In this episode of the B2B Brand180 Podcast, Linda Fanaras interviews Mark Skalla, founder of Fulcrum Fractional and author of The Leverage Point. Together, they explore why growth can expose hidden operational weaknesses, how founders become bottlenecks in their own businesses, and what leaders need to change to scale without everything depending on them.
Mark shares practical insights on delegation, accountability, decision-making, and building systems that allow teams to take greater ownership. You’ll hear actionable strategies for identifying operational bottlenecks, using AI and automation to improve visibility, and creating the structure needed to support sustainable business growth.
01:47 When Founders Become the Bottleneck to Growth
03:42 Why Growth Amplifies a Broken Business
06:45 The Leverage Point: How to Know When You’re the Bottleneck
09:14 Using AI and Automation to Improve Accountability
10:03 The “Founder Hero” Problem: When CEOs Stay Too Tactical
16:54 Why 80% Delegation Can Outperform 100% Founder Execution
17:39 Why Marketing Growth Exposes Operational Weaknesses
22:58 Rapid-Fire Questions
https://leveragepointbook.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markskalla/
Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency
Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/
Linda:
Welcome to the B2B Brand180 Podcast, where we don’t just talk about growth, we challenge the assumptions behind it. I’m Linda Fanaras, the CEO of Millennium Agency, and your host today. And today I’m joined by Mark Skalla. Mark built and exited a seven-figure digital marketing agency, but here’s the part that makes founders lean in. The better his marketing performed, the faster it broke the companies he was serving. So every winning campaign exposed the broken systems underneath. And that sent him deep into operations, leadership, and the infrastructure that actually lets a company scale. Today, he’s the founder of Fulcrum Fractional, and he’s the author of The Leverage Point and the creator of the Fulcrum Blueprint, a framework for founder-led companies in $1 to $15 million ranges. And his mission is simple and hard. He helps founders build a company that no longer depends on them. Mark, it’s great to have you here. I’m excited to start to cover this and figure out what CEOs and founders can do to make things work better.
Mark:
It’s an honor to be here. I appreciate it. I love talking to other founders about what it is that I’ve learned over my journey and happy to share some information.
Linda:
That sounds great. We’ll just call this out because most founder-led companies, they don’t stall because the founders, they’re not working hard enough. We know that they do that. They stall because the founder actually has become part of the business that nothing can move without. So they throw in a new hire at a structure problem. They throw in a new tool at an accountability problem. They might even throw in more hours at a problem that doesn’t need more hours. But the real effort is that the diagnosis is wrong. And that Mark is exactly where your work lives, right?
Mark:
That’s absolutely correct.
Linda:
Yeah, absolutely. When was the moment you realized your clients didn’t actually have a marketing problem? They had a structure problem and that founders were the bottleneck the whole way.
Mark:
So it was probably not until the third or fourth customer when I had my marketing agency told me the same thing that I realized there must be something going on behind the scenes that I wasn’t seeing. And the messaging came across pretty much the same each time. Mark, we have too many leads. Mark, we’ve got too many sales and we’ve got to retool something and I’ve got to figure out how to deal with this additional volume, or I’m working on hiring more salespeople. And I didn’t think anything of that the first or second time. I thought, I’m just an awesome marketer. This is working the way that it should. It’s so much business. That’s exactly what people are paying marketing agencies for. But around that third or fourth, I started naturally being curious and saying, I think that there’s an underlying problem here. And it’s something that I was learning also being my own founder of an agency.
I was experiencing some of these similar problems on my own and I hadn’t put two and two together. And what happens with founders is we’re very resourceful individuals. We typically will shoulder all of the tasks that need to be done because who else is going to do it? But after a certain point, we can’t grow past that scale. We’re limited by our own ability. Not our ability to perform the tasks, but we just can’t humanly do all that’s required of us. And that started getting me fascinated into, so how do other companies build outside of this growth limitation? And that brought me into better operations, better systems, and then a fascinating journey into learning more about leadership, how companies are teaching their, whether it’s an executive team or just their leadership on owning not just the processes that exist, but the outcomes for those processes so that naturally you’re building in that evolution that companies need in order to survive.
Linda:
That’s great. It’s the nail on the head. I would say that growth doesn’t necessarily fix a broken business. It actually starts to amplify it. And then when revenue doubles, the cracks don’t close where I think a lot of CEOs think that they’ll just go away. They actually get twice as expensive and twice as big.
Mark:
They certainly do. And the more people you throw at a problem, the more complex things usually become. Who’s handling the handoffs? How are you still measuring those KPIs and tracking that the right people have done what you’re supposed to be accountable for? And they’ve handed it off with clear accountability to the next person or the next department. When you add another third or fourth or fifth person, now you’ve got more handoffs and your processes usually don’t cover those. So it seems, oh my gosh, I need more salespeople, but more salespeople than you need a sales manager and sales manager needs to the marketing manager. Yeah. The complexity just compounds. And we don’t know as founders, unless someone helps sits and educate us through, yeah, it works for smaller, but usually about that $2 or $3 million in revenue a year, most of the systems that got you there all start crumbling and breaking.
And we’re frantic to try and, “Hey, this got me here. I don’t want to kill the white elephant.” But at the same time, we can’t grow unless we do. And there’s a lot of frameworks that exist by people that are far more brilliant than I am that have put together and said, “We’ve scaled businesses from zero to $50 million or zero to $200 million.” And it’s taking those and putting them in bite sized chunks for those smaller organizations that I’ve really become passionate about. And it pairs really well with helping companies also do marketing and build better systems for the marketing so they’ve got reliable outputs. So I love both sides.
Linda:
That’s great. I think with a lot of CEOs and founders, the process that they have lives in their head and nowhere else. So at a small scale, maybe that didn’t get away with that, but as they start to scale, it gets a little chaotic, right? So maybe when they’re small creates friction, when they get larger, then it becomes super chaotic.
Mark:
And you touched on something really important, Linda, that founders being able to document the processes is one foundational step. But the very next step that I talk to almost all of the clients that I work with is mapping out how you make decisions. And that’s a powerful thing to try and help teach your leadership team. Not here’s the process that I use to do the task, but here’s the criteria that I use in order to make a good decision. Because when you can embark on your leaders how you’re determining this is good or this is bad, now you’ve got a team of people that are using the same criteria to make those decisions. And they’re starting to learn ownership of outcome, which then allows that evolution to continue through multiple revenue cycles as you continue to hopefully scale and grow.
Linda:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I think learning the founders of the CEO’s decision-making process and trying to align with that obviously makes growth a little bit more successful. So your book is sort of built around a single idea, which is the leverage point. What does that term actually mean? How does a founder know that they’ve become the bottleneck without even realizing it?
Mark:
So the book was born out of me wanting to try and be methodical with what I was learning ad hoc. As I was working with individual clients in a fractional capacity, I realized that there’s a specific repetitive framework that needs to be built in order to founders to start scaling outside of their own ability. The same problems usually show up, right? It’s founder fatigue. It’s they’re jumping into problems that really they shouldn’t be. Sometimes it’s time management. Founders will sacrifice time with their family, time with their hobbies. Sometimes it’s time spending at the gym and our overall health in order to just invest in the business and what it is that we’re building. But those start showing in different ways. You realize you’re jumping in a slack that you shouldn’t have to do, or you’re having to approve a project that you’re frustrated. I don’t know why I thought I gave autonomy to this person or this team in order to solve this problem, but it’s ending up back on my desk.
And there’s a couple of repetitive tasks that take us back to the same framework that I talk about in The Leverage Point on how founders can start using some very specific tools to document what those are and immediately start seeing some relief in, well, what are these tasks that continue to recur? Can we tie them to a specific KPI and a scorecard that we’re looking at on a regular basis? Can we make sure that we’re clear on that accountability for those individuals? Sometimes individuals are really willing to grow, but if we know that those individuals can’t grow within the framework, sometimes we’ve got right person, wrong seat. Sometimes we have wrong person, wrong person. It doesn’t matter the seat. Giving the founders the tools is what the leverage point really starts at. Is A, identifying the problem. What kind of founder are you and what problems are you experiencing?
Are you experiencing that, oh my gosh, I can’t take any time off and at 16 hours a day, I’m still running behind of the things that I should be doing? Or is it more tactical? There’s a couple of other different exercises such as let’s document what your Monday morning looks like. Are you putting out fires of things that should have been solved or are you spending your time doing what really drives the business forward? And if you’re not doing what drives the business forward, there’s a specific way that we can walk through and say, let’s identify those tasks. Let’s identify the right person in the org chart. If we don’t have one, then we’ll create an org chart. Who should be owning this? And what does that ownership look like? And then how do we measure in a way where AI is becoming so incredibly prominent?
How can we use automation and leverage technology so that the information is coming back to the founders instead of the founders going and retrieving that information? I don’t want to have to say, Hey Linda, it’s Monday morning. Did you do the things that I asked you? I’d rather you be reporting that. So I jump in and look at a scoreboard and I say, Linda’s on top of it. She’s done all the things that I need to. I have the visibility that I need to know that it’s under control. Now I can go spend my ideal work block doing something that actually finds opportunities for the organization, revenue enhancement, new products, et cetera.
Linda:
So you put the accountability back on them, making sure whether the scorecards are updated or just ensuring that they meet whatever the deliverable could be, whether it’s a task or it’s a leadership board they need to update. It’s making sure that they’re actually doing that to move the company forward so you’re not having to circle back and check in, which I think a lot of CEOs do. They’re always kind of more tactical, which gets them away from that sort of strategic perspective that most CEOs and entrepreneurs love that part of their business, right?
Mark:
There’s a chapter in my book specifically about this, Linda. And I understand it again. I’ve started two companies and have been a founder myself. So I’m not just an operator talking to a group of people I can’t relate to. And I call it the founder hero. And I cannot tell you how rewarding it is as a founder to put on your cape and go solve a problem. But every time we do that as founders, we’re not enabling our team to get the right framework in place to have that problem solved. It feels great to save the day. It feels great to save the sale, the product, to do client services. And there’s an upset customer and you say, you know what? I’ll jump on the call and I’ll save this. Part of us love that. But building that out of your regular day and out of your responsibility as a founder is one of the things that will take you to the next level because you’re enabling that next group of people to own those outcomes so that you don’t get to wear the cape, but you’re wearing a cape in a different way. You’re building a much stronger legacy for your organization, more security, more stability, more growth.
Linda:
Relying on a CEO and the CEO’s busy. Obviously you get that momentum that actually stalls. So you got these great people who actually want to own something, but they start to leave because they can’t make those decisions. And I think part of my question to you today is once you do work with a founder or a CEO, you get an idea of what direction they may go into or what the answer could potentially be. But then you have those instances where you don’t really know and maybe you have to wait and figure out, well, should I just go for it and get my hand slapped later? Or should I just wait even though it’s going to get bottleneck? So how do you figure out best strategy for problems like that, that might show up?
Mark:
The first path is listening. As much expertise as 20 years of doing this has brought me, there’s very little that I know walking into a company in an organization. My first couple of weeks are listening and having conversations with not just the founder, but also the leaders. And sometimes organizations are big enough, they might have two layers of leadership, the executive team and then managers. And it’s asking open-ended questions and having conversations about Linda, what’s working the way it should and what’s not working the way it should? And then knowing to listen. And often you’ll see the same cycles of issues coming up. Sometimes people are following an old process that the company has grown past and the process hasn’t been updated. Sometimes there’s not that accountability of I’m doing my part, but the handoff is choppy. So I don’t know if the other person’s doing their part and there’s no clear way to track that.
That’s an easy scorecard item that we can put in play. And I’m going to say something that founders might not love to hear, but quarterly conversations, especially with your executive team and making sure that they’re doing it with those that are running directly under them, reveals so much information about opportunities for employees to grow and for the company to continue to grow. I call it the telephone game. If you, almost any company, walk in and say, what are the three core focuses this quarter or this year for the organization? And you ask that question in private, you will very rarely get the same answer. So some of this is creating that cadence so everyone has clarity. These are the things that are important. This is how we’re measuring whether we hit those goals or we don’t. And these are the ways that I can contribute in order to do that.
But listening is the very first tool that I’ll implement in anybody that I’m working with or trying to help resolve how is the founder showing up, but maybe not showing up in the right way and what can take away some of their pain? It’s just listening. A lot of the team members have those answers.
Linda:
Yeah, that’s great. When you have a CEO that you’re working with and they’re like, we definitely need more marketing or we need more people and you do your analysis, how do you actually cut through that when you have to work with somebody that may have their own mindset? Because I would assume that might get challenging from time to time.
Mark:
It is. And it’s clarity around what the number one and number two goals are. So it’s hard to have 10 priorities. We all keep 10 priorities because we’re busy people and we have, well, no, I want to accomplish all these things. But if you start sifting through where does the company really, where does your vision sit for the company at the end of the year or at the end of three years? Or if you really want to go big at the end of 10 years, that’s an equation that you can solve for by working backwards. If we know where we want to be in a year, we have quarterly goals that we can extrapolate and say, well, I know where I need to be quarterly in order to do this. Is that feasible or is it not feasible? And then it’s working to give each person in the department their way to contribute to that particular goal.
Going in, most founders will give me a list of anywhere from half a dozen to, I don’t want to call any names, two dozen priorities. Two dozen priorities is messy. It’s chaotic. And it’s also not really achievable. When we can boil it down to, I really want to focus this year on profitability. Okay, now we have a clear goal. Revenue’s not the same as profitability. We can grow revenue without being profitable. I’ve seen plenty of companies do that. They lose money, but they’re getting tons of revenue. When we identify those core things of where we want to focus on, then it’s just working a plan backwards. And I know that it sounds overly simplified, but believe it or not, that’s not an exercise that founders spend most of their time doing. We’re saving the sales. We’re going and jumping in to manage handoffs. We’re trying to figure out why on earth I don’t have the visibility for the numbers that I thought I was going to have. When it comes to clarifying, I think having that clear picture makes achieving the goals so much easier.
Linda:
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think like we talked about earlier, you’ve got CEOs or founders that are in a multitude of different directions. And how do you get that focus in? Because when you’re facing constraint, the fix might be small, right? I mean, it could potentially be small. It’s just that it’s getting overlooked.
Mark:
And we have to be okay with failure. There’s another really good point. When founders often say, “Mark, I do this because I know I’m best at doing this. It’s not something I want to have on my plate, but currently I’m the one that executes it best.” Well, you’ve had repetition, you’ve had years of practice, and we need to pass the torch on some of those things, some of those tasks and some of those abilities to the rest of our team. And we need to say, someone’s maybe not going to do this at your 100%, Linda. But if we can train someone on your team to do this at 80%, but they’re doing it all the time, 80% consistently off the founder’s plate will outperform 100% of a busy founder. And that’s just simple straight math. So we’ve got to help ourselves understand it might be a slightly lower standard because founders are amazing. They have a lot of talent, but not having that task anymore and having it done at 80 or 90% actually scales far better than that extra 10 or 20% would.
Linda:
Yeah, that makes complete sense. So let’s talk about when marketing meets operations, where you and I might overlap. Why does aggressive marketing growth so often trigger these operational breakdowns? And so what should leaders actually understand about that before they put more fuel on the fire?
Mark:
More clients has more everything. More clients requires more onboarding, more sales, more customer service, and more ability to actually deliver whatever it is, whether you’re shipping physical products or you’re doing digital products. All of their downline from that moment of sales requires more if you continue to grow. And often we don’t build that into, “Hey, I know that I want to grow bottom line revenue or top line revenue, and I want to build out profitability so that we can continue to scale.” But how does that look for your team? Do we understand capacities? And there’s a big pitfall that a lot of founders will fall into. What’s the current capacity of your existing team to grow before we need to start adding people? And when we do add people, what’s that strategic vision and plan look like? Who needs to be added first? How do we expand our scope as an organization to be able to add that component?
Again, responsibilities, scorecard, how do they fit into the org chart? Who do they report to? Who do they manage? We don’t have a plan. We just know, well, I know that if I grow sales, I can add an extra person to help with the shipping. Or I can add an extra person to help with what about clients that if it’s recurring billing, you’ve got to go and chase payments because they have failed payments. One of the clients I worked with, we didn’t think about that. We scaled from 7,000 people that were doing monthly recurring to about 11,000 people that were doing monthly recurring. The number of people that were missing billing that we had to go and claw back and say, “Hey, we need a better card on file. We don’t want to just write those business off,” was two more full-time people because we grew that recurring component of the company so much.
And we didn’t think and plan about that. So that really got me thinking about as a structure for when we’re looking at growing our marketing, what’s the point of failure that’s going to happen first? And how do we build into our plan as we scale marketing? I’m going to need time to onboard that person. I’m going to need time to train that person. And I need to hire them either 30, 60, sometimes 90 days before I hit that point, or else we have that house of cards that starts falling down and we realize, uh-oh, I’m not doing the customer service that I should. I’ve got customers that are giving me feedback that is lower where they normally are giving me feedback or shipping’s taking a little bit longer. So it’s really looking down the pipeline and saying, we have a goal. We’re going to assume that we’re going to hit that goal.
Now let’s build the if statements. If we hit it, where does it break? And what do we do? And when do we need to be prepared to start implementing and doing that ahead of time instead of being behind the eight ball?
Linda:
Yeah. No, that completely makes sense. I’d love to make this real for the audience. So let’s say they realize they have this problem. Would you recommend one or two actionable takeaways here today?
Mark:
Absolutely. So one of the things that I’m making available to everyone that’s listening to your podcast is the second module of my framework. And there are a couple of exercises that are in there that don’t take a lot of time that will give founders immediate time back in their schedule. And one of them is a simple documentation. You can either do it one week or two weeks of the tasks that they find themselves continuing to run into and who should be owning them. And that’s about 15 to 30 minutes of an exercise. And then assigning that out to the people and looking at a KPI. So the important tie-in is not saying, “Well, I’m Linda and I realize that I don’t want to be doing these four things, so I’m going to assign that to Sally, Mo, Larry and Susie.” It’s how do I know that they’re doing what they need to do?
And I’m getting feedback without having to ask them. So it’s creating that scorecard of saying, “These are the things that I’ve assigned. Here’s the KPI, the metric that I can look at so that I know it’s being done. And I’m going to have them uploading that to…” You can even start very simple, almost free, and do this in a Google Sheet. So that you’ve got, as a founder, a dashboard that I know I’ve just eliminated three to five things out of my daily schedule. I know that I’ve got a KPI that I can check in on if I get nervous about are they handling it? Are they not handling it? And then this is one of the first things that we tie into when we’re doing those quarterlies. It’s another conversation. Linda, I know that I passed this off to you a month or two or three months ago.
I’ve seen the scorecard. It seems to be doing well. Talk to me about this. Have you had any problems? Do you have any ideas for how we can improve this? And suddenly you realize you’ve got ideas on how to automate it. You’ve got ideas on using a different piece of technology. So your process just begins to get better by that quick documentation exercise, but it continues to get better as we continue to stay focused on if the KPIs are moving in the right direction. We’re having conversations of how to continue owning that and improving it further. Sometimes there’s no further improvement that you need to do. And as a founder, you’re wonderful and fantastic that you’ve just eliminated. If that’s half an hour of your day or 45 minutes of your day multiplied over the week or over the year, congratulations. You don’t have to stay as late or you don’t have to be on your phone when you’d rather be doing something different.
Linda:
That’s great. So I’m going to jump into some rapid-fire questions for you. Number one, what’s the biggest myth about scaling a founder-led company?
Mark:
That founders can do everything on their own.
Linda:
The wrong fix founders throw at a structure problem.
Mark:
People.
Linda:
The one question every founder should ask before their next hire.
Mark:
Am I measuring the right metric for my company’s health?
Linda:
The bottleneck in one word.
Mark:
Inability to grow without you being involved.
Linda:
Where should AI actually start in a founder-led company beyond saving time?
Mark:
As a process that the entire company uses together and collectively.
Linda:
Awesome. So Mark, this is a real shift because it’s not about really working harder here. It’s really about taking a look at that operational, those bottlenecks that occur, especially with founders and CEOs. And it’s making sure that the business doesn’t need you for it to just keep it together. So I would love for you to share, Mark, how people can get in touch with you, maybe a little bit about your book.
Mark:
Absolutely. Book is available on Amazon. All you got to do is look at either Mark Skalla or The Leverage Point. It’ll come up. It’s a great place to start if you’re looking for an education. If you’re looking for tools and access immediately, the best place that you can go to, again, I don’t make the module for free for anyone else other than the listeners here. You can go to fulcrumfractional.com/blueprint and you’ll be able to download your free copy of that second module blueprint. The reason I chose the second one, it’s a little bit less education, but it’s a few more tools that you can implement inside of a few hours in your first week. And you will immediately start seeing less things on your plate as a founder. You might start getting a little bit more of that clarity time for better thinking, better planning.
And that’s the beginning of the freedom that I think founders who are in the process of growing, but they’re not entirely sure what to let go of first, I think they’ll find a little bit of their answers in there.
Linda:
If you found this helpful, don’t just listen. Apply it to your day-to-day. I’m sure there’s something in here that you can actually take away. Please like, share, comment, or subscribe and connect with Mark at Fulcrum Fractional and grab his book The Leverage Point, and you can definitely find him on LinkedIn. So let’s keep challenging the assumptions behind how we grow.
