Live Strategy Session: How to Stop Being the Bottleneck as Your Business Grows
With Nazeera Dawood, founder of Vendorship
Nazeera Dawood has built Vendorship into a $10 million business with 33 people. Vendorship helps businesses navigate government contracting, from finding opportunities and certifications to writing proposals and helping companies win government contracts.
Now she wants to grow Vendorship from $10 million to $30 million, but there’s a problem. The first $10 million was built with Nazeera in the middle of almost everything. Even her COO told her: “You are the bottleneck.” In this live strategy session, we work through how Nazeera can stop solving everyone else’s problems and spend closer to 70% of her time on the work that could actually take Vendorship from $10M to $30M.
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What this session is about
Nazeera has already done quite a lot of the obvious work to make Vendorship less dependent on her. She has come out of around 40 client Slack channels, stopped attending some leadership meetings and reduced her working day from the 10 – 12 hours she used to put in to somewhere closer to five to eight. The business has continued to grow, and she has started finding more time for the partnerships and strategic work that were difficult to get to when she was caught in the weeds.
The problem is that stepping out of something and actually letting go of it are not quite the same thing. Nazeera still finds herself watching what is happening, jumping into meetings and solving problems because she knows the answer. Her COO has become quite good at calling her out on it, including telling her after one meeting: “Nazeera, it’s my meeting and you took over it.” Nazeera knows she should be spending more of her time building strategic partnerships, strengthening sales and developing Pioneer Gov, but estimated that only around 30% of her week was actually going towards those priorities. She reckons it should be at least 70%.
The session works through what keeps pulling her back into the business despite knowing where her time is better spent. We look at the difference between giving someone a task and giving them ownership, why constantly being the problem solver can make a team more dependent on the founder, and how Nazeera can take some of the things clients value specifically about her and teach them rather than assuming she has to keep doing them herself.
Ben's Diagnosis
Five takeaways from this session
1. You can delegate the work and still keep the dependency. Nazeera had already made some fairly significant changes before we spoke. She had removed herself from client channels, stopped attending meetings she no longer needed to be in and put a COO and leadership structure around her. On paper, quite a lot had been delegated. Yet she described herself as still “lurking”. She would see a problem, know how to fix it and feel responsible for stepping in.
If everyone knows that the founder is watching, has the answer and may intervene when things get difficult, there is still a reason to defer upwards. Nazeera’s next step was less about finding another list of tasks to hand over and more about allowing the people who already have those tasks to make the decisions that come with them.
2. Nazeera realised she was taking away the team’s chance to solve the problem. Part of Nazeera’s instinct to jump in came from wanting to help. If somebody was struggling and she already knew the answer, why make them struggle unnecessarily?
During the session she saw the other side of it. Every time she stepped in, somebody else lost the chance to work it out. In her words: “I’m not letting them grow.” That matters even more because Nazeera is already thinking beyond her own tenure as CEO. She wants Vendorship to continue as a legacy business and has started thinking about succession, with the possibility of eventually moving into a chairwoman role.
3. The work Nazeera wasn’t getting to could be worth another $10 million. When we looked at the work Nazeera believes could take Vendorship from $10 million towards $30 million, three priorities came up: strategic partnerships, strengthening sales and developing Pioneer Gov.
Only around 30% of her week was going towards them. She thought it should be at least 70% and said that making that change could potentially double the business within a year or two. That puts a rather different price on getting pulled into emails, meetings and operational problems. As Nazeera put it: “I haven’t prioritised the priorities.”
4. “See one, do one, teach one.” The day before our conversation, Nazeera had stepped into a sales call, taken over and closed the contract. Her team saw it happen, but they hadn’t stopped afterwards to unpack what she actually did differently. So we talked about replaying the call, asking the team what they noticed, then breaking down the small things Nazeera does naturally before having them practise it themselves. Watching someone who is very good at something is useful but it becomes far more useful when you can explain what they are doing and why.
5. Nazeera was setting goals for everyone except herself. Nazeera already holds the team to clear weekly targets: she asks what the sales number is, what happened and why something didn’t happen. During the session, she realised she wasn’t doing the same thing with her own role as CEO. The work that could move Vendorship forward kept getting pushed behind emails, meetings and other people’s problems. So one of her commitments was to set weekly goals against her own priorities and protect time for them in the same way she expects the team to protect theirs.
Notable numbers
| Figure | What it represents |
|---|---|
| $10M | Current annual revenue at Vendorship |
| 33 | Team members at the time of recording |
| $30M | Nazeera's revenue target for the next five years |
| $150,000 | Value of the RFP that received zero valid bids, the experience that inspired Vendorship |
| 200 | RFPs submitted by one client before working with Vendorship, resulting in zero contracts won |
| 4 to 5 per month | Contracts that same client was winning within six months of working with Vendorship |
| 99.8% | Vendorship's proposal acceptance rate (against an industry standard of around 50%) |
| 35 to 40% | Win rate once proposals are accepted, in line with industry standard |
| $850 billion | Size of the US government contracting market |
| 30% | Proportion of Nazeera's current week going on her three highest-priority activities |
| 70% | Where she believes that proportion needs to be to reach $30M |
| 70 to 80% | Target proportion of women in Vendorship's workforce |
Transcript
Conversation Chapters
Where to find Nazeera Dawood
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