Saturday is where I try to zoom out.

Not because I’m above tactics. I love tactics. But because tactics without direction is how you end up busy and broke, successful and exhausted, growing and secretly miserable.

This week, I’ve been thinking about the difference between a business you run… and a business you babysit.

If you have built something real, you know the feeling.

You’re not just working. You’re monitoring. You’re not just leading. You’re catching. You’re not just building. You’re preventing.

You spend half your week stopping things from going wrong.

And the worst part is that it becomes normal.

You start thinking that is what leadership is.

It’s not. It’s survival.

Here are the three things I’ve been thinking about.

There’s a specific kind of tired that does not come from doing too much.

It comes from being responsible for too much.

The kind of responsibility that lives in the background of your day like a low-grade hum.

So you keep touching everything, not because you love control, but because it feels like the only way to keep things safe.

Here’s the hard truth:

You are not overwhelmed because you have too many tasks. You are overwhelmed because your business still thinks you are the glue.

And glue is a bad job description.

I’ve met a lot of founders who are good people, smart people, hardworking people… who are stuck because they built a company that treats them like a fail-safe.

Every process ends in them. Every decision ends in them. Every exception ends in them. Every emotional wobble ends in them.

That is not sustainable.

And it is also not a reflection of your “capacity.” It is a reflection of your structure.

A business that depends on your attention is a business that will always feel fragile.

It might make money. It might have a good reputation. It might look impressive from the outside.

But on the inside, it feels like you are holding a waterline with your hands.

So what changes?

Not everything. Not overnight.

But one major shift: you stop being the decider of everything and you become the designer of decision-making.

That is the difference between babysitting and leadership.

Leadership is not “having the answers.” Leadership is building clarity so other people can answer.

If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Because it means you are bumping into the edge of the old identity.

The builder identity says: “If I don’t touch it, it might not be good.” The leader identity says: “If I don’t build a system, it will never be good without me.”

That is a painful transition.

And it is the exact transition founders avoid until their body forces the issue.

The goal is not to get rid of responsibility. The goal is to distribute responsibility so the business can move without your constant supervision.

A practical question I’ve been using lately:

What decisions am I making that I should be designing a rule for instead?

If the answer is “most of them,” that’s okay. That’s normal.

Start with one.

Founders love to tell themselves this:

“I have to approve it because I care about quality.”

Sometimes that’s true. And sometimes it’s a cover story.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed.

When a founder insists on approving everything, it is usually because the standards are vague.

Quality is not documented. Expectations are not clear. The definition of “done” changes based on mood. Feedback is random. Training is assumed.

So the founder becomes the quality filter.

That works at ten clients. It breaks at fifty.

Not because the team is bad. Because the system is undefined.

The fix is not to loosen quality. The fix is to define it.

If you want your business to stop relying on you, you need to take the “taste” in your head and translate it into something your team can use.

That sounds corporate. It is not. It’s freedom.

Here’s a simple framework I like:

For any repeating deliverable, write:

One page. Not a thesis. Not a manual.

One page is enough to start.

Because the goal is not perfection. The goal is transfer.

Right now, your standards are trapped inside you. That is why people ask you. That is why you approve. That is why you feel stuck.

Define the standard once and you reduce approvals forever.

There’s a reason this feels hard. It forces you to answer a question most founders avoid:

What do I actually want?

Not what you tolerate. Not what you accept under pressure. What you want.

When you define that, your business can finally stop guessing.

And your team can finally stop interrupting.

This is the part nobody wants to talk about.

Founders do not stay the bottleneck because they are stupid. They stay the bottleneck because it protects something.

Usually, it protects identity.

If you are the one who approves everything, you stay important. If you are the one who makes the final call, you stay safe. If you are the one who knows everything, you stay needed.

Again, I am not calling anyone selfish. I’m calling it human.

When you build a company from nothing, being needed becomes part of how you measure value. And letting go feels like losing value.

This is why you can hire a team and still feel overloaded.

You hired help. You did not transfer authority.

Because authority transfer is emotional.

It requires you to trust people in ways you have not had to trust them before.

It requires you to tolerate imperfection while they learn.

It requires you to accept that someone else might do it differently than you, and the business might still survive.

That’s the real test.

Not the spreadsheet. Not the org chart. The test is whether you can stand not being the central hero.

If you are in the stage where you’re feeling that tension, it does not mean you are failing.

It means you are growing up as a founder.

Builder stage: you do it. Manager stage: you systemize it. Leader stage: you develop people to do it. Visionary stage: you set direction so it keeps moving.

You cannot skip stages, but you also cannot stay in the builder stage forever without paying for it.

The payment comes as exhaustion, resentment, or the kind of success that feels like captivity.

So here’s the question I’ve been sitting with:

What would change if I built this business like I intend to still be alive and sane in five years?

Not rich. Not famous. Alive. Sane. Present.

A lot of founders are scaling a company while shrinking their life.

That is a bad trade.

If you want the business to stop babysitting you, do this:

For one week, every time someone asks you something that makes you sigh, write it down.

Then next to it, write:

At the end of the week, you will have a list of system opportunities.

Not theoretical. Not “one day.” Real.

Pick one and build a simple decision guide.

Then hand it off and let it be messy for a minute.

You can’t scale without training your business to live without you.

If you are carrying everything, I’m not going to tell you to “just delegate.”

That’s cheap advice.

I’m going to tell you the real thing:

Your business is asking you to become someone new.

Less heroic. More intentional. Less reactive. More defined. Less involved in everything. More responsible for the environment.

That shift is uncomfortable because it changes your identity.

But the payoff is worth it.

You do not need to build a business that requires your constant approval to be good. You can build a business that is good because the standard is clear, the decisions are distributed, and the system holds.

That is what maturity looks like.

Enjoy your Saturday. Breathe a little. Write one rule that saves you ten interruptions next week.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.