Growth or Control? The Decision Every Business Owner Must Make

Every business owner, including you, has or will need to make this choice at some point in their business journey.

In fact, you may have already made this choice without realizing it, and it might be why you aren’t seeing the results you want.

But, before we get to the choice, I think it would be helpful to look at this first: the 5 stages of business growth in a small business.

I won’t dive into all the details here (you can read more about it here), but Mel Scott and Richard Bruce highlight key factors that shape each stage of small business growth, along with common crises businesses face going through between these stages stages.

The reason I mention this to you is because a major part of moving to the next stage of business depends on the choice you make (and doing it to a greater degree as you go up in stages).

So, what’s the big decision you need to make?

The choice

There are two main choices you can make for your business. While it’s not entirely binary, the direction you choose will significantly impact the goals you set for your business.

Here’s the choice: Do you want to keep tight control over everything, or do you want to see your business grow?

Suggestion: “By ‘control,’ I mean overseeing all decisions, tasks, and directions within the business—even taking on all the work yourself. It can include micromanaging the work others do if you have employees.

Another aspect of “the choice” that could affect you is this: do you want to keep doing what you enjoy and like doing, or do you want the business to move forward?

You usually can’t have both—it’s one or the other. If you want to maintain control or focus on what you enjoy doing, it will limit your business’s growth and how much wealth you build (it also limits your ability to step away from the business or to sell it).

If you want to grow your business, increase wealth, and build it where you can step away or even sell it, then you have to let go of some of the control in your business.

It’s okay if you want to keep doing what you love, like baking pies or handling social media. But here’s the catch: as long as you’re working in the business, you’re not working on it—and that limits growth.

(An option with that is to hire someone to manage your business while you do the work, but that, again, means releasing control.)

In the rest of the article, we will explore:

• Why business owners often don’t want to release control
• How maintaining control limits your growth
• How releasing it grows your organization
• Practical steps you can take to release control to grow your organization

Why many business owners often don’t want to release control

Naom Wasserman in The Founder’s Dilemmas says that two of the big motivators that entrepreneurs have for starting a business is wealth creation and control.

Think about why you started your business:

You may have started the business because you want control and autonomy. You may have wanted freedom from having a boss. You may have wanted to control the different aspects of it to make it the way you want it. You may love doing certain jobs or tasks and wanted to do it on your own.

You may have started it for wealth creation and the freedom that can come with business ownership.

Let’s dive into it some more.

It’s important to them.

When someone starts a business, it’s usually important to them. For many, it’s their life. They pour their blood, sweat, and tears into it. They may even identify themselves with the business.

When that happens, it can be hard to let go of control, especially if you identify with the business, and you may fear that others may mess up.

They know technical skills but not leadership skills.

A lot of business owners start out because they’re great at something technical, or they’re passionate about a particular craft. For example, they love baking pies or always dreamed of starting a yogurt shop. So, they become (or are) good at baking pies and doing yogurt, but they don’t have the business and leadership skills needed (at least yet) to release control well.

When they try without the learning, it fails. The hires don’t work out. The situation gets worse. So they say it’s not worth it and try to still maintain all the control over everything.

(Here’s a study by Tim Mazzarol that mentions the need for business owners to develop leadership, management, and coaching skills before effectively delegating tasks.)

They enjoy certain tasks.

They started the business because they enjoyed doing a certain task or function. They love social media, so they create a social media agency. Instead of working for someone else, they are their own boss. They don’t want to let go because they enjoy it.

It’s their baby.

They may feel like they are losing part of their identity if they let go. Releasing tasks is releasing part of who they are, so it’s hard.

However, to grow, you have to either pull back and have other people do the technical work or hire a manager to be “in charge” so they can keep doing the work.

That’s tough because that means not doing what they enjoy or necessarily being their own boss. They can still maintain overall “boss-ness”, but depending on how that is done, that can also create lots of issues.

They are insecure

Sometimes, it’s personal insecurity or a lack of confidence in their leadership skills. They may not trust anyone because of that, and, because of that, they try to maintain control of everything.

It can be a lack of trust in employees. The owner doesn’t trust others’ leadership skills or judgment or trust them to be able to do it or do it as well, so they try to control as much as they can (some related research studies can be found in this article).

They may fear the mistakes their employees will make, or they are perfectionists and think no one can do it as well as they can.

It could be other reasons or a mix.

There are, of course, other reasons owners may not want to release control and it can be a mix of the above. What’s important, though, is if you have a hard time letting go of control, to examine yourself and see the reason why.

What happens when you don’t release control

We’ve talked about the overall concept of how control vs. growth works, but specifically, how does it keep your business from growing? Let’s look at a few aspects.

You limit the business by your limited abilities, knowledge, and capacity

First, there is only so much you can do as one person, and there’s only so much expertise you can have. As your business grows, more and more of your time will be taken up and the demands on you will increase. Eventually, you run out and/or burn out.

More and more things that need to be done will be areas that you don’t have a lot of skills or learning in. You can either take time to try to learn how to do it at least half-decent (on top of your already increasing workload), or you just won’t do them well (which won’t be good for business).

You bottleneck the business

You become a bottleneck when every decision or action needs your approval or attention, forcing others to wait on you. When it’s always waiting on you, your time and ability to get things done becomes a bottleneck that hinders your business’s success, survival, and growth.

It also makes it hard for you to get away and harder for you to sell the business (if that is the direction you want to go).

When everything relies on you, it relies on you. You can’t get away. If you aren’t there, it doesn’t happen.

It’s demotivating to employees and can increase turnover

When you control everything, your employees aren’t invested and don’t take ownership in what they do. They just do what they are told.

And being that one of the big human motivators is autonomy, you crush that (and their motivation with it). This then leads to more people leaving.

It limits your growth and scalability (and can hurt survivability)

Bringing it back full circle, because of all of the above, it hurts your ability to grow, can hurt your survivability as a business, and limits your financial potential.

If you make the business dependent on you, there’s only so far it can go.

(Kapasuwan and Rose mention multiple studies related to the topic of the need to delegate for growth in their research article.)

What happens when you do let go of control?

First, when I talk about releasing control, I’m mostly talking about delegation.

What is delegation?

Here is a definition by Kapasuwan and Rose in their study “Cultural Effects on Delegation in the Small Business Life Cycle”:

We define delegation as the willingness of a founder–manager to yield the authority of an important management function to others.

That is an important aspect of delegation, but not 100% complete. Dave Stitt, in his book Deep and Deliberate Delegation, discusses three levels of delegation: tasks, processes (or functions), and outcomes.

Here is a better definition: Delegation is giving authority and responsibility to others over specific tasks, functions, or outcomes.

This can include decision-making within those areas.

(We’ll dive more into how to delegate in the next section.)

The question then is, “How does delegating benefit your organization?” Let’s look at a few ways (and some studies that back them).

It can increase financial success and survivability

First, it’s a determining factor of your survivability and financial success as a business.

Richard Cuba and Gene Milbourn Jr. in the abstract of their research study Delegating for Small Business Success, found that “The degree of delegation of administrative and technical tasks was determined to be a key factor affecting business survival and financial success.”

Another study by Yong Wang and P. Poutziouris found that businesses, where owner-managers delegate authority, tend to operate more professionally and achieve higher sales growth.

They  also found that “Results unanimously demonstrate that business growth performance is associated with the degree of authority delegation, but is not influenced by scale of operation.”

Referring to the business stages from the introduction, the authors found that the higher in the stages you get, the more delegation you need to do.

I know this was a lot on this one topic, but I wanted to show you that delegating is important if you want growth in your business.

It builds commitment, motivation, and ownership in employees

By delegating, you’re not just giving employees autonomy—you’re empowering them to take ownership of their work. It gives them a chance to grow as people and in their careers. It helps build motivation and commitment in your employees, and it can help lower turnover rates.

According to a study by Mohammad Kafaji, delegation increases employee engagement which increases business growth, and it’s more impactful than just encouraging employees to collaborate and share ideas (which does increase business growth, just to a lesser extent than delegation).

It gives you more time to focus on what is important

As a leader in your business, certain tasks are important for you to do as the leader. Certain tasks provide high leverage that you should focus on.

When you delegate effectively, the work that you would have been doing still gets done, and it gives you the time to focus on the more important tasks.

How to release control (Practical steps and actions)

You now know that to grow your business you need to release control. So how do you do that?

Start by developing your leadership and management skills

A study by Tim Mazzarol found that many manager-owners need to grow in their leadership, management, and coaching skills before they can effectively delegate and build effective teams.

Why many business owners lack leadership skills

There are many reasons for this. One of the big ones is that people often start businesses because they like doing something or are good at something. Maybe they have a good idea or are good at creating or inventing something. Maybe they are good at marketing so they create a marketing agency.

That’s a good skill, but that’s different from leadership. Those are different skills that don’t equate.  

Leadership is a skill, and to get good at it, you need to learn it and practice it.

Often people pick up leadership from what they’ve seen around them, the common rhetoric online, or maybe even a book or two. The problem is, often what is seen or what is the common rhetoric isn’t effective.  

In Gene McNaughton’s book The Sales Edge (great sales book if you want to grow in that area), he says that 90-something percent of salespeople gain their skills from what they’ve seen as they go along—and that’s why most salespeople aren’t top performers or that effective.

It’s similar to leadership (to dive deeper into this topic – check out our article).

Many (maybe even most) manager-owners don’t really know leadership. They have other skills and are great at those, but leadership isn’t something they’ve trained in or learned, even though they may think they know it.

(Side note: Have you ever noticed no one thinks they are a bad leader? It’s just like everyone thinks they are an above-average driver (even when they aren’t). It’s like the salespeople mentioned earlier, they think they are doing okay, but they are missing out on so much. It’s important that we all are humble and recognize we may not be as good as we think we are and seek to learn and grow.)

Founding CEOs are often replaced because of the lack of skills

When it comes to companies with investors, many times the founding CEO is replaced because they don’t have the skills to move the business forward. Some sources say that within 3 years, 50%+ have been transitioned from the CEO position (Openview, Underscore.vc).

The Founder’s Dilemma also covers this topic, and it’s been part of multiple other studies (Kapasuwan and Rose cite multiple in their research article.)

Bottom line: If you want to effectively grow your business, build high-performing teams, delegate well, and not be a person who needs to be replaced because they don’t have the skills (even though they may think they do), then be humble and work on learning and growing your leadership skills.

How to grow your leadership skills

1. A good first step is my book Essential Leadership: 65 Lessons Every Leader Needs to Know. It goes over what leadership is and what it takes to be a great leader.
2. You can also check out other books on our recommended books page (it’s arranged by categories).
3. Check out some of our articles:

• The REAL Definition of Leadership
• Leadership vs Management: What’s the Difference?
• How to Create a Culture of Safety in Your Organization
• How to Communicate Better As a Leader (12 Key Ways)
• 13 Key Principles That Will Make You A Great Leader
• The Do’s and Don’ts of Leadership

4. Ask quality leaders you know for guidance.

5. Ask for feedback about your leadership abilities and how you can grow from those around you and your employees.

6. Never stop learning and growing.

2. Create and record the systems in your organization

This includes the different processes that you may do in your business and checklists that people can follow that guide people in their work.

This is NOT, however, about creating bureaucracy or a bunch of rules that people follow. It’s not something that’s set in stone or that’s about controlling every detail.

It’s about showing how to do certain tasks or functions so that no task is dependent on one person and that others can read the systems or checklists and be able to do the work.

Here are some examples:

Payroll: There are likely set steps that need to be followed when payroll is being done. By documenting those steps, it makes it where your company isn’t dependent on you or someone else to be able to get it done.

Blogging: You may have the blogs on your site written in certain ways. You may create a checklist to show the steps that need to be done before a post is published. It isn’t about controlling every detail but giving the framework it needs to be done in to make sure it’s done well, according to brand and style, etc.

Surgery: You want your surgeon and nurses to have a set procedure/checklist they follow to make sure they don’t forget anything!

Documenting steps and checklists helps people get the job done right. Even for creative tasks like blogging, it gives a framework where creativity can thrive.

Some areas may have more flexibility than others, and some jobs and functions may be more strict than others for legal, safety, and other reasons. However, in general, you don’t want it to be seen as set in stone, and you want it to be flexible and adjustable if people have suggestions or ways to make it better.

Steps to begin to systemize:

First, start documenting the different functions and tasks in your organization, starting with the ones you want to delegate to someone else first.

For example, if you are doing payroll, you would record or write down every step you take to make payroll happen.

You then would want to follow, or better yet, ask someone else to follow your documentation to see if you recorded it well. You would want to ask the other person how clear it is and if they have any questions about the documentation.

Be careful about overdoing it, too. You don’t want to skimp on the steps, but making pages and pages of steps just makes people want to avoid looking at them. You want to make it simple enough that people can follow but with enough detail that they understand how to do it. If you want to add extra info just in case, add it as an addendum.

You can also think about what needs to happen for certain things to be done. You can write those out as a checklist. For example, if you are doing blogging, what are all the steps that must happen before the blog goes live?

Whatever it is, write it out or record it.

You can do this multiple ways: you can have someone else record it as you (or whoever) do the task. You can video it and write it out later (having a video and recorded version), or just write and document.

Tools like Loom can be helpful when recording videos on a project.

Software like Scribehow helps you automatically create documentation (haven’t used it personally, but it looks like a neat tool).

Whatever you do, document the steps and use a site like notion.so, documents on your Google Drive or OneDrive, or even a printed binder that people can hold and look at.

Then, keep improving it over time. I know I’m being repetitive, but it’s important: don’t see any process as set in stone. Always be looking at how to improve and do things better. Others who do the tasks (or who have followed the steps) may have ideas on how to do it better, faster, and with greater results.

Anytime someone says “That’s just the way we do it here,” and there is no why or reason behind it, that’s a problem.

Also note, that “systems” shouldn’t be done because of a lack of trust or to control people.

3.  Start delegating

Start delegating to your employees. It’s okay to start small. You can start small with certain tasks, then build up to where you are delegating functions (e.g. marketing) and even specific outcomes (e.g. increase production by 20% from the widget section).

There can be a lot that can go into delegating effectively, and we have a guide you can follow here. But, in quick summary:

Know what to delegate:

What’s most important for you to do in your position? You should focus on those things and delegate the rest.

What can others do just as well (or close to it – some recommended if they can do it 80% as good as you, delegate it) or even better to you?

What motivates you and what is a drag for you to do? What boosts you and what drains you?

If you can, try to delegate things that drain you.

Who to delegate to:

First, look at job functions. If that’s part of their area, it makes sense to give them those tasks and functions.

You may also consider if you are trying to grow people in certain areas, you may delegate certain tasks or functions. Or if they excel in that area, you may want to delegate it to them.

As a business owner, if your employees’ jobs are more fluid, then you may use a mix of those reasons. If someone is good at something and enjoys it, then you may want to delegate those tasks or functions to them.

You may also start training people to take over certain tasks or functions by starting to delegate certain tasks to them.

How to delegate:

• Give clear expectations – make sure what you are thinking you are saying is what they are hearing (a great way is to ask!)
• Work together to create milestones
• Have a specific timetable (but can adjust when new information comes in if needed)
• Provide the resources, training, and open the doors they need to make it where they can do it
• Meet regularly with them to see how they are doing and how you can support them

Again, to learn more, read our full article here.

Also note, if it fails, don’t just assume delegation doesn’t work, look at what went wrong: Were expectations clear? Did they have the resources and training? And so on.

4.      Set clear roles

As you start, some roles may be more fluid, but you want to, as much as possible, be clear about who is responsible for what.

Even huge companies drastically suffer and have unhealthy internal competition and conflict because roles are unclear.

As much as possible, you want to let people know what they are responsible for and what they aren’t. When you have multiple employees, you want to make sure each one knows their role, the other person’s role, and where the line is between those roles.

A great way to do this (if you already have employees) is to have everyone write out what they think they are responsible for and what the other roles are responsible for.

If there’s some blurring of lines, talk as a group and work it out so that there is no confusion.

If you are starting to hire people, you can let them know that things may change over time and certain aspects are fluid, but it’s also a good idea to be clear about what you are hiring them to do.

There are different ways to do this:

Michael Gerber in The E-Myth Revisited suggests that, before you even hire, write out the different roles and responsibilities and have your name on each role. As you hire, you replace your name with theirs.

You can also look at what you are doing now in different areas (such as marketing), and write out those in a description. You can look at other job descriptions as well to help you see what those roles typically do.

However, it’s also good to look at outcomes. What outcomes are you wanting this person to accomplish? Put those there.

(A good resource for one method of doing it is, as mentioned before The Emyth Revisited‘.)

What if you want to just keep doing what you love and not delegate it?

There are a couple of options in that. You can keep control of the whole business and keep doing what you like, but know that it will limit your growth and make the business dependent on you.

If you are fine with that, there’s nothing wrong with that. Just know you are choosing that.

You can also hire someone to handle the business and managerial side. If you do that, you will need to be very clear about roles and be willing to give up some control to allow the person to do their job well.

Micromanaging everything to ensure it’s done your way will ultimately hurt your business.

What if you don’t want to give up control?

Again, that’s your choice. Just realize that it can affect the level of growth and potentially survivability of your business. If you’re fine with that, that’s fine. It’s your business.

So, what’s it going to be? Control or growth?

What choice are you going to make for your business? Whatever it is, make sure it’s intentional.

If you want to stay in control or just do what you enjoy, that’s fine, just make sure you understand the tradeoff you are making.

If you want to grow, then you are going to have to give up some level of control. That can be hard, that can be tough, but with the right preparation, you can do it well.

Books & Resources

Essential Leadership: 65 Lessons Every Leader Needs to Know – Thomas R. Harris

Deep & Deliberate Delegation – Dave Stitt

The E-myth Revisited – Michael Gerber

The Founders Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman

Systemology – David Jenyns

Guide to Delegation

Sources

Johnston, M. A. (2000). Delegation and Organizational Structure in Small Businesses: Influences of Manager’s Attachment Patterns. Group & Organization Management, 25(1), 4-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601100251002

Cuba, R. C., & Milbourn, G. (1982). Delegating for Small Business Success. American Journal of Small Business, 7(2), 33-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/104225878200700208 Link

Wang, Yong & Poutziouris, Panikkos. (2010). Leadership Styles, Management Systems and Growth: Empirical Evidence from UK Owner-Managed SMEs. Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC). 18. 331-354. 10.1142/S0218495810000604. Link

Mazzarol, Tim. (2003). A Model of Small Business HR Growth Management. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour &amp Research. 9. 27-49. 10.1108/13552550310461036. Link

Scott, M., & Bruce, R. (1987). Five stages of growth in small business. Long Range Planning, 20(3), 45-52 Link

Kapasuwan, S., & Rose, J. (2004). Cultural effects on delegation in the small business life cycle. Journal of Asia Entrepreneurship and Sustainability, 1(1), 1-17 Link

Kafaji, M. (2020). Delegation and collaboration practices to embrace innovative ideas for business growth in small to medium enterprises. Journal of Entrepreneurship Education, 23(1), 1-15. Link