Everything routes through you.

Every decision. Every approval. Every fix. All of it queues at one desk.

The shape of it — Your business has a shape.

It feels like a busy week. Step back, and it looks like a bottle.

The narrow point — You are the bottleneck.

Decisions. Accountability. The operating rhythm. Your time. The manual work. All five narrow to the same place: you.

What changes — It breaks. You don't.

Not by working harder. By building the layer that runs the week without you.

The bottleneck scorecard — Which bottleneck are you?

20 questions, about 4 minutes. There are six kinds. The scorecard tells you which one you are, and what to fix first.

Richard Cussons is a fractional COO and integrator mentor for founders doing $1M–$3M a year. He builds the team, the operating rhythm and the systems that let a business run without its founder in the middle of every decision.

The six kinds

Six kinds of bottleneck. You're one of them.

By now something has probably told you you're the bottleneck. A book, a podcast, a Sunday-night look at the numbers. Half the internet is ready to tell founders that.

The useful part is the bit they skip: which kind. There are six, and each one is fixed differently. Get that wrong and you fix the wrong thing, and nine months on it's all back on your desk.

Every quarter you stay the bottleneck is growth you don't get back. And an exit value that prices your absence in as a risk.

  • The Tollbooth

    Your team's capable. So why does everything still stop at your desk?

  • The Hand Crank

    You handed over the decisions. So why are you still the most tired person in the building?

  • The Day Trader

    Sharp in the moment. Good calls. So why does the year never quite go where you meant it to?

  • The Pilot Light

    The strange one. The business is basically fine. So why can't you put it down?

  • The Fuse

    Everything runs through you, evenly. No one weak spot, because it's all the same spot. Oddly, that's the good news.

  • The Flywheel

    It runs without you. Genuinely. Rare at your size. If that's you, the scorecard says so.

Find out which one you are20 questions · about 4 minutes · free · private
What you get

Four minutes. Twenty questions. One straight answer.

Not a number and a well done. A read on where the business actually leans on you, and what to do about it first.

  1. 1Your score out of 100. The higher it climbs, the more of a bottleneck you are.
  2. 2Your stage. Four of them, from Founder-Trapped to Runs Without You.
  3. 3Your type. Which of the six you are, and why.
  4. 4Your five areas: decisions, accountability, the operating rhythm, your time, the manual work. Worst one circled.
  5. 5What it's costing you, in hours a week and dollars a year, based on your answers.
  6. 6The first move. One thing to do this week, not a forty-page plan.

You see your type before you give an email. The full breakdown, the cost and the first move come by email, with a short follow-up series you can leave any time.

Is it a sales pitch?
The result is free and complete. There's a call you can book at the end if you want one. If the business runs without you, it says so.
SaaS or services?
Both. It asks, and the cost estimate changes with the answer.
Do I have to give my email?
Not to see your type. Only for the full breakdown.
Get my score
A real scorecard result: a score of 56 out of 100 and the five areas, with the worst one marked
The cost line from a real result: about 14 hours a week, about $68k a year
From a real result. Red is where the business leans on you.
Richard Cussons
Who's marking it

I've been the bottleneck. I've spent forty years being the fix.

I'm a fractional COO and integrator. Not a coach. My whole career has been doing the second job in other people's companies, the one that turns a founder's ideas into things that actually happen.

I've also been the owner with every order and every decision coming back to me. I fixed that one, then sold it.

$2M → $24M
The ASK Method Company. I was the COO who built the operating engine that did it.
7× Inc 5000
Across ASK Method and Bucket.io.
5 exits
The last one Bucket.io, co-founded part-time from scratch, sold to ScoreApp in 2024.
1,734 founders
Through the coaching and mastermind programmes I built and ran at The ASK Method Company. What worked, what didn't, where they got stuck and what freed them. That many times over, you spot it fast.
"I felt like I had reached the limits of my capabilities as an operator — while also simultaneously serving as the main creative force in the business."Ryan Levesque, founder of The ASK Method Company, on why he asked me in.

More about me →

Who it's for

Founders doing $1M to $3M who've built something real.

Usually five to twenty-five people, a product or a service people actually pay for, and a founder who's still the de facto COO. The constraint isn't demand. It's operating capacity.

If you're under that range, or what you really want is someone to come in and do the work for you, this is the wrong four minutes.

And if this quarter's targets look a lot like last quarter's, start here.

Find out which bottleneck you are →

The first question

When you step away from the business, even for a day, does it feel like things start to pile up waiting for you?

Yes, if I'm honestNot usually — it holds together

Either way, the scorecard tells you why, and which of the six you are. 20 questions, about 4 minutes, free.

If you're worried it's too late or too tangled, it isn't. The scorecard tells you where to start.

DECISIONSACCOUNTABILITYCADENCEFOUNDER TIMEOPS

Your shape across the five areas. The circle is where it's worst.