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

074 | 3 Business Systems That Secretly Sabotage Female Founders and How To Break Free

• Dawn Andrews • Season 2 • Episode 74

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Every founder is running systems even if they’re chaos.

In this episode, I’m naming the three hidden systems that high-achieving women accidentally build that lead to bottlenecks, burnout, and stalled growth. These are the survival systems that got your business off the ground… but now they’re costing you time, clarity, and peace.

If your calendar is full, your team depends on you for everything, or you're constantly rewriting what others create, this one’s for you.

In this episode, you’ll learn…

  • The 3 toxic system archetypes: The Hero, The Hoarder, and The Ghostwriter
  • How each system shows up, what it’s really costing you, and the emotional truth underneath it
  • Tactical solutions: delegation frameworks, AI decision trees, SOPs, and brand voice guides that actually work

This episode at a glance:

[1:54] - I wasn’t just in a broken system. I was the broken system.

[14:35] - The hero needs to stop solving everything and start documenting decisions.”

[15:42] - You are not broken but your systems might be. And when you change the system, everything changes.

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:

Every female founder is running business systems, even if they're chaos. But here's the truth that we don't talk about enough, the very systems you built to survive in the early stages of your business are now sabotaging your ability to scale. Those systems were built fast. They were built under pressure and from a place of needing to prove yourself, but now they're siphoning your time, your clarity and your leadership. In today's episode, we're exposing the hidden systems sabotaging female founders and what to do instead, to finally lead with power and peace.

Dawn Andrews:

Welcome to she's that founder the show for ambitious women ready to lead with clarity and scale with confidence. I'm Dawn Andrews, business strategist and executive coach in today's deep dive, we're naming the hidden systems sabotaging female founders, and I'm sharing how to rebuild them so they don't run you into the ground.

Dawn Andrews:

Hey, founders, not sure how to move from chaos to clarity in your systems, in your leadership, in your communication. I have something for you. Grab the AI for founders playbook. It's your shortcut to smarter systems, delegation sanity and getting 10 plus hours back each week. How does that sound? Grab the AI for founders playbook. The link is in the show notes. For years, I thought my lack of structure was the price I paid for being nimble, for being able to move quickly, to make creative decisions on the fly, to be able to pursue opportunities that were hot in the moment. It turns out, it was the cost of burnout. My team kept coming to me for answers, but I was changing direction so fast, I didn't have answers to give them. And in addition, my calendar was full of check ins approvals and quick questions, but there was no traction. And then I realized I wasn't just in a broken system. I was the broken system. There it is, and I'm not alone.

Dawn Andrews:

According to McKinsey's women in the workplace report, 43% of women in leadership roles report being burned out, compared to 31% of men. Now gender aside, men or women, those percentages are really high, and that's not personal failure. That's systemic breakdown. If that many people are burned out, something is just not quite right, and it's not all on the individuals that are experiencing the burnout. Having been a survivor of three rounds of burnout in my career, I started to map my patterns, and what emerged were three invisible, but freaking deadly systems that smart, capable women fall into so let's meet these systems. Call them archetypes, if you will. These are ways of being that we as leaders, and especially women in leadership, are behaving that we sometimes don't even realize we're doing.

Dawn Andrews:

Here we go. Here are your three archetypal systems when you're the system that might be causing you breakdown, burnout and the inability to scale the way you'd like to number one the hero system. You're the go to person for everything, and it feels great until it doesn't.

Dawn Andrews:

Here are the symptoms of the hero system. Every big decision routes through you. You feel pulled in to every fire. You may even be the one starting some of those fires. Your team loves you, but they are overly dependent on you, and there's a deeper emotional truth to the hero system. You've built your business on trust in yourself, which is great at the beginning, but now your identity is tangled with your usefulness. Letting Go feels like losing control, and it feels like losing your value, and it sucks, because in order to pass on that trust, there will be times that your team doesn't love you. There will be times that they don't handle the buyers well. There will be times that big decisions and balls are dropped, and there's a deeper hidden cost to all of this. If you're living in the hero system, you're the escalation path and the execution path. So as you ask for more of yourself, of your business, all that execution still goes through you. You're not actually pushing it through to your team. Your team starts to stagnate, because though they love you and look to you for direction, at a certain point, they stop investing in their own growth and their own momentum forward in their roles, because you're the backstop for everything, and your growth stalls personally, and it also stalls the growth of your business, real world stories.

Dawn Andrews:

One of my clients ran a large marketing agency. Her calendar was triple booked. Her team would not make a move without her green light. It was honestly like a vice grip that she had around the business. And when I asked why she still handled every approval, she said, If I don't, we'll lose. Clients, and perhaps not wrong, but we pushed a little further into it, and what it turned out she was really afraid of was losing her purpose, like if she wasn't holding everything with that tight grip, what would she be doing? Where would she be spending her time and energy? So we shifted her role from hero to architect and built an AI decision tree so that she could follow through with what her team was doing and make sure that her clients were held and serviced well. And she finally stepped back into leadership and focused on her vision for what the business could be in the future.

Dawn Andrews:

The solutions to the hero system, if you're stuck in them, is to move into an architect phase, to think of yourself as the builder of your business, not the hero of your business. And the solutions here are permission based systems so that there are stops along the way for your team to execute and you feel like you still have quality control if necessary, we created an AI supported knowledge base with the frequently asked questions she would get from her team, so the team could refer to this custom GPT to ask questions and get answers as if they were her. And then we also created a red, yellow, green light delegation framework so that along the way, if tasks needed to be moved on, she knew, and the team knew when they absolutely needed to stop with her and needed her approvals and assistance, when they could handle some of it themselves, or take it as far as they could take it in the yellow phase and then turn to her or own it completely themselves in the green light phase.

Dawn Andrews:

That's the hero system. So ask yourself, are you beloved by your team, but holding too much you might be a hero, but let's see if we can turn you into an architect so that you can grow your business. The next system that might be slowing down your growth is the hoarder system. This is where everything's in your head, your inbox, your Google Drive, your yellow notepad sitting on your desk, your text chain, all of the core information that would really give your team freedom to grow and move is locked in with you. Here's how you know, if you might be in the hoarder system, you recreate the same process constantly. Your team is always asking, where is that? You feel disorganized, but you don't trust others to do it right?

Dawn Andrews:

So here's the deeper emotional truth. Hiding in the hoarder system, you fear that sharing everything means losing your edge. You believe that your value is what only you know. Yeah, if you're a need to know basis kind of person, you're hoarding information, and it's stopping your business from growing, and there are a few other hidden costs. Redundancy becomes your status quo. That means that you're the one that's gonna have to keep building it over and over and over again because you're not empowering your people to do it. Onboarding becomes incredibly slow, which means that you might be reluctant to bring on more clients, because you're the one that has to handle the process of bringing them on and team morale dips.

Dawn Andrews:

So imagine you're in the kitchen. I like to cook with my kids. Imagine you're in the kitchen, and you're the only one with the recipe book, so there may be ingredients to build some fabulous meal. I'm not really obsessed with lasagna, you guys, but for some reason it's always a great metaphor. So imagine you're trying to make a lasagna. You have everything laid out, and you're the only one with the recipe book. That means that everyone that works with you or for you is really just an extension of you, or an extra set of hands with no brain attached. They don't actually learn how to make a better lasagna. They don't learn how to make a lasagna at all, because all of the information resides with you.

Dawn Andrews:

Let your people read the recipe book and learn how to make the fabulous lasagna, and then you can step out of the kitchen and they can make it for you. Okay, real world story for you. This one rings a little too close at home, but I'm just going to share it anyway. Emma, who is a creative founder of a creative agency, had a massive dropbox folder labeled Do not touch. Her team avoided it like a landmine. When we sat down, she admitted she wasn't hoarding all of the information in the DO NOT TOUCH folder. She was scared that somebody was going to mess it up, that something would get deleted, something would get moved. What we did is we used AI to audit the folder. First of all, we made a copy of the folder so that it was usable. We set up AI automation so that information that she put into hers could go into a community folder if it was relevant and safe for her to share it. And then we used AI to audit and organize her processes into searchable, shared SOPs in a hub, and her stress dropped. All those lasagna recipes started to get shared. Her team felt empowered, and she finally stopped being the secret keeper. Doesn't it sound like I continued to build SOPs for my team and 2025 has been a big year of revisiting what I had done before and what I'm doing.

Dawn Andrews:

Now, especially with AI, to help with the process. So here's the solution to the hoarder system. Ai generated SOPs, centralized searchable systems and documentation as a leadership act. Sharing this information, creating SOPs is part of being an extraordinary leader. So just take it on as a mindset. And if any of this sounds familiar, like if you're resonating with one or both of these systems, then grab the AI for founders playbook. It walks you through how to stop being a hoarder and start building scalable structures.

Dawn Andrews:

Here is the last system. You may be any of the three systems that we're talking about today, or you may bounce around between them, depending upon what your situation is. So the last system is called the ghostwriter system. You do the thinking, the writing, the approving, even when you have a team. Here are some symptoms of the ghostwriter system. You rewrite everything your team sends you. And I mean rewrite, not just like a little tweak. Here, a word change. There, you rewrite it. You think to yourself often, it's faster if I just do it, if you've thought that or heard yourself say it aloud, you're doing this more than you know.

Dawn Andrews:

Please listen to the system and look at how you might be able to shift it. It will change your life. Another symptom is your team is busy, but the results actually still feel like your job. Here is the deeper emotional truth with the ghostwriter system, you're proud of your brand and your standards, but deep down, you don't fully trust others to represent you, and that rewriting and bottlenecking everything with yourself is what keeps you safe, the hidden cost. Here you become the single point of failure. Like everything stops with you. That podcast doesn't go out your fault, the emails don't go out on time, your fault. Everything stops with you, your team, creativity flat lines because you're not asking them to flex their mental muscles. You're doing it all for them, and over time, you feel increasingly resentful and you're the one that's creating the situation that's causing it. Real World story here I work with the founder of a fashion brand, and this founder spends an incredible amount of time, rewording, asking for reshoots, redoing everything creative related to their brand. They have been known to say, my voice is our brand, nitpicking everything that the team is doing. This founder silenced the team.

Dawn Andrews:

How did we fix it? We built a brand voice style guide with AI and trained the team to use a feedback framework with this founder so that they could step into their brilliance. The founder began using AI for feedback, and the team began using AI for feedback so they could communicate more specifically and clearly with one another. And finally, this founder started to build some trust in their team and focused on the big stage, not the comment bubbles.

Dawn Andrews:

So the solution for the ghostwriter system is creating an AI assisted voice guide so that team members could actually write in the founder's voice and create content that was very close to what the founder needed. We created scalable feedback frameworks so that they knew how to talk to each other better, how to communicate and get what they wanted from each other, and we created standards to align brand and quality. We basically built as best we could, an AI version of this founder's creative approach, so that every time the team members were building and creating social creating images, they would get as close as possible using AI as a guide and a co pilot, and then when the founder was reviewing the information, they were able to see their needs, their creative vision, reflected in that work. And the amount of ghost writing reduced considerably.

Dawn Andrews:

So if you want to stop ghostwriting, hoarding or heroing your way through your business and take a freaking breath. The AI for founders playbook is your first real exit ramp. Grab it now and start designing systems that run without you.

Dawn Andrews:

Okay, let's recap. The hero needs to stop solving everything and start documenting decisions. The hoarder needs to stop fighting systems and information in their head and start building visible ones. And the ghostwriter needs to stop rewriting or recreating everything and start scaling her voice. These archetypes are not flaws, they are survival strategies, and they helped you build your. Business. So thank them for what they have been, but now they are holding you back, and it is time to build something different.

Dawn Andrews:

According to Forbes, 75% of female founders cite burnout as their biggest barrier to scale, not lack of talent, not even lack of funding. It is burnout. You don't need to work harder. You need to work differently, and this is totally within your capability. So this week, pick your most prominent archetype, the hero, the hoarder, the ghostwriter. Which one are you really spending the most time in? And identify one recurring pattern that's draining you. Then use AI to create a template, a process, a framework that will start breaking that cycle. You are not broken, but your systems might be. And when you change the system, everything changes.

Dawn Andrews:

If today's episode gave you clarity, courage or just a deep exhale, hit that follow button, leave a review or send this to a founder friend who needs to hear it, and if you're ready to ditch burnout systems and build ones that actually scale, download the free guide 10 Ways AI will make you a better leader, and you'll find that in the show notes. Or you can also come join us inside AI for founders a private community on LinkedIn. You don't need more bandwidth, you need better systems, and you can totally create them with ease, on the fly, in motion, while you are scaling your business. See you next time friends you.