For years, I made bad hires and promoted the wrong people into the wrong seats. It cost me more than money. It pushed good people out the door. People who probably would still be here, still doing great work, if I had built the company differently. I created bottlenecks in every department, and most of them led right back to me.

That’s a hard thing to say out loud. But it’s true, and that’s where this story starts.

The COO Who Held Us Back

For a stretch of time, I had a COO running my office who wasn’t building anything. They weren’t making the systems better. They weren’t growing the team. They weren’t solving problems on their own. What they were doing was micromanaging. Tight, narrow, and in a way that made everyone wait on the top for answers.

So I kept getting pulled back in. Fires to put out. New processes to set up. Decisions to make that should have never reached me.

“I was the ceiling of my own company, and I had put someone in charge who made sure it stayed that way.”

When I finally let that COO go, I had to come back and run the office myself. Day to day. The workload was too much, so I started handing out assignments to whoever was on the team. Whoever was close to the work, whoever was ready.

That’s when I found her.

She Started Out Answering Phones

Nicole was answering phones when I started handing out work. Nothing big at first. Small tasks, simple asks. What I noticed right away was the pattern. She finished everything fast, got it right, and came back asking for more.

That doesn’t sound like much. But in a company where I had spent years chasing people down and explaining the same things over and over, someone who got the work done and came back hungry was a rare thing.

So I gave her harder stuff. She kept coming back. Faster than I thought. Better than I asked for.

Then our main ordering lead quit out of nowhere. That role usually takes months before someone can really do it well. I didn’t have months. I started training Nicole, and within days, not weeks, days, she had enough of it down to take it on. I would check her work while she did the data entry. Her mistakes dropped. Her speed went up. And when she didn’t know something, she’d come ask instead of guessing.

She was sharp, careful with details, and she knew how to speak up when she hit the edge of what she knew. That last part matters more than most people think.

The Test I Didn’t Know I Was Running

Looking back, I was running the same test every time I gave Nicole an assignment. I just hadn’t put words to it.

The test is this: when you leave them alone, do they make the work better?

Not just keep it going. Not just hold the line. Do they make it better? Do they spot the problems you missed, think through the fix, and come back with something stronger than what you gave them?

Someone who needs you to push them, hold their hand, and hand them every answer is not a leader. No matter what their title says. They become the bottleneck, or they hand it back to you and you become the bottleneck. Either way, the company can’t grow. You just get busier.

The people worth building around do the opposite. When you check back in, something is better than when you left it. That’s the sign.

From Ordering to the Whole Office

Once Nicole had ordering down, we didn’t stop. We built the whole department together. She led the team, set up KPIs, chased down the real cause of the issues, and kept making things better. We’d sit down, pick a problem apart, try a fix, break it, rebuild it, and break it again. It turned into a habit. Not just fixing things, but really understanding them.

That same thing moved from ordering to the showroom team, to customer service, to contracts. Every time, she dug in, learned the work, found what was broken, and fixed it. Every time, the job got bigger.

Eventually, she had earned enough trust across every department that she took over running the office day to day. Now I point at goals and she builds. We talk strategy. The rest is hers.

The latest proof. She just led the full rollout of our new CRM with our new CRM company. That was a huge, complicated project. It’s the kind of thing I never would have thought anyone else in the company could pull off. She owned it from start to finish.

What an A Player Actually Is

People throw the term “A player” around all the time. It gets used so much that it almost stops meaning anything. Hard to pin down. Hard to quantify. Everyone wants one, but most people can’t tell you what one looks like until they’re standing in front of it.

I can tell you now, because I have one.

An A player is the person who, when you leave them alone, makes the work better. They take what you give them, own it, and bring it back stronger. They don’t wait. They build. They find the problems you didn’t see and fix them before you ask. They turn a department around. Then another one. Then the whole office.

Nicole made my company a million times better. She freed me up from running the day to day, and she gave me back the one thing I had been losing for years. Time and space to chase the next dream.

That’s what an A player does. They don’t just fill a seat. They give you your life back so you can go build the next thing.

This is the first article in an ongoing series I’m writing about lessons I’ve learned building Southwest Blinds & Shutters over the last twenty plus years. New articles every few weeks.