The connective tissue problem: why coordination always lands on the founder
What is the connective tissue problem?
It's the coordination work that sits between roles rather than inside any one of them: the follow-up that makes sure a contractor's output actually reaches the person waiting on it, the context that has to travel from a sales call to a delivery team, the decision that needs input from three people who don't talk to each other directly. No job description owns it, so by default, it lands on whoever is already holding the most context. In most small and mid-sized businesses, that's the founder.
Why hiring more roles doesn't fix it
The instinct when this gets painful is to hire another role: an EA, a project manager, an ops person. Each of those helps with a slice of the problem. An EA manages the calendar. A PM runs delivery against a plan. An ops hire owns a function, usually one. None of them are chartered to hold the connective tissue between all the pieces, because that was never anyone's job to begin with. The founder hires three good people and is still the one translating between them.
What the coordination actually requires
Closing this gap takes someone who sits above any single function and is responsible for the handoffs themselves, not just the work inside each handoff. That means visibility into what's happening across the business, not just one corner of it, and the standing authority to flag when something is about to fall through a seam. It's closer to a chief of staff function than a project manager function, even though the two get confused constantly.
Why this shows up later than people expect
Founders usually don't notice the connective tissue problem until the business has already outgrown the point where it would have been cheap to fix. Early on, the founder is close enough to everything that holding it together, while exhausting, is at least possible. The gap becomes visible once there's enough happening that no single person can track it from memory anymore, and by then the cost of the founder still doing it is measured in the things that aren't getting their attention instead.
If this is the shape of what's eating your week, the strategy session scopes exactly where the coordination is breaking and what it actually takes to close it.