Management by Control Point: How CEOs and founders can stay in control without micromanaging everywhere

If you’re the founder of a growing startup or the CEO of a mid-sized company, you’re juggling a thousand things. You want to stay in control without micromanaging every detail — but how?

Three years ago, I joined our family business as co-CEO. Before that, I spent three years at McKinsey. Here’s one technique I’ve found very helpful in my own work:

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Management by Control Point means to step in at critical process junctures to stay informed and remain in control.¹

How we use it

We’re a 30-person engineering office and B2B distributor of automation equipment, handling 30,000 orders per year. The process is standardized: quote request → offer → purchase order → delivery. But there’s a lot of volume and noise.

We use these control points:

• Monitoring incoming customer requests and routing them
• Authorizing all large offers before they are sent out
• Reviewing all large orders
• Reviewing delayed orders

These are process steps we as management handle ourselves. They’re time-intensive, but these steps give us insight into customer needs, our performance, and sources of error.

How others use Management by Control Point

Startup example

A friend founded a 250-person venture-capital-funded healthcare startup. He and his cofounder manually approve all outgoing payments every Friday. It’s time-consuming, but keeping costs under control is of central importance to a cash-strapped startup and it also gives them an excellent view on what’s happening in their company.

Corporate example

Ralph Dommermuth, founder of 1&1 (a major German ISP with 3,000 employees and 4 billion euros in revenues), still checks all outgoing marketing actions himself including all TV spots, newsletters, marketing banners, new websites. On the OMR podcast, he said that too often what was agreed before did not materialize and he wants to correct it.

There are many other examples: A club owner sitting at the entry to check who’s coming in, the head of a research institute who vets every research paper before it’s published or a military commander with final strike authority.

All use control points as a check that can’t be bypassed.

Management by Control Point: What it is not

This is not about adding (or removing) bottlenecks

At first I wanted to call this concept Management by Bottleneck, but I had to accept that that was too confusing. But just to state the obvious: bottlenecks (and forced control points) are usually bad. There’s a whole management theory about removing them.

But most companies already have natural checkpoints where many processes converge. Don’t create new control points, just pick one that’s already there.

This approach isn’t without cost: You can become a bottleneck in the bad sense — slowing things down or burning out. To avoid this, I recommend sharing your control point with someone you trust. Why? Because it gives you a second perspective, it’s never good if you’re the only one able to fulfill some central function and it’s nice to be able to switch off when you go on vacation.

This is not micromanagement

It’s demoralizing for your team if you’re a micromanager. Instead, this method is about oversight and information gathering at critical junctures. People will prefer working at a well-run company with clear oversight rather than a chaotic and ineffective one.

The general tradeoff is one of centralization vs. delegation. In an ideal world, top down strategy would cascade down through processes and culture, but in the real world, incentives are not always aligned.

For very small teams, this approach is overkill — you already do everything. But once your company grows past a certain point, Management by Control Point is one way to stay grounded and informed.

As the company matures, the focus shifts from execution to information-gathering. You move further from the operations — but you still need unfiltered information.

This is not a replacement for strategy

Every management approach has its time and place. So there’s a time and place for creating a strategy, vision, plan or for a top-down analysis. For reading your company’s balance sheet, talking to outsiders and so on.

But you should spend even more time in your operations – and for this use this approach.

How to pick your control point

Not every control point is useful. Here’s what to look for:

• Capability fit: Pick a process where your skills or judgment make a difference.

• Comprehensiveness: Choose a step that intersects with many processes, otherwise, you will not get enough information from it.

• Signal quality: Look for places with honest, hard-to-polish data. Don’t stare at irrelevant information and take the data unfiltered, not mediated by someone.

These are the most important, but you could also add Strategic relevance: Ideally, the process should be important — but a lot can also be learned from less important but information-rich process steps. (Think of us handling random customer emails.)

The most important objective is for you to gain the most information. What you then do with it is for you to decide.

Early vs. late control points

Ideally you would pick an early control point, identify issues before they become problems or before a lot of money on some task. But information at this stage tends to be more unstructured. Think of a venture-capital fund making fast funding decisions or of the Apple CEO Tim Cook reviewing customer emails every morning.

But many of the most vivid real-life examples are those where the control point is located late in the process chain. At this point, a lot of processes are wrapping up and come together. Examples are my friend authorizing outgoing payments or 1&1 CEO Ralph Dommermuth checking every marketing campaign.

There’s something magical about checking at the last possible point, as there is no place to hide then. Think of a restaurant chef checking every plate before it heads to the table.

If you can you might even want one control point early in the chain, and one late.

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In any business, it’s easy to get distracted, so your attention is one of the most valuable things you have

Start by picking 1–2 control points where your attention brings the most leverage. Then watch those points, own them — and do the work. Every day.