Running a small business shouldn’t feel like babysitting

Why your team keeps asking the same questions—and what that’s telling you about your business

There’s a moment in every small business owner’s week that feels a little like parenting toddlers. Someone’s asking where the forms are. Someone else doesn’t know how to log into the POS. A third forgot how to price a basic service. You sigh. You answer. Again.

Then you go home, sit down, and think, “Why can’t anyone just do their job without needing me?”

It’s not that your people don’t care. It’s not even that they’re not capable.

It’s that your business has turned into a never-ending game of “Ask the Owner.”

When you’re the system, you become the crutch.
And the longer it stays that way, the more your team learns to wait for you instead of figure it out themselves.

Here’s what that really means: you haven’t built a business yet. You’ve built a very busy help desk.

And it’s exhausting.

According to Gallup, over 70% of small business teams report confusion about who’s responsible for what tasks—and the most common fix is to “just ask the boss.”

It feels efficient. It feels like leadership.
But what it really is… is babysitting.

And let’s be honest: you didn’t start this thing just to answer emails and solve the same three problems every week.

The shift isn’t a team change. It’s a systems change.

Because when the work lives in your head, the business can’t run without you.
But when you build repeatable systems—checklists, dashboards, processes your team can follow—you stop being the bottleneck.

The real win isn’t just saving time.
It’s building a business that teaches your team to stop asking you and start owning the work.

So if it feels like you’re running a daycare, it’s not your people.
It’s the missing systems.

And the best part? You can change that starting this week—with one written process, one ownership handoff, one less fire you have to put out.