# The trap of rapid growth and single points of failure

- **Episode:** [155](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/155.md) (2024-12-19)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** rapid-growth, single-points-of-failure, trap
- **Time:** 21:04–23:43 (start 1264s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/155?t=1264](https://truthliesandwork.com/155?t=1264)

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[21:04] Louise Hill: I can tell you, I mean, a trap that I fell into without realizing it. I, it was in that period of kind of incredibly high growth, I realized, well, I was drowning. Bluntly, that's what it came down to. I realized I was sinking underwater and I was trying to, something I've learned I have to do about every 6 months is kind of step back and go, okay, am I doing the right things? Am I, you know, am I prioritizing my time in the right way? What does the business need for its next stage of growth? So I stepped back and tried to look at why was I drowning, and I realized that I'd become a roadblock. I really had created inadvertently a situation where too many things came back to me. It might be that I was the only person who knew who was the right contact at a company we were working with. Or I was the only person who knew why we did something in a particular way, or sometimes where, which folder something was in, in our systems. And that had to change because I was gonna go under and the business was gonna fall over. So I decided to, I set up a campaign that I called Single Points of Failure
[22:36] Al Elliott: Yeah
[22:38] Louise Hill: And challenged the whole business to identify single points of failure. And that might be where we had an individual who was the only person who knew how to do something that was pretty critical, or it could be something as stupid as filing systems that only certain people had access to. And embarrassingly, my name appeared in it a huge amount. But we spent a concerted 6 months trying to work our way through removing all of those single points of failure. And it meant I was able to let go of an awful lot of stuff and make sure that the knowledge was out there in the much wider business for how to do stuff and get on without needing me. Obviously, that then freed me up to concentrate on the things I should have been concentrating on. But it's, You know, I sometimes get asked for tips and I always think, who the heck am I to give anybody tips? But watch out for that. It's a really easy trap to fall into. Really easy