This is a long, but good one, so buckle up.
A founder told me, with real pride, I might add, that her door is always open. Anyone on her team can come in, any time, with anything.
A few minutes later she mentioned, almost as an aside, that she does her real work after 9pm once the house goes quiet.
Those two things are connected.
She hadn’t realized it until I pointed it out.
Most founders I work with haven’t either.
What An Open Door Actually Costs
An open door feels generous.
Your team knows you’re there, nobody stays stuck for long, and you get to be the person with the answer.
So the door stays open all day.
Each interruption on its own is small. Eight minutes on a pricing question. Twelve on a client email someone wasn’t sure how to word. Five to approve something they could have approved themselves. Add them up across a normal day and the person responsible for strategy gets about forty minutes of uninterrupted thinking.
The work that grows a business needs long blocks of time.
Planning next quarter, fixing your pricing, figuring out who to hire next.
None of that fits between knocks on the door, so it slides to the only quiet hours left, which are after dinner.
That’s how a growing company ends up being steered by a founder running on fumes at 10pm.
What Constant Access To Your Team Does
When anyone can walk in and get an answer in two minutes, there’s no reason to think a problem through first.
Asking you is quicker than working it out, so asking you becomes step one on everything.
In a years time, it’s a habit across the whole team.
Capable people stop making calls they’re perfectly able to make, because the founder has always been right there to make it for them.
Then you wonder why nobody takes ownership. They learned it at your door.
Set Office Hours
The fix is pretty simple and takes about three weeks to become a habit.
You pick two windows a day when the door is wide open.
The rest of the time, questions go onto a shared list.
Something useful happens to that list.
Within a few weeks, about half of it gets crossed off before you ever see it.
People write the question down, wait a couple of hours, and solve it themselves in the meantime.
The ability was there all along. You just didn’t let it show up.
If you still need to be involved, here is a set up I have walked clients through. If you don’t need to be as involved, provide less office hour times.
The Office Hours Setup: The Practical Part of this Blog
How to Close the Door Without Leaving Your Team Stuck
1. Pick your two windows
Choose two 30 to 45 minute blocks a day, one late morning and one mid afternoon. Your mornings stay protected for your own thinking. Put both windows in your calendar as recurring events so your team can see them. Hold them for at least three weeks before you judge how it’s going, because the first week always feels clunky.
2. Set up the question list
Make one shared list your whole team can add to. A ClickUp list, a Google Doc or a Slack channel all work. Every question goes in using this format:
- The question: What do you need from me?
- What I’ve tried: What have you already looked at or tested?
- What I think the answer is: Your best guess.
- When I need it by: Today, this week, or no rush.
That third line does the heavy lift in that frameowrk. Once people write down their best guess, they often realise they already knew the answer and just wanted permission.
Tell them that if their guess is reasonable and the risk is low, they can go ahead.
3. Decide what’s allowed to interrupt you
Write down exactly what can still come through the door outside office hours, and keep it short. Something like a client about to walk or a safety issue. Everything else goes on the list.
4. Tell your team why
They’ll follow the system much faster if they understand it. You could say something like:
“I’ve been answering questions all day and doing my actual job at night. That is on me for not setting up the right systems. Starting Monday I’m holding office hours at [time] and [time]. Anything that comes up in between goes on the list with what you’ve tried and what you think the answer is. If you’re confident in your answer and it’s low risk, go for it. I trust you. Here’s what still counts as urgent: [your list].”
5. Run the Schedule
During the office hours, people can come into your office but if they don’t, work through the list from top to bottom. When someone’s best guess was right, tell them so in front of the team next time you are in a meeting. That’s how the habit of trusting their own judgment gets built. When it was wrong, walk them through how you thought about it (in private) so they can make the call themselves next time.
6. Review at week three
Look back over the list and count how many questions got crossed off before you reached them. Then look for repeats. A question that keeps showing up means you’re missing a process, a document or a decision rule. Write it down once and stop answering it.
Where this fits
Office hours buy you your thinking time back, and it starts teaching your team to own their calls. It holds up far better when the rest of the structure is there to support it: clear roles so people know which decisions are theirs, decision rules they can lean on, and a meeting rhythm that gives questions a proper home.
That’s what we build inside Structured to Scale. It’s a self-paced program with video modules, templates and exercises like this one, plus group coaching so you’re not figuring it out alone. You work through it at your own pace and get unstuck alongside other founders doing the same work.
If your best thinking keeps happening after 9pm, get on the waitlist to know when the next Structure to Scale co-hort launches. Fill out the Form Here.
