What to do when the business owner is the bottleneck
Owners who refuse to check email, manage staff, or update decades-old processes force managers to constantly mediate scope disputes between crews and clients. This bottleneck leaves you working off the clock just to prop up a business that would otherwise fall apart.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Physically printing out emails and handing them to the bossDid this help you?
- 2Fielding repeated status check calls and emails from clients while waiting on the bossDid this help you?
- 3Sorting out discrepancies in person between the client and the crewDid this help you?
- 4Working unpaid, off-the-clock hours to compensate for failing operationsDid this help you?
- 5Slowly rolling out new systems to avoid overwhelming the existing staffDid this help you?
- 6Leaving the family business entirely to find another jobDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Every email that comes into the business funnels through me first, because he doesn't even access the inbox.”source ↗
“So then the crew shows up on the day of the job with one understanding of the scope, and the client's standing there with a completely different one, and guess who's in the middle sorting that out.”source ↗
“Anyone else stuck propping up a business that would fall apart without you, while the guy at the top treats it like his personal fiefdom to run little power games in?”source ↗
“My parents refuse to write anyone up, put performance improvement plans in place, fire anyone, or hire anyone else. I am at my wit’s end because I cannot do it all. I am not salaried and I do a lot off off-clock work because this is my parents’ livelihood and my entire childhood was spent helping them build this business.”source ↗
“I was told from an early age I was going to take over the family business. As I grew older the people running it grew more and more out of touch. They didn't want to change things because its been that way for 30 years! I moved on and they are going out of business.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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