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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
Ambitious… But Lazy - What if the real goal of building a business isn’t doing more… but getting things to work without you?
10,000+ Customers With 15 People – How SweepBright scaled to over 10,000 customers with a team of just 15. A practical conversation with Raphael Bochner on leverage, focus, and designing a business that grows without growing headcount.
Hiring without Hiring – How to scale without adding payroll or burning out.
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – Stop selling to everyone. This episode focuses on defining your ICP so you can scale with better clients and less chaos.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master – You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
The Exception Protocol: Designing Clear Paths for When Things Go Wrong
A client's project is running late. Your developer is stuck on a bug. A payment didn't go through. A vendor missed a delivery deadline.
Your team member pings you on Slack: "Hey, we've got a situation. What should I do?"
And now you're in firefighting mode… again. Dropping everything to make a decision that pulls you away from the work only you can do.
This happens three times this week. Seven times next week. Eventually, you realize: you're not running a business. You're running a never-ending series of "what do I do now?" interrupts.
The problem isn't that things go wrong. Things always go wrong.
The problem is that your team doesn't know what to do when they do.
The Exception Problem
Here's the thing about processes: they work great when everything goes according to plan.
But business is exceptions. Things deviate from the plan constantly.
Think of your business like an assembly line.
When the assembly line runs smoothly, everyone knows what to do. Part A goes to Station 1, gets processed, moves to Station 2, repeat.
But what happens when Part A arrives damaged? Or when Station 2 breaks down? Or when the customer changes the order mid-production?
In a factory with no exception protocol, the entire line stops and waits for a manager to show up and tell them what to do.
In a factory with a clear exception protocol, the workers know:
Step 1: Try X
Step 2: If X doesn't work, try Y
Step 3: If Y doesn't work, escalate to [specific person]
The line keeps moving. Managers only get involved when genuinely necessary.
Your business needs the same thing.
Right now, your team is stopping the line every time something unexpected happens—because they don't know what they're empowered to do.
An exception protocol gives them that clarity.
Why This Matters for Microteams
Big companies have layers. When something goes wrong, there's a chain of command. Junior person escalates to manager. Manager escalates to director. Director escalates to VP.
In a microteam? Everyone escalates directly to you.
Here's why an exception protocol is especially critical for small teams:
You're the bottleneck by default. Every decision that "needs founder approval" slows everything down.
Your time is the most expensive resource. Every hour spent on trivial decisions is an hour not spent on strategic work.
Empowerment drives ownership. When people know they're allowed to solve problems, they do. When they're afraid to act without permission, they wait.
Speed is your competitive advantage. The faster your team can resolve issues without escalation, the faster you move.
The best microteams don't have founders who make every decision. They have founders who've designed systems so most decisions don't need them.
The Exception Protocol Framework
Here's how to build a clear, actionable protocol for when things go wrong so your team knows exactly what to do without asking you first.