How to Find the Bottleneck in Your Business (Start With One Stage)
“It’s fine, I’ll just work on all of it.”
You’ve said it. Then you spend a month on the website, the proposal, the welcome emails, and the business feels the same as it did on day one.
One stage sets the pace for everything else. That stage is your bottleneck, the single spot that slows the whole line. Fix anything else and the extra work stacks up behind it. So the first job is to find the bottleneck in your business. Just one.
Find the bottleneck in your business with this table
Look for the place where work piles up, where sales fall furthest below your target, or where you and your team have no room left. Then find yourself in the table.
| What it looks like | Where it’s jammed | Where I’d look |
|---|---|---|
| Inquiries have gone quiet. Sales are steady. | Getting found | Where your leads come from, your message, your offer |
| Plenty of inquiries. Hardly anyone buys. | Getting the yes | How fast you reply, your sales calls, proposals, pricing |
| Everyone said yes. Nobody has started. | Getting started | The handoff after the sale, the first steps, scheduling |
| Work keeps stacking up and your team is out of room. | Out of room | How full each week is, scheduling, hiring, redo work |
| Work goes out the door and comes back with complaints. | Getting it right | Delivery steps, training, quality checks |
| The work is done. The invoice isn’t. | Closing the loop | Close-out steps, invoicing, sign-off |
| Clients leave happy and never come back or refer anyone. | Back again, with friends | Check-ins, reviews, how and when you ask for a referral |
| Revenue is up. Cash is tight. | Cash in the door | Unpaid invoices, payment terms, how fast you bill |
Pick one stage. If you have a team and it can’t agree, start with the one that has been behind the longest. If it’s just you, the same rule works.
Now try to talk yourself out of it
A stage can look broken when the stage before it is starving it. So argue with your pick for a minute.
Check whether it’s getting enough work from the stage before it. If it isn’t, the problem lives upstream. If it’s failing with the work it does get, the problem lives here. Throw out any month that a holiday, a huge job, or a system outage bent out of shape. Move your pick if the answers point somewhere else. That’s how you find the bottleneck in your business and not just the loudest stage.
Where else the jam can hide
Two stages can look jammed at once. Work can also stall in the gaps between stages, right where one person hands off to the next. And if every row in the table feels a little true, the jam may be you.
In my experience, the stage that jams is the one where a decision is still waiting on you. That’s a Hostage File.
When that stage moves, the jam will show up somewhere else. That’s progress. It also gets you a Thursday back, and you’ll know exactly why.
If you want to see where else your business may be leaking, use the Profit Leak Scorecard.
It’s Handled™ | Operational architecture for founders who built the business and are ready to stop being the infrastructure.
I’m Rachel Lavern, a founder and Operational Architect. I’ve spent 22 years inside the operations of Fortune 500 companies, and now I help founders step out of the middle of their own businesses. Here’s my story.
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