Here's a question I ask every owner I work with, and it tells me more about their business than the accounts do: what's the largest amount anyone in your business can spend without asking you? And what's the biggest commitment anyone can make to a customer without checking first?
The honest answer, in most owner-managed businesses, is roughly nothing. Every credit for an unhappy customer, every van repair, every one-off discount, every schedule change — it all queues for the owner. Forty to a hundred small decisions a day, arriving by phone, by message, by someone standing in the doorway.
The queue is the problem
Each individual decision feels quick. You know the answer — you've seen the situation fifty times — so you give it and move on. But add them up and they're the reason your day disappears, and something worse is happening underneath: your team is learning, one answer at a time, that deciding isn't their job.
That lesson compounds. Capable adults stop weighing things up and start collecting your answers instead. Then you look around in year five and complain that nobody takes ownership. They did take ownership once. The queue trained it out of them.
Decision rights, written down
The fix is boring and it works: write down who decides what, up to what limit, guided by what rule.
A cleaning company I worked with ran this exercise after we logged a week of the owner's inbound decisions — ninety-one of them, and seventy-four were operational calls worth less than £300. We gave site supervisors £100 of authority with one sentence attached: "fix it for the client first, log it the same day." Area managers got £500 and discounts up to ten per cent. The owner kept contracts, pay, and anything the weekly log showed happening repeatedly — because a decision you make three times isn't a decision, it's a missing rule.
Two months later her phone had gone from ninety-one interruptions a week to about twenty. Client complaints fell — not because the service changed, but because resolution time collapsed from hours to minutes. The person standing in front of the problem could finally fix the problem.
Start smaller than feels comfortable
You don't need to hand over the chequebook. Start with limits so small the worst case is trivial — £100 caps the tuition fee while the judgement grows. Ask for a simple log, read it weekly, and raise the limits as the log earns your confidence.
The point isn't to make fewer decisions because you're lazy. It's that every decision your team can make well is a decision that never queues outside your office again — and a person who's finally allowed to practise deciding.
Write the answer to the £500 question today. If it embarrasses you, that's the finding.