The Four Traps That Keep Business Owners Stuck
You captured the frictions. Post-it notes on the wall. You know what's broken. So why don't you fix it?
The Resistance. Steven Pressfield calls it the invisible force that stops you from doing work you know you should do. The inner critic trolls that sit on your shoulder. They show up as procrastination, perfectionism, "I'll get to it next week," or "I need more research first."
In business, the Resistance hides inside four specific traps. If you don't know which trap you're in, you'll keep fighting the wrong battle.
Trap 1: The Control Trap. You or someone on your team becomes the linchpin. All information, decisions, and approvals flow through one person. You think you're maintaining quality. You've actually become the bottleneck.
Trap 2: The Variability Trap. The output depends on who does the work. One person does it this way, another does it differently. Results are inconsistent. Most people think this is a people problem. It's a systems problem.
Trap 3: The Memory Trap. Work depends on someone remembering to do something. Calendar reminders, to-do lists, Post-it notes everywhere. Every time execution relies on memory, you've created a point of failure. People forget. People get sick. Things fall through the cracks.
Trap 4: The Visibility Trap. You don't have the information to manage your business. Flying blind on financial data, customer data, operational data. You can't fix problems you can't see. You end up solving the wrong thing.
The diagnostic questions:
- Control: "If I disappeared for two weeks, would the business keep running?"
- Variability: "Does the output depend on who does the work?"
- Memory: "How much work relies on someone remembering?"
- Visibility: "Do I have the data to make this decision?"
Which traps are you in? Be honest—probably at least two. Maybe all four.
Over the next episodes, Scott goes deep on each trap: how to diagnose it, how to escape it, and how it connects to the SCALE framework.
The bottom line: Think about a friction in your business. Ask yourself: which trap is creating it? Control, variability, memory, or visibility? Once you know the trap, you know exactly what to fix.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
