Brock Beiersdoerfer opened a donut shop, hoping to create something good for his community. A few years later, he was working 80-hour weeks, losing sleep over payroll, and wondering how long he could keep going.
Brock and his wife, Kimberly, opened The Heavenly Donut Company in 2013 with no restaurant experience. The shop ran 24 hours a day, and after a while, the business followed them everywhere. Brock worked roughly 80 hours a week, and Kimberly 60 to 70. Even when they were home, employees were still working, the phone could still ring, and there was always something at the store that could pull one of them back in.
Soon, Kimberly wondered why they were talking about the business all the time. The couple started setting boundaries at home, but the larger problem remained. The donut company depended on the two of them for almost everything, and Brock spent enough time living that way that it had begun to feel normal.
How much are you willing to write off as “just part of owning a business” before you question the way the business is being run?
A 35-hour shift was harder to explain away
One morning, Brock woke up at 2 a.m. and headed to the shop to help the kitchen prepare for a busy day. He stayed through closing, grabbed food with Kimberly, and called the cook scheduled for the next overnight shift because she had a history of being late.
After another exchange that Brock had already had too many times, he told the cook not to come in. He took Kimberly home, drove back to the shop, worked through the night, and stayed into the next afternoon after another employee called out. By the time he left, he had worked about 35 hours.
Brock remembers thinking, “This is not what I thought this was going to be.” His body was starting to crash whenever he stopped long enough to feel how tired he was.
There were many other warning signs. Brock stayed awake worrying about payroll and took out a loan to cover it. At one point, he canceled direct deposits and wrote checks instead because he knew employees probably wouldn’t cash them until Monday, buying the company a few extra days.
He remembers an employee showing up in handcuffs and another disappearing during an overnight shift, only to be found asleep in his car while the dough was rising.
A messy shelf gave Brock a different idea
One of Brock’s biggest changes in thinking didn’t come from payroll or a marathon shift. It came from a couple of badly organized shelves in the office.
Brock looked at the mess and immediately thought about how long it would take him to fix. An employee standing nearby told him Tuesday night would be slow and offered to take care of it instead.
When Brock came back the next morning, everything was organized exactly the way it needed to be. “I don’t have to do everything,” Brock remembers thinking.
At the time, he was sitting in six seats on the Accountability Chart. The shelves gave him proof that someone else could take a job off his plate and do it better than he would.
What else was Brock holding onto simply because he had never given anyone else the chance to handle it?
The first bigger change came with overnight management. One employee was already watching quality, making cooks redo donuts that weren’t up to standard, keeping things clean, and paying attention to details that Brock wasn’t there to see. Brock and Kimberly gave her more responsibility and a pay increase instead of hiring a completely new person.
Brock admits they underestimated what she would bring to the business. Better overnight oversight gave him more than time back. The work was getting done properly when he wasn’t there, and he started to see how assigning responsibility to the right person could eventually show up in the financial results, too.
That gave him enough confidence to start seeing the light. If someone else could run the overnight operation, someone else could manage the front. Each handoff helped Brock see that letting go didn’t have to mean lowering the standard.
Then his managers said they worked better without him
Brock and Kimberly had been in business for nearly four years when Brock’s mentor, Ken DeWitt, gave him Traction. Brock had been looking for answers for years, but this was the first time he felt the pieces came together in a way he could actually put to use.
The change still took time; Brock estimates it took another six years before he was mostly out of the store’s regular work. He wasn’t scheduled to serve customers, make donuts, or decorate them, but he still attended weekly meetings and spent roughly 10 hours a week involved with the company.
Then, during an annual meeting, one of his managers pointed to something she considered one of the company’s biggest wins that year: Brock hadn’t been there as much.
Without him in the room, the team wasn’t waiting for him before acting. Brock was somewhere else doing his own work, so they handled things and kept going.
He explained that part of the reason he still attended weekly meetings was to show the team that he cared about them. Their response was essentially, “We know that you love us. You don’t need to babysit us.”
So Brock stepped out of the weekly meetings, too, and moved to monthly conversations with the store manager.
That feedback could have stung. Brock had spent years being the person who filled whatever role was empty and covered whatever shift needed covering. Now his team was telling him that his absence sometimes made their work easier.
If your team always waits for you before acting, is that proof they need you or proof they’ve learned to wait?
Getting time back gave Brock another problem to solve
When Brock first got down to roughly 40 hours a week, he started looking for a hobby. For years, the business had taken so much of his time that having ordinary hours felt unfamiliar.
That was also when he started to think the company could eventually run without him. Kimberly had already stepped back into social media and marketing, the part of the business she enjoyed, and Brock began thinking about what he wanted his own role to look like.
They considered opening more locations, but Brock didn’t want to return to nights and 60-hour weeks while his kids were young. If another location ever opened, he wanted it built so it didn’t depend on him being there.
Brock already knew what the business had cost his family. For the first few years of his oldest son’s life, Brock was often gone before sunrise and home late. The business eventually gave him more freedom, but he couldn’t get those early mornings with his family back.
Getting out of the store wasn’t only about working fewer hours. Brock was still left to decide what he wanted to do with those hours back.
Some of that attention went toward other business owners.
Brock spent years talking with entrepreneurs who came through the donut shop, and their complaints sounded familiar. He knew the feeling of lying awake over payroll, stretching himself too far, and thinking that if he could solve one more problem, everything might finally settle down.
Once Traction started helping his own company, Brock bought cases of the book and handed copies to business owners he met. Over time, after the donut shop reached a point where it could operate without his daily presence, he called Ken and asked about becoming an EOS Implementer himself.
Brock doesn’t think the work is ever finished
There’s a part of Brock’s story that resists a tidy before-and-after ending.
He doesn’t believe you build the right structure once and leave it alone. The company changes. People develop. Roles that made sense at one stage stop fitting another.
Brock has seen how easily an owner can end up right back in seats they worked hard to leave because the organization grew, and nobody reconsidered the structure around it.
Brock’s story is not really about escaping the business. It is about noticing when the business has become too dependent on you.
Years ago, Brock could work a 35-hour shift and still wonder whether that was simply what ownership demanded. Today, his managers know they don’t have to wait for him, and Brock has work outside the shop that he finds deeply fulfilling.
The Heavenly Donut Company still matters to him. He just doesn’t need to prove it by being everywhere, all the time.
What has become so normal inside your company that you’ve stopped asking whether it should be normal at all?
To hear Brock go deeper on building The Heavenly Donut Company, learning to rely on the people around him, and getting himself almost entirely out of the store’s day-to-day work, listen to Episode 25 of the Hitting the Ceiling podcast.
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