Core question
Why does everything in my company bottleneck on me?
Short answer
Because at some point you stopped leading the system and became the system. Every workflow passes through you, every decision waits on your attention, and every process lives in your head because nowhere else holds it. It works until it does not.
This happens to nearly every senior executive who is good at their job, and it is not a failure of delegation. It is what accumulates when someone is the only person who holds the full picture.
The business grows. The demands compound. And the executive who was already the ceiling on how fast things can move becomes the floor as well, because nothing can proceed without them.
The pattern is easy to recognize once it is named. You are the integration layer between departments that do not talk to each other. You are the memory of why decisions were made. You are the routing system for anything that does not fit an existing process. None of that is in your job description, and all of it is real work you are doing without being recognized for it.
Most senior executives are running two jobs. Most only get paid for one.
The reframe worth sitting with is this: you should not be the system. You should have one.