When the Founder Becomes the Bottleneck in an E-commerce-Driven Company

They had built a very smart online configurator. If you were an architect or someone designing an office, you could sit down in front of the screen and in a few minutes order exactly the desk you needed. Longer, shorter, different material, with or without height adjustment, different legs, cable management, power sockets, connectors, everything. You saw the price immediately. You saw what was possible. You did not have to write ten emails to a sales office and wait a week for an answer. The configurator was so good that it practically replaced a classic commercial department for a large part of the business.

This transparency had its downsides, but as long as the company was relatively small, it worked well. They were still under the radar of the serious competition, and the founder could personally keep things under control. This continued until he was no longer able to maintain control.

When Growth Turns Into Founder Burnout

The founder was an engineer. He was someone who had literally grown up in the workshop and worked on various projects. As the business grew, he found himself in a position where he could no longer sleep. Too many things were happening at the same time.

On any given day there were production issues, custom project requests, suppliers who needed decisions and on top of that a constant stream of slightly unusual orders coming in through the configurator.

All of this started to affect the quality of his decisions. It also blocked him from doing things the company really needed from him. One of them was that he did not have the energy or time to work with people who could run more complex projects and operations inside the company.

Up to around 20 people, he could still hold everything together. Roughly ten were in the workshop. The other ten were in design, development and administration. It was a lot, but it was manageable.

Then several large and complex projects arrived almost at the same time. Many of them started as edge cases in the configurator. Clients had tested the limits of what was possible, and the company, as it often happens, had said “yes”.

Quality, deadlines and internal capacity were all tested very hard.

At that moment it became clear that many things had to change. How the e-commerce channel was used and for whom. How far the configurator could go without creating chaos. What had to change inside the company so that this volume of work did not simply crush the existing structure?

The founder was stuck in a permanent dilemma. Was he the person who ran production? Was he the person who ran design? Was he the person who ran development? And was he the person who ran e-commerce, project sales and was the only one who could program the configurator?

The only role that did not really occur to him was that he was supposed to run the business.

When I told him this directly, he would rather not talk to me for a year. Then, one year later, he called and said that he had no choice any more.

Those twelve months had exhausted him and had quietly damaged many good things that existed in the company.

The Turning Point: When the Founder Must Step Out of the Front Line

When we finally started working together, it was obvious that we needed something close to a restart. Not a new logo or a new mission statement, but a very serious change in how everyday work was done.

One very practical step was the company phone number. For years, many clients had the founder’s direct number. They called him for everything. Special requests, delivery issues, new ideas, but also why the phone has two bars on the desk and four when it’s lifted, and “issues” like that.

We had to provide that phone number to someone else in the company.

Of course this had consequences. Clients were surprised. Some of them were unhappy. The founder felt as if a part of his identity was being taken away. However, in this specific situation, it was necessary. The business could not move to the next level while every important conversation still started and ended with him.

If we had started earlier, a softer approach would have been possible. This is one of the key lessons from this story. The later you start to work on people management, the more radical the surgery has to be.

Designing the Company Backwards from the Future State

Once we took that first step, the rest of the work was almost completely unglamorous.

We did not ask “how does the company look today”. We asked “how does it need to look in a few years if it wants to survive and stay profitable”.

From that future picture we went backwards.

We clearly separated responsibilities and gave real authority to the people who needed to have it. Not in theory, but in daily work. Someone had to own how the configurator was used for standard orders and when a request became a project. Someone had to own the flow from the online order to production and installation. Someone had to own product development and the rules for what can and cannot be promised through the online tool.

We identified which competences were missing. Not in a very complex way, but in a simple list. What does this person need to know? Which decisions must they be able to take without asking the founder? Where do they need support?

The plan did not start in its current state. The plan began with the future goals the company needed to achieve.

The whole process lasted almost two years. The company was lucky. The market for office furniture was stable and growing slowly. That gave the firm just enough stability to change itself. If the market had been more volatile or had dropped during that period, it would be a fair question whether the company would still exist today.

The Business Impact of Removing Bottlenecks

The effect of these changes was not visible in one week, but it was very visible over time.

The time to market for a new product was reduced by a factor of five. Before the change, introducing a new product that could be configured online could easily take a year, because everything passed through one overloaded person and one overloaded set of informal rules. After the change, the path was much shorter and much clearer.

The time needed to find drawings, documents and solutions that had already been used on similar projects went from an average of seven days to a few hours. On paper, this sounds almost ridiculous, but when everything is controlled from one place and one person, these delays are very real.

The founder’s role changed. He was still deeply involved. However, he was no longer the only person who could unblock operational work. Other people had clear decision rights. The e-commerce processes were “reconfigured” and, together with the production line, became part of a single system rather than a set of exceptions that only he understood.

The company grew, and the main bottlenecks disappeared.

The Hardest Part: Aligning the Founder with the New Operating Model

If you look at this from the outside, the steps are not complicated.

• You define the structure of roles and decisions.
• You decide who is the owner of which process.
• You write a simple map of competences.
• You agree on a rhythm of work that people can actually follow.

The hardest part was not the design. It was making an agreement with the founder himself.

He had to commit to certain behaviours. What he would still do. What he would stop doing. Which decisions he would support, even when they were not exactly the decisions he would have made himself.

He described it very nicely. He said that he felt like he was at the dentist. He knew that the tooth had to be fixed. He knew it would not actually hurt that much. But he still had to complain.

In the end, the company came out stronger. And the founder did not only keep his company. He kept his health (seriously) and his ability to enjoy what he had built.

For many e-commerce-driven businesses, this is the real question. Not only how fast you can grow, but whether you are ready to stop being the main bottleneck before it is too late.

The E-commerce Takeaway

For e-commerce businesses, the risk here is easy to miss because revenue can keep growing while the operating model quietly breaks. A great webshop, configurator or self-service quoting tool increases speed and demand, but it also increases exceptions, coordination and decision load. If all exceptions still land on the founder, the system will eventually slow down.

If you want a simple check, look at this:

·         Who decides what your e-commerce channel can and cannot promise

·         Who owns the handover from online order to production and delivery

·         Who can say “no” to edge cases without escalation

·         How fast you can change a product, a price rule or a configuration option without involvement of founder/CEO

If those answers point to one person, you are not scaling e-commerce. You are scaling stress.