of avoidable bottleneck behavior.

Dawn Andrews:

Here's the takeaway, you're not lazy if you shift these behaviors, you're legacy minded. You can't scale excellence if everything is locked in your head. So letting go of that bottleneck and letting go of some of the control means that you're actually building a business that lasts you. So step two, name it and delegate it once you have an idea of those choke points.

Dawn Andrews:

So we talked about what gets held up if you don't touch it, what decisions always come back to you. And what do you procrastinate on, even though you know your team could help you that's naming it. So once you name it, you can start to delegate it. If you know the choke points, name them out loud, write them down. It does two things. It externalizes the habit, so it starts to make that how you think and how you react to your bottleneck situations.

Dawn Andrews:

Most importantly, it opens the door to solutions, solutions that can be handled by your team, systems or AI. Start small. For instance, approving all invoices becomes setting a $500 auto approval threshold expenses up to $500 somebody else can make that decision, or whatever your number is for your business, writing every client email becomes creating a script library. We're on LinkedIn, and we're starting to use LinkedIn a whole lot more, and so I'm creating a script library so that my team knows what my common comments, DMS, responses would be, and they can make their first pass at it, or just take care of it all together. And we have a brand voice, AI GPT, that they can also use to help rewrite and respond to things in my voice.

Dawn Andrews:

Another example might be being the slack Oracle, the person who is always on Slack becomes creating certain office hours and or decision trees so that other people are responsible for a main portion of your decisions, so that you don't stop the process.

Dawn Andrews:

For those of you that might be thinking, my team is incompetent, or I'm surrounded by idiots, which I have heard on my client calls, that is not true, and that's on you. What it really means is your team is untrained, or you're hiring poorly, and either way, still on you, you've been over functioning, which makes it impossible for them to step up.

Dawn Andrews:

If you are holding it all together all the time and always the backstop, they're never going to step up. They're not going to show you what they've got. First, you've got to give them space to try and fail and improve. Here's an example. One of our executives that we work with was reviewing every piece of content before it went live. The amount of time that this highly paid, high functioning, like one of a kind executive was spending on social media posts was astonishing.

Dawn Andrews:

We built a trust ladder to start with low risk tasks so that they could review together. We built a custom voice GPT so that their team could put together drafts of all of those posts before they went out, and all of the content before it went out. And I held this founder's hand until they were able to build up enough confidence and trust that their team was going to be okay and that the messaging that was going out was going to be okay.

Dawn Andrews:

It took about a month, but finally, they were out of the day to day ops of all of the content and social media. If you are a founder, and I say this with love, and I say this from experience, you should not be in the minutia of social media. It is an entry point to your funnel, and it is not high dollar value for what it is that you specifically do best.

Dawn Andrews:

Okay, last step design for autonomy, not just for relief. So delegation isn't dumping. It's not like, Oh, my God, thank God that's on my plate. It's designing what systems will support your team making decisions without you. Is it a racy decision tree? Is it a communication workflow? Is it those boundaries on how much can be spent? Is it snippets of conversation or GPT you can use to make it work? Is it an auto workflow you can build? Who knows, but we can talk about that. That's what I'm here for. Think about it this way. It could be SOPs that are alive, not buried in some notion stack or Google Drive. It is weekly decision making meetings. How would you feel if every meeting that you had actually crossed things off the list helped you decide and moved things forward so that you didn't have to think about them anymore, the kinds of meetings that you feel bad if you miss them, if they have to be rescheduled because they're urgent and important, and it's where all of the magic happens. Weekly decision meetings using feedback loops, so that you have ways of sharing the information, having your team do it, and then both of you getting back with each other to determine, how did that go? How was it for you? How was it for me?

Dawn Andrews:

And finally, using founder friendly AI tools that handle 80% of that repetitive, administrative team oriented work, so you can all focus, not just you as the executive or you as the leader, but even them in their expertise, they can focus on the 20% that matters. How about that? This is a shift that we've been making, and we've been making it fast, and we've been making it hardcore. Most of our work is now running through AI workflows, and I trust my team, because not only did I build those systems that empower but we built them together. Together. I didn't just dump and run if you're nodding along, thinking, okay, but where do I even start? Start with joining our community. We have dawn, the AI for founders group on LinkedIn. It's where delegation meets automation, all with heart and AI magic. I'm dropping weekly prompts, tools, mini scripts, recommendations to help you stop bottlenecking your own brilliance.

Dawn Andrews:

So join us. The link to the AI founders group is in the show notes. We can't wait to see you there, or you can find us on LinkedIn at AI for founders. Let's recap what we did today. We helped you identify your bottleneck pattern. We named it so you could delegate it, and we helped you design it for Team autonomy, not just for short term relief or a breather. This is your homework. Ask yourself today, if I disappeared for three days, what would stop moving, and what would I come back to after that break? And then pick one of those things to hand off this week, and if one of them feels too big, pick a portion of that one thing to hand off this week. Not everything, not perfectly, just one thing. Start testing this and come share your answers in the AI for founders community. No shame, just strategy. Because the hidden cost of doing it all yourself isn't just burnout. It's blocking the very growth that you say that you want, and if you're not growing, you're dying. Let's fix it one hand off at a time.

Dawn Andrews:

Thanks for hanging out with me today. If this episode made you think or made you want to finally hand something off. Amen. To that. Leave a review. Share it with your work wife, or DM me what you're letting go this week. Send me a message on LinkedIn. And hey, I want you to remember that you don't have to be the one to do it all, to be the one who gets it done. I'll see you next time on she's that founder. You.