18 October 2026
If you answer everything, you are not the boss. You are the **switchboard**.
If the day starts with “have you got a minute?” and ends with the same sentence, you are not leading the company. You are the switchboard. I say this because I have been there, not because I read it on a slide.
I was a bartender at the pub in my hometown. For a few months in 2018 I opened a panzerotti shop at the station in Padua: hiring and supervising staff, the accounts, and a campaign so people knew we existed. I have founded and led companies, from Frank & Jhon in 2017 to Atlas, where I have been CEO and co-founder since February 2025. In between I have been chief executive, general manager and CFO. The detail is on the About page. Here I care about one thing: in a small firm, the questions come back to the same desk.
Not a failing. It is how a small company is built.
This is not a moral failing. It is the shape of a company when there are few people and the processes are not written down. Someone has to know where the file is, who approves, what the procedure is, whether that customer can be called back, whether the number on that sheet is the right one. If that someone is always you, the rest of the team waits. The real work — deciding, selling, going to site, talking to a supplier — slips.
An example, not a client
Eight people, the same questions
Imagine a construction firm of eight people. It is not a client of mine and it is not a case I have measured. It is an example, so the mechanism is visible. The owner is on site in the morning. The phone has three messages: where is the estimate, who said yes to that variation, the supplier wants a name. None of these questions is hard. They have been answered before. The answer lives in the owner’s head, or in a chat from three weeks ago, or in a PDF with a name nobody remembers. Eight people stop for a sentence that takes twenty seconds. Multiply that by the week and the boss no longer has a trade. The boss has a queue.
I call that queue a bottleneck. It is not a consultant’s metaphor. It is the moment when the company moves at the speed of the person who is asked most often, not at the speed of the work. I saw it as an employee, waiting for a signature. I saw it as an owner, when the signature was mine. I saw it in a small shop, where opening, hiring and keeping the books meant every exception came back to me. The size changes. The mechanism does not.
Ask the Boss
This is where the example I call Ask the Boss comes from. It is not a packaged product and it is not a client case with a result to hang on the wall. It is an example of a custom solution: an assistant answers the team’s repetitive questions instead of the owner, and a person checks before the answer becomes a decision. The simulation on the site is deliberately simple. “Where did that file go?” arrives. The assistant proposes the answer that is already in the procedures. Someone validates. The boss is not woken for the fifth time.
Why not just tell the team to sort it out? Because often there is nowhere to sort it. The procedure is oral. The file has three versions. Approval is a habit, not a written step. Asking the boss is rational if the boss is the only archive. The problem is not the question. The problem is that the archive is a person.
An assistant, alone, does not fix the archive. If you feed it chaos, it returns chaos in a more confident tone. That is why the work I propose does not start with software. It starts by listening to how the day actually runs, by mapping what repeats, by building a tool only there, and by a human check on the result. Four steps. I call it the custom method because the honest name is that: it is not a package that is the same for everyone.
The check is not decoration
The human check is not a ribbon. It is the condition. An automatic answer that gets an approval wrong does not save time. It moves the mistake and then charges for it twice. I write about that in another note. Here it is enough to say that Ask the Boss, in the example, does not let the answer leave on its own.
There is a limit I want in writing. I do not have a market statistic to quote, and I will not invent one. I cannot tell you what share of owners live like this. I can tell you that I have lived it, in different roles, and that the questions which come back are almost always the same: the file, the procedure, the approval, the “say that again”. If you recognise that list in your week, you do not need a speech about artificial intelligence. You need to look at a queue and decide which pieces can leave your head.
The review I offer lasts thirty minutes and it is free. You bring one process that repeats. We look at where the time goes. If there is no AI to build, I say so. I prefer a quick no to a project that looks busy and leaves the switchboard where it was.
The boss is for the things only the boss can decide. The rest, if it has already been said, can stop going through them. That is not giving up control. It is the opposite: control becomes a choice again, not a reflex every time something rings.