Role: Founder & CEO, B2B SaaS company
Business Stage: Post Series A, approximately 35-person team
Coaching Theme: Decision-making under pressure and founder bottleneck
Engagement: Biweekly 1:1 coaching, 9 months
As the company grew, more decisions were being made, but too many were still coming back to the founder. Product, hiring and pricing decisions continued to wait for his involvement, even though the team had grown to around 35 people.
The average key decision took 12 days to close, releases were slipping and deals were stalling. He was also working close to 70 hours a week, while annual recurring revenue stood at roughly ₹14 crore and net margin was around −90%.
The issue was not a lack of trust in the team. There was no clear system for deciding which decisions needed the founder, where his input was useful and where the team could take complete ownership.
The coaching focused on changing how decision-making was shared across the business rather than simply asking the founder to delegate more work. The work centred on decision rights, delegation and building greater team autonomy.
Every decision type he currently handled was mapped into three categories: decisions that must stay with the founder, decisions where the founder provides input but the team decides, and decisions the team owns fully. The coaching also helped him work through the discomfort of actually letting some decisions go.
Between sessions, the founder maintained a personal decision journal, recording each significant decision, how long it took and what held it up. These decisions were reviewed during coaching to identify patterns of over-deliberation and understand where delays were coming from.
Each biweekly session also began with a direct review of the delegation commitment made during the previous two weeks. When a decision that was meant to move to the team had not moved, the conversation focused on what was getting in the way and what needed to change.
Nine months into the engagement, average turnaround time for key decisions had reduced from 12 days to 3 days. The founder estimated that roughly 70% of decisions that previously reached him were now being made by the team without his input, compared with under 20% at the beginning.
Annual recurring revenue grew from roughly ₹14 crore to ₹19 crore, up about 36%, while the net margin loss narrowed from around −90% to −58%. His working hours also reduced from close to 70 hours a week to around 48 hours.
The change was not simply about removing decisions from the founder’s workload. He could remain involved in strategy and important business decisions without continuing to be the approval point for everything else.
The team had greater clarity around what it could own, while the founder had more space to focus on decisions that genuinely required his judgement. This created a clearer balance between founder involvement and team decision-making.
For a growing SaaS company, founder dependency can become a constraint when decision-making remains concentrated at the top. This engagement focused on creating clearer decision ownership as the business and leadership team evolved.
The work brought together founder decision-making, delegation and accountability to help the team take ownership of more decisions without removing the founder from areas where his involvement remained important.
As a business grows, the way its founder works has to change with it. If too many decisions still depend on one person, the answer may not be working longer hours or trying to make every decision faster yourself.
It may begin with understanding which decisions should remain yours, which should be shared and where your team can take ownership.
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