August has this strange rhythm to it.
Half the team is at the beach. The other half is answering emails, sort of. Projects move slower. Meetings start later. You can feel the hum of the business start to fade just a little…except for you.
You’re still pushing
It’s not just the heat. It’s the silence.
In fact, the quieter things get around you, the louder the realization becomes:
“If I stop driving this, does anything move?”
I was talking to another owner last week who described it perfectly.
“We’ve come a long way. I trust my people. But I still end up being the one to clarify the next step, to tie things together. And honestly, I can’t tell if that’s just how leadership works… or if we’ve built something that still depends too much on me.”
That’s the moment.
Not burnout. Not frustration. Just that quiet awareness:
You’re still the system.
What this moment reveals about your team.
This tends to show up for companies in the 50–150 employee range.
You’ve hired great people. You’ve gotten bigger. But you haven’t fully outgrown the operating patterns of a smaller team.
So things float.
Deadlines blur.
Ownership gets fuzzy.
Decisions loop back to you.
And it’s not because people don’t care.
It’s because you haven’t yet built the structure for clarity to scale with you.
August is a clarity accelerator
What’s interesting is that this shows up most clearly in the summer.
When things slow down. When you’re looking ahead to Q4.
And it raises the real question:
If you’re the only one pushing right now, what happens in the fall when things need to speed up?
Need a quick sounding board before Q4?
No big pitch here. Just something worth sitting with as you look at your week.
Where is execution depending on you to keep momentum going?
Where could clarity or ownership make that unnecessary?
And if you’re curious whether the way you’ve set up your team is helping, or quietly holding you back, let’s grab a 30-minute conversation. I’ll bring questions, not a slide deck.
Coffee’s on me.
Let’s figure out what’s really going on.