This article hits on something I've noticed before that is perhaps obvious to many but always seems unintuitive to me: past a certain point, generic "management" skill is the limiting factor irrespective of domain. Sure, it helps to have domain knowledge, and it's more important in some areas than others. But for a service-oriented business, hiring, organization, and client management (growth + retention) dominate at scale. Helps understand why people good at those things get paid so much despite "knowing nothing" about the business they're managing (in some cases).
My father-in-law has been slowly retiring from his contractor business for the last several years. He's down to working 40 hour weeks these days. It's really hard for him to step back further because he's still a critical step in so much of the process. He's the only person at his company who can do certain parts of each job.
Prospects want to talk to him, specifically, because his name is on the business and previous customers refer to him by name. He can bring other people into the sales cycle but can't completely delegate it.
He's got to sign off on the quote for the work (rehabbing an old kitchen, for example). The business depends on these quotes being profitable, so he needs to be extremely confident in the quote, and the work crosses several domains within the crew. Recently he's been training a back office employee, who's seen years of work and how much it costs, on how to do this well.
And he's ultimately the one who has to inspect the finished work and ensure it's up to the company standards. Typical manager responsibility there. If someone on his crew does a crappy job, he's the one getting a phone call and has to rearrange the schedule to address rework.
Anyone with interest and aptitude for these tasks is long term aiming to start their own contractirs.
I don’t know how it relates to construction but if you were describing a software development studio I would say it sounds like your father in law hired too many junior and/or incompetent and/or unmotivated employees and then micromanaged the process + done too much of the work himself to compensate.
The same way you avoid it: Succession planning. You need to do the same thing as before this becomes an issue, but now you have less time. You need/want battle plans before a battle, but if you don't have them before you have to make them during.
I don't think there's a contextualess answer, but broadly you either find a direct replacement that you mentor (or maybe you're lucky and they're already GTG) or you diminish your role and have multiple other roles within your org (or outside, i.e. outsource) take up what used to be your responsibilities until your role is obsoleted.
Probably try to hire someone more senior, preferably with management, sales or bizdev experience. And then start pairing with them until they have his specific workflow down. It may never be anyone as good as he was but the alternative is that the business goes under when he can no longer work.
Lack of domain knowledge usually increases the amount of management you need too.
In software development for example your teams become much larger because you made the wrong decisions by not understanding the scope and requirements, selecting the wrong stack and tools and hiring the wrong people.
So now you need more management all the way from HR to procurement, engineering, support and legal to brute force your way into delivering.
And all these salaries and benefits need to be paid which means now there's less money to hire and retain qualified engineers and to invest in improving your products and services.
Once an organization falls in this cycle is very hard if not impossible to change, it becomes part of the culture.
Read a little closer. The thesis of the article is that you need to transition from personally managing sales and marketing to hiring someone else to manage them. It's a difficult transition that requires a different skill set than just domain expertise and hustle.
The article assumes you hire perfect people and manage them perfectly. If you manage them improperly, or your the people you hire are bad, the numbers certainly go down.
But the point of the article still stands even if you do things perfectly, it's the agency business model that is the limiting factor here, I think.
