There is a particular kind of interruption that small business owners recognise immediately: the one that starts with "do you have a second?"

It's always a second. It's never a second. And by the time you've walked across the office to look at someone's screen, explained why the thing is doing the thing, and returned to what you were doing — and then tried to remember what you were doing — twenty minutes are gone.

If this happens four times a day, that's 80 minutes. Per day. Against a business where you are the highest-leverage person.

Why this happens

It happens because there is no other path.

When a laptop won't connect to the network, there is no place to look it up. There is no troubleshooting guide. There is no person whose job is to handle it. The only option is to find the owner, because the owner is the person who knows.

This is not a people problem. Your staff is not incompetent for asking. They have nowhere else to go. You made yourself the destination by being the only person who ever had the answers.

The fix is not "stop answering questions." The fix is to create other destinations.

What "other destinations" actually means

A simple FAQ or troubleshooting doc. Not comprehensive. Not elaborate. Just the ten things that come up repeatedly. The printer password. How to connect to the VPN from home. What to do when the invoicing software won't load. Where the shared files are. How to add a new client to the CRM.

This document should live somewhere everyone can find it. Not buried in a shared drive. A bookmark in every browser. A pinned message in your team's chat.

I have seen this single change eliminate 60% of the "do you have a second?" interruptions, permanently. The questions don't go away. They get answered without involving you.

A defined escalation path. For the things that aren't in the doc: one person is the first escalation point before it reaches you. Not necessarily someone with IT expertise — someone who will try the obvious solutions first and can judge whether something is urgent enough to interrupt the owner. Often a senior team member who is already trusted with similar judgment calls.

The point is not to make you unreachable. The point is to make your involvement the last resort, not the first.

Vendor support as a first call, not a last resort. For most software your business uses, there is a support team. For most hardware, there is a manufacturer's helpline or a local repair shop. Most small business owners treat these as options to try "if it gets really bad." In practice, reaching out to the actual support channel is faster and more effective than the owner troubleshooting by feel.

The things you can stop doing immediately

Being the password reset service. With a password manager, every team member has access to their credentials without asking anyone. This category of interruption should not exist.

Knowing where things are filed. If you are the only person who knows the folder structure well enough to find a specific document, the folder structure needs work. This is an organisation problem, not an IT problem, but it generates IT-style interruptions.

Personally onboarding new software. When a new tool gets introduced, the person who introduced it — you, or whoever proposed it — should create a short orientation. A five-minute recording. A single-page guide. Not a training day: a reference that a new user can consult when they forget how something works.

What you do with the time

The honest reason most business owners stay as the default IT person is that extracting yourself feels like a project, and the interruptions feel manageable in the moment.

They're not manageable in aggregate. If you tracked every IT-style interruption for one week — every question, every fix, every "look at this" — the total would probably surprise you.

That time compounds differently when it's uninterrupted and applied to the work only you can do: relationships, growth, the decisions that actually require your judgment. An afternoon of documentation upfront pays back continuously.

Owner bottleneck is one of the five things I look for in the free audit. [Book it here.](/contact)