Everything depends on you. Who’s supporting you?

At nine in the morning, you planned to think about growing the business.

At ten past nine, your manager asked whether a delivery could be rescheduled. Then the designer sent over two banner options. Then you had to find an invoice, confirm an order and explain what to say to a customer who was “just checking”.

By lunchtime, you’d already worked as the boss, a dispatcher, an information desk and the person who remembers where that file is.

You’ll think about growing the business tomorrow. There’s even a free hour in your calendar. A bold prediction.

When everything goes through the owner, it’s easy to see that as a sign of responsibility: you know your customers, keep an eye on quality and solve problems quickly. Often, that’s exactly how the business grew.

But eventually, the same way of working starts getting in the way. There are more tasks and more people, yet one person still has to give everyone permission to move forward.

How can you gradually change that without putting your team through an “I’ve disappeared, now figure it out” experiment?

Imagine a small furniture workshop. The owner hired a manager to handle customer conversations. She now takes enquiries, collects measurements and prepares quotes.

But she forwards every unusual question to the owner:

• Can we use a different handle?
• What about Saturday delivery?
• The customer wants a discount.
• This alcove isn’t a standard size. What do we tell them?

On paper, customer communication has been handed over. In practice, the owner is still having the conversation, just through someone else.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the manager can’t work independently. Perhaps she doesn’t know which decisions she’s allowed to make. Perhaps she was criticised the last time she took the initiative. Or maybe the prices and terms she needs exist only in the owner’s head.

Before saying “they can’t do anything without me”, check: what does your team actually have to work with when you’re not involved?

A person needs a clear outcome, access to information and the authority to act within agreed limits. If any of those is missing, the questions will keep coming back.

In Atlassian’s exercise on roles and responsibilities, team members compare how they understand their own responsibilities with what others expect from them. That conversation helps uncover work that everyone assumes belongs to someone, but nobody has actually taken on.

A small business doesn’t need a corporate workshop for this. It’s enough to look at one process and answer honestly: who is responsible for what here?

“Delegate more” isn’t much help when you barely have time to work out what you’ve been doing.

For a few working days, try noting down requests that interrupt your work. Keep it brief; you’re not writing meeting minutes:

• found the current price list for the manager;
• approved a delivery change;
• explained to the designer which option matched the brief;
• resolved a difficult complaint;
• reminded someone who needed to call the customer back.

Then write down why you needed to be involved in each one.

Are you the only person who knows the answer? Then the information isn’t readily available.

Is the answer known, but nobody is allowed to act without you? Decision-making authority needs clarifying.

Does the person lack the skills to do the task? They need training, an example and practice.

Is nobody responsible for the next step? Someone specific needs to own it.

Does the decision genuinely affect the whole business? Perhaps that should remain part of your job.

This distinction helps you avoid treating every problem by creating another job. An extra manager is unlikely to help if the latest information still lives on your phone and every response needs your approval.

“Help with customers” sounds friendly. But it doesn’t say where that help starts or ends.

Instead, you could agree:

You’re responsible for new enquiries: clarify what the customer needs, prepare a quote using the current terms, record the agreements and identify the next step. Bring me requests that fall outside our agreed prices, timelines or production capabilities.

Now there’s a clear area of work. The person can follow an enquiry through to a specific state: the quote has been sent, the customer is waiting for clarification, or the order has been passed to production.

Start with one recurring process. For example, preparing standard quotes, handling new enquiries or arranging routine deliveries.

Choose work that you can explain, check and correct without serious consequences. A routine order is a better place to gain your first experience of handing over authority than a dispute with your biggest customer.

It also matters whether the person has time for the new responsibility. Adding another process to an already full day won’t work just because someone is more independent. Agree which existing tasks will be removed or given a different priority.

The owner says: “Just do it properly.”

The employee hears: “Do it the way I imagine it, but haven’t explained yet.”

To avoid that, write down a few things for the process you’ve chosen.

What outcome is required. For example, the order has confirmed items, a price, a date and a delivery method.

Where to get the information. The current price list, production schedule, service description and agreed terms.

What can be decided independently. Choosing a standard delivery option, offering an available time slot or correcting a routine mistake in an order.

When you need to be involved. A request exceeds the budget, requires new commitments or concerns a serious complaint.

How you’ll see the status of the work. Through an entry in your work system or a short update at an agreed time.

Don’t copy someone else’s limits. A small payment to compensate a customer might be a routine decision for a manager in one business and swallow the profit on an order in another.

The limits need to fit your finances and your team’s capabilities.

If every decision needs your permission, the team has tasks, but not yet enough authority to complete them.

You don’t have to start with a forty-page document. Especially if the person will be searching it for just one thing: “What do I do when a customer asks for a different date?”

A short guide may be enough for the first process:

1. What starts the work.
2. What needs to be checked.
3. Where the latest information is kept.
4. What a finished result looks like.
5. When to ask for help.

Add an example of a task done well. And one case where the process stalled: what was unclear and how it was resolved.

Test the guide on real work. Ask the person to complete a task using it, and watch where they need to ask additional questions. That’s where the explanation is missing.

Check access separately. An employee may know the process perfectly but be unable to see the order or change its status. That’s a technical obstacle; telling them to “be more proactive” won’t fix it.

We’ve already written about businesses depending on access in “Your Contractor Disappeared. Who Controls Your Website?”. The same principle is useful inside a team: the people responsible for the work need access to it.

Your manager has prepared a quote. It’s correct, but you would have written it differently. You rewrite the text, send it to the customer yourself and think: “It would have been quicker to do it myself again.”

For one message, perhaps. But your team has just seen that you still do the final work yourself.

When checking the work, distinguish between three situations.

There’s a significant mistake. A wrong price, an unconfirmed deadline or an important condition missing. It needs correcting, along with an explanation of how to check it next time.

An agreed standard is missing. The person made an acceptable choice, but you expected something else. Clarify the rule and add an example.

You simply prefer your own version. If the result meets the agreement, consider whether you need to intervene.

This isn’t an invitation to accept poor work. It’s just that “not how I would do it” and “doesn’t meet the requirements” can mean different things.

Also agree how mistakes should be reported. If every problem earns someone a telling-off, there’s a risk that you’ll hear about the next one later. The business benefits more from an early warning while there’s still time to put things right.

After handing over a process, you still need to see what’s happening. But that doesn’t require reading every message before it’s sent.

For our imaginary furniture workshop, a short update could cover:

• which enquiries are still unanswered;
• which quotes are awaiting a customer’s decision;
• where production needs to clarify something;
• what needs the owner’s involvement and why.

You then step into the process at specific points. The team can work between those reviews.

Reviews may be more frequent at first. Once the person is consistently doing the work well, you can reconsider them. Frequency should depend on the complexity of the process and the consequences of a mistake, rather than a desire to reduce communication at any cost.

It also helps to gradually introduce a format for asking for help:

Here’s the situation. I’ve checked these details. I suggest this option because… I need your decision on…

That may still be difficult for someone who’s learning. First, help them understand what to check. Independence takes practice too.

Here’s a basis for a conversation with the person you’re handing a process over to:

I’d like to hand over preparing standard customer quotes to you, from the beginning through to sending them.

Together, we’ll write down what information is needed, where to get current prices and which terms you can offer independently.

For now, check non-standard work and unconfirmed deadlines with me.

We’ll go through a few quotes together first. Then you’ll prepare them independently, and we’ll review the results at an agreed time.

We’ll also decide which of your current tasks need to be taken off your plate so you have time for this process.

If information or decision-making authority is missing anywhere, we’ll note it down and update the way we work.

After the conversation, test the agreement on a real task. “I understand everything” is useful to hear, but completed work will tell you more.

Then there’s nobody to hand the process over to yet. But you can prepare it for a future handover and reduce the number of decisions you have to repeat.

Save answers to common enquiries, define standard packages and collect the information needed for calculations in one place. See which steps ordinary tools can handle: reminders, an enquiry form or a document template.

Make sure customers still have a way to ask an unusual question. A template helps with a routine situation, but it shouldn’t pretend every situation is the same.

That way, you gradually prepare work that someone else can take on when you’re able to bring them in.

Choose one question that people regularly bring to you.

Ask why answering it requires your involvement. Write down a rule, give the person the information they need and agree the limits of the decision. Then check together whether they were able to complete the work.

Don’t expect one document to make the business independent of its owner. But you can already make one process clearer.

Assign the time you free up to something specific straight away: talking to a promising customer, checking profitability, working on a new offer or resting. Otherwise, the next small task will quickly fill it.

You’ll still have plenty to do in the business. It helps when those tasks leave room for the decisions you started it to make.

If constant approvals stem from enquiries, information and tasks being scattered across different tools, write to Grandma. We’ll look at a specific process and work out what needs organising.