The World’s Best Bottle of Ginger Beer Had a Bottleneck. It Wasn’t the Bottle.

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The hard­est iden­ti­ty shift in busi­ness isn’t going from employ­ee to CEO. It’s going from hands-on CEO to strate­gic CEO.

Growth didn’t slow down at Bund­aberg. John did.

John McLean is CEO of Bund­aberg Brewed Drinks — the Aus­tralian fam­i­ly busi­ness behind a world famous gin­ger beer.

By the time the com­pa­ny was oper­at­ing in more than 60 coun­tries — with a mas­ter brew­ery under con­struc­tion, inter­na­tion­al sales clos­ing in on domes­tic, and a man­age­ment team that had nev­er been stronger — John McLean had become the sin­gle biggest con­straint on his company’s growth.

Not because he lacked abil­i­ty. Not because he wasn’t work­ing hard. But because the instincts that built the busi­ness — the hands-on involve­ment in every deci­sion, the per­son­al own­er­ship of every impor­tant lever — had stopped being an asset and start­ed being a ceiling.

“I was a hands-on CEO,” John reflects, ​“and I’m learn­ing to be a strate­gic CEO. It’s been a huge change, to step back from pulling every lever to empow­er­ing oth­ers to pull the lever, then talk­ing to them about how they can get even bet­ter outcomes.”

When Strengths Become Constraints

What John is describ­ing isn’t a per­son­al flaw. The hands-on CEO style is exact­ly what built Bund­aberg from a region­al fam­i­ly busi­ness into one of the most loved gin­ger beer brands in the world. Those instincts were real assets. They built real things.

In The 4 Forces of Growth, I describe what I call the Bat­tle of Two Bicy­cles. Every CEO has two giant jobs. The oper­a­tional bicy­cle runs the busi­ness today — prof­it, per­for­mance, pay­roll, cus­tomers, the dai­ly fires. The strate­gic bicy­cle grows the busi­ness for tomor­row — mar­ket intel­li­gence, new part­ner­ships, the vision, the future shape of the com­pa­ny. Both mat­ter. But you can only ride one bike at a time.

Most CEOs default to the oper­a­tional bike. It’s tan­gi­ble. It’s urgent. The dash­boards are right there, the team needs answers, the rewards are immediate.

John was no dif­fer­ent. He was an excep­tion­al oper­a­tional CEO — that was the bike he was great at. The trou­ble is that when a com­pa­ny is grow­ing into 60+ coun­tries with a mas­ter brew­ery under con­struc­tion, the strate­gic bike is the one that needs the most time. And nobody else can ride it for the CEO.

The behav­iours that get you to a cer­tain lev­el of suc­cess are gen­uine­ly excel­lent. Being in the details. Know­ing the busi­ness deeply. Mak­ing deci­sions quick­ly because you under­stand the nuance. They build real things.

But what got you here won’t get you there.

At a cer­tain size and com­plex­i­ty, the CEO who’s still pri­mar­i­ly on the oper­a­tional bike isn’t adding val­ue. They’re absorb­ing it. Every deci­sion that runs through them instead of the team is a deci­sion the team didn’t make, and didn’t grow from making.

The com­pa­ny can only grow as fast as the CEO is will­ing to climb onto the strate­gic bike.

What the Shift Actu­al­ly Requires

When John began work­ing with Lawrence & Co, one of the first things we worked on wasn’t strat­e­gy. It was identity.

Who is John McLean as a CEO? And more specif­i­cal­ly, who does he need to become?

The answer was clear, and uncom­fort­able: he need­ed to move from oper­a­tor to archi­tect. From the per­son who pulled the levers to the per­son who designed the sys­tem that made lever-pulling unnecessary.

That trans­for­ma­tion required sev­er­al things in parallel:

Build­ing the right man­age­ment bench. Some long-time team mem­bers fit the new struc­ture. Oth­ers didn’t. John reflects hon­est­ly: ​“Some­times peo­ple who’ve been with you a long time may not be the right peo­ple mov­ing for­ward. Tak­ing the time to real­ly think about who you’re employ­ing is cru­cial.” These were painful calls. They were also nec­es­sary ones.

Imple­ment­ing rig­or­ous plan­ning rhythms. Quar­ter­ly goals replaced ad hoc deci­sion-mak­ing. Every­one under­stood the fly­wheel — the core engine of how Bund­aberg grows. When peo­ple under­stand how the busi­ness works, they can make bet­ter deci­sions with­out run­ning every ques­tion up to the CEO.

Learn­ing to man­age through con­ver­sa­tion rather than con­trol. John describes it as talk­ing to peo­ple about how they can get even bet­ter out­comes. Not mak­ing the deci­sion for them, but devel­op­ing the peo­ple who make decisions.

And mak­ing this shift is gen­uine­ly dif­fi­cult. Let­ting go of the things you’re great at — the very things that built the com­pa­ny — can feel like los­ing your edge before you’ve found a new one. Every CEO who’s been through it talks about how uncom­fort­able the mid­dle is.

The Pay­off

The trans­for­ma­tion is still in progress. That’s worth say­ing. These shifts don’t hap­pen in a quar­ter. They’re ongo­ing, iter­a­tive, and some­times frustrating.

But the results at Bund­aberg speak clear­ly. Rev­enue grew 61.9% between 2019 and 2025. EBIT­DA as a per­cent­age of net sales has exceed­ed 25%. The top-tier cus­tomer base doubled.

And per­haps most telling: the busi­ness now runs with­out John pulling every lever. The man­age­ment team makes many deci­sions inde­pen­dent­ly. John’s daugh­ter Bronte McLean, 27, now works at the com­pa­ny in sus­tain­abil­i­ty, observ­ing board meet­ings, learn­ing how the busi­ness oper­ates. The fourth gen­er­a­tion is prepar­ing for what comes next.

You don’t build that kind of suc­ces­sion readi­ness in a com­pa­ny where the CEO is still pulling every lever.

Where Have You Become the Bottleneck?

Take a hard look at last week.

How much of your time was on the oper­a­tional bike — solv­ing today’s prob­lems, jump­ing in to make sure things didn’t go side­ways, being the answer when some­one need­ed one? And how much was on the strate­gic bike — build­ing the rela­tion­ships, mak­ing the calls, and pro­tect­ing the focus that deter­mines where the com­pa­ny goes next?

If the answer makes you wince a lit­tle, you’re in good com­pa­ny. Most CEOs we work with find the oper­a­tional bike has been get­ting more of them than they real­ized. Not because they’re lazy or unfo­cused. The oppo­site. Because they care, and because there’s always one more thing only they can do.

Three places to start:

Name the lever some­one else should be pulling. One spe­cif­ic deci­sion. One spe­cif­ic call. Hand it over. Then talk to the per­son about how they can get even bet­ter outcomes.

Block strate­gic time first, not last. A morn­ing a week. A day a quar­ter. Cus­tomer vis­its that aren’t trou­bleshoot­ing. Strate­gic con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple you don’t get to often enough.

Tell your team where you’ve been the bot­tle­neck. Say­ing it out loud shifts the dynam­ic. Peo­ple stop wait­ing for you. You stop being the answer by default.

John McLean did ver­sions of all three. The shift is still in progress — it usu­al­ly is. But the com­pa­ny runs dif­fer­ent­ly now. And the fourth gen­er­a­tion is prepar­ing for what comes next.

That kind of com­pa­ny doesn’t hap­pen when the CEO is still pulling every lever.

Watch the full inter­view below or read more in our recent case study with Bund­aberg here.