Recording: Break The Bottleneck: Eliminating Owner Dependency – Susan Fennema

Dive into the key takeaways from the latest Catholic Founders Guild Expert Call (February 24, 2026). The call focused on the essential topic: Break The Bottleneck: Eliminating Owner Dependency, featuring Susan Fennema from Beyond the Chaos. Susan made it clear that you need to start setting up processes on Day One and highlighted the common growing pains that hit around 4 and 10 employees. She offered a simple roadmap for delegating tasks in stages (from simple admin work all the way to sales) and emphasized that building solid, repeatable systems is how you get your freedom back and seriously increase your business's value. Download your free copy of their e-book, 3 Ways to Control Chaos in Your Small Business. Learn the 3 most important action tips you can take today to end chaos and regain control of your business

🚨 SPECIAL OFFER: Susan offers a 15-minute call to anyone from the Catholic Founders to discuss processes, issues, or software recommendations to help optimize their business processes. This is free for those who are part of the guild. One of the many perks that you get for only $100/year. Join the CF Guild today.

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One-Liner Takeaway

For those who aren’t paid members yet, here’s the quick one-liner takeaway:

To scale and achieve true freedom, a founder must implement living, repeatable processes from day one, which transforms the business from a chaotic job into a valuable entity.

The core of Susan Fennema’s message was a stark realization for all of us: without systematic processes, the founder is perpetually chained to the business, which ultimately stifles growth. She stressed that the time to start building these systems is not later, but on day one, even if you are a solo operator, beginning with personal policies and evolving from there. Susan clearly identified the key pinch points for founders—the growth stoppages that occur around four and then ten employees—where the capacity to communicate and direct the team maxes out. To break past these barriers, the business’s operating procedures must be “living and breathing,” constantly integrated into the team’s tools, and never just passive documents sitting on a shared drive.

We discussed a pragmatic, staged approach to delegation, starting with administrative tasks to free up the founder’s time, then moving on to client delivery, financial oversight, and finally, sales, which is typically the last function to leave the owner’s plate. A critical piece of advice was how to overcome the temptation to reclaim work from a struggling employee: instead of rescuing them, we must focus on improving the process itself and ensuring expectations are clear, often through visual instructions. Susan affirmed the necessity of having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to track sales and a Project Management tool (like teamwork.com) to embed the actual processes, noting that robust systems not only improve operations but also act as their own multiple in a business valuation.

Alright, the rest of this session is exclusively for CF Guild members. If you’d like to join future calls, consider upgrading to a paid membership today.

The Catholic Founders Guild is an association of Catholic Biz owners who believe that their business is meant to be an extension of God’s will in the world.

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