I help owner-led teams fix the patterns that cause dropped balls and midweek derailments
— so the team carries more and you get your time back.
"Give me one quarter — just one — where we actually do the stuff we said we'd do."
I work with owner-led service businesses where too much of the important work still leans too hard on one person.
If this sounds familiar, you’re in the right place.
Your business isn’t jammed up because you lack systems. It’s because too much of the important work still depends on you.
Inside most growing, owner-led service businesses, the same frictions show up:
❌ Decisions default to the owner.
The team is smart, but they wait for clarity, direction, or the final call. Nothing really moves until you weigh in.
❌ You’re straddling too many jobs.
Client delivery, team management, direction-setting — all fighting for the same bandwidth. Your highest-value work keeps getting shoved to nights and weekends.
❌ Plans don’t stick.
You set priorities, everyone nods, and then the week dissolves into side quests. By Friday you’re back to improvising.
❌ Ownership is fuzzy.
Good people drop balls simply because no one knows who’s catching what. Things fall through the cracks because “someone” was supposed to handle it.
❌ Momentum depends on your attention.
When you step back, things slow down. Not because people don’t care, but because the internal side of the business isn’t strong enough to carry the weight without you.
I work with teams in this exact spot — capable people, good work, real demand — but the day-to-day is still too dependent on the owner to keep things moving.
These aren’t systems problems. They’re founder-load problems — the kind where the business still leans on the person who built it to keep everything upright.
Tools won’t fix that. Templates won’t fix that. SOPs won’t fix that. They just add more for you to manage.
And the cost is real: rework, dropped balls, tired teams, and an owner who can’t get out of the weeds long enough to work on the big stuff.
When fewer decisions route through you, your week opens up. Most owners reclaim 5–10 hours simply because the team stops waiting for answers, approvals, and direction. Slack quiets down. “Quick questions” vanish. You stop being the default traffic cop.
With clearer direction and fewer bottlenecks, they take on more of the day-to-day — scoping, handling issues before they hit your desk, moving work forward without hesitation. The “I thought someone else had it” moments start disappearing.
Priorities stay steady instead of melting into side quests. Decisions hold. People follow through. Your week stops dissolving into improvisation and you stop having the same conversation every quarter.
As priorities stabilize, surprises drop. Fewer scrambles, fewer emergencies, fewer “sorry, this fell through the cracks” moments. The business stops feeling like a series of micro-fires.
No more guessing, no more catch-all tasks that silently land on your plate. Everyone knows what they own week to week, so handoffs are cleaner and far fewer balls hit the floor. You no longer have to hover to keep things moving.
These aren’t abstract improvements. They’re the on-the-ground shifts that happen when the business stops leaning on the owner to keep everything upright — and starts running cleaner and faster on its own power.
I’m not here to shove you into a prefab system and wish you luck. You get a custom diagnosis and a tool-agnostic roadmap based on what’s actually slowing you down — not whatever a framework claims should be happening.
Most resets land in 8–12 weeks. It’s structured, focused and designed to get the business off your shoulders and running on its own power.
Growing service businesses don’t stall because they lack systems. They stall because too much clarity, direction, and decision-making sits on the owner. When that load shifts, the business finally runs the way it should.
Here are the principles I've come to believe over my decade+ of doing this:
1️⃣ Execution problems are leadership-load problems in disguise.
If the important work still routes through the owner, the team can’t move with confidence. Most “process issues” bigger than a clerical mistake are really symptoms of decision bottlenecks, unclear priorities, or shifting direction — not a lack of documentation.
2️⃣ Teams need clarity and consistency more than tools.
You can have the cleverest workflow in the world — or a pencil and paper — and the results will be the same if people aren’t sure what matters, when, or who decides. Moving away from fire drills is 95% habit, 5% tool. Clarity fuels autonomy; tools just support the habits you already have.
3️⃣ Accountability only works when expectations are clear and agreed upon.
You can’t hold people to what they don’t understand or never agreed to. When expectations are clear (transparency) and confirmed (consent), accountability finally sticks. This is why dropped balls disappear: people know what’s theirs, why it matters, and how it fits into the bigger picture.
These principles work because they match how real businesses behave: clarity lowers friction, ownership spreads load, and stable rhythms keep decisions alive.
Once those pieces are in place, the team isn’t waiting on the owner — they’re running the business with you.
KN Literary Arts
KN Literary had ambitious growth goals but wasn’t seeing traction. Internally, the team didn’t have consensus on what the real problem was, and the work kept landing back on Kelly’s desk. I came in, assessed where things stood, and helped the team align around a clear plan, a steady weekly rhythm, and a leadership structure that could actually carry the business forward.
What changed:
“Karen made such a difference from the day she walked in. We had ambitious goals but no traction — and no agreement on why. She got us aligned, rebuilt our rhythm, and helped me put the right leadership team in place. Now the business is firing on all cylinders, and I feel invigorated by our vision again.”
— Kelly Notaras, Founder & CEO, KN Literary Arts
Every engagement starts the same way: we get clear on what’s actually slowing you down.
You can’t fix a business that still leans too hard on one person without first seeing where and why that’s happening. That’s what the Diagnostic is for.
Then, if you choose to move forward, we fix the part of the business that’s carrying too much weight.
That’s the Reset — a focused engagement that rebuilds the structure and habits your team needs to keep work moving without everything leaning on you.
Here’s the sequence:
We surface the real pattern:
You leave with a clear picture of what’s tripping the business and what needs to change first.
Then we fix the pressure points that slow everything down. We:
It’s decisive, contained and aimed at removing the founder-load that keeps the business stuck.
I’m Karen Sergeant and I’ve spent the last decade helping founder-led service businesses grow without leaning on one person to hold everything together.
After 9/11, I spent years in CIA operations, often in a war-zone, where clarity and alignment weren’t nice-to-haves — they were the difference between things going right or going sideways. That training taught me to build clarity under pressure, spot the real risks, and keep my team aligned. That muscle carried straight into the work I do now.
I’ve supported and led businesses from deep-six into multi–seven figures, and the pattern is always the same: the external wins pile up, but the inside can’t keep pace. The back-office starts vetoing growth. Priorities fall apart before the read receipt triggers. One leader told me, “We have five proposals out, and if any one of them says yes, we’re screwed.”
My work focuses on the spots where the business leans too hard on the owner: the decisions that bottleneck, the plans that dissolve into side quests, the responsibilities no one really owns. I help teams run the business with you, not wait for you — so the week moves cleaner, the work moves faster, and you get your time back for what actually matters.
Every engagement begins with a short Intro Call.
We’ll confirm whether this work is the right fit, and whether you’re ready for what most owners tell me they want: the first quarter where the business finally does what it said it would do.
Book an Intro Call →
Operational Clarity for Owner-Lead Teams
I help owner-led teams fix the patterns that cause dropped balls and midweek derailments — so the team carries more and you get your time back for the work only you can do.
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© 2025 KAREN SERGEANT • ALL RIGHTS RESERVED