If people wait for you to approve small things, such as a discount, a refund, an expense or a reply to a client, you have an approval bottleneck. It feels like control, but it costs you hours and it makes the team slower and more nervous. The way out is not to approve less by feeling. It is to decide the limits once, in writing, so the team can act inside them.
Why approvals pile up on the founder
- The rules are in your head, so nobody knows what they can decide alone.
- A past mistake made you want to see everything.
- Asking you is faster than working out the limit.
- Nobody wants to be the person who guessed wrong.
Step 1: list what you approved last week
For one week, write down every request that came to you for approval. Next to each, write what you decided and why. After a week you will see that most requests are the same few kinds, and that you said yes the same way almost every time.
Step 2: turn the repeated yeses into limits
Wherever you said yes the same way three times, write a limit. Not a vague rule like use your judgment, but a number or a condition: a discount of up to a set percentage on projects above a set size, an expense under a set amount with a receipt, a refund within a set number of days. Add the date and who owns the limit.
Step 3: keep a short list of what always comes to you
- Anything above the limits.
- Anything you have not decided before.
- Hiring, pay and performance conversations.
- Commitments to customers or partners that cost real money.
Step 4: make the limits easy to find
A limit nobody can find sends people back to asking you. Put the list where your team already looks, and make the answer to which limit applies take seconds, not minutes.
Step 5: review the exceptions, not the routine
Once the limits exist, you only see the cases outside them. Read those once a week. If the same kind of exception keeps coming, raise the limit or write a new one. If a teammate used a limit badly, fix the limit or the explanation, and talk to the person, instead of going back to approving everything.
Where an AI clone fits
The hard part of limits is that people still have to ask what the limit is. An AI clone of the founder can answer that question from the limits you approved, show where the answer came from and when it was confirmed, and send anything outside the limits to you. It never decides a case you did not approve. AskMyStartup works this way and is in private beta. To see how much time repeat approvals cost you now, try the free repeat question cost calculator.