The first thing I check in any business (you can check it yourself right now)
The first thing I ask every business owner I talk to is "which part of your business slows down your growth the most?" I ask this before anything else because over-engineering anything else changes almost nothing, and speeding up this one piece can move everything else exponentially.
I have spent 20 years in infrastructure and automation, at the Department of Defense, a global pharma company, a mid-sized software company and my own solo-founder companies. The story was obvious at every scale: things cannot grow faster than your biggest bottleneck allows.
In a business it can sit anywhere, down to a hand-off between two people. I like to start by looking directly down the line from where you get eyeballs on your business all the way to whether or not customers come back, because a constraint in your primary marketing-sales funnel costs you growth more directly than anything else in your business likely could. You can run that check on your own business right now.
By the way, if I'm wrong and you really have more customers than you can produce for: Congrats, you're the consultant now ;)
Find the constraint first
Walk your business stage by stage and put a rough number on each one. The worst number is where growth is getting stuck, and your time goes there until that stage stops being the worst.
The five stages
- Reach: how many people find you each week?
- Acquire: how many of them get answered and booked?
- Convert: how many quotes turn into paid work?
- Expand: how many customers come back or send someone?
- Capacity: can you handle the work you already have?
Rough numbers are fine. A guess you write down beats a feeling, and you can check a guess next month.
How to find your constraint
This is the full method, about an hour with a notepad, and every step is here.
Count who finds you
Reach. Count the people who reached out last week: calls in your phone's call log, calls and messages on your Google Business Profile, form emails, walk-ins. Say it comes to 40 a week. Write it down, along with how they found you if you know. Reviews and ads live in this stage too. Count website visits too. The number is usually already there and nobody has looked: your site builder's stats page (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy), Google Analytics if it's set up, or the website clicks on your Google Business Profile. Say 400 visited and 40 reached out. People are finding you, and something between the visit and the call is losing them, which is a different problem from not being found.
Count who gets booked
Acquire. Of those 40, how many got an answer and an appointment? Count the calls you missed, the ones you returned the next day, and the voicemails and texts nobody answered. If 40 reached out and 22 got booked, 22 is your number. If this stage comes out worst, I've written about what missed calls cost and getting texts answered while you're on a job.
Count the quotes you win
Convert. Count the estimates or consults you gave last month and how many turned into paid work. Say you quoted 20 jobs and 8 said yes. Then look at the 12. If most of them never heard from you again after the quote went out, that's where this stage leaks, and a quote that follows itself up is one fix.
Count who comes back
Expand. Go through last year's invoices and count the customers who came back, signed up for maintenance, or sent someone your way. Count the review requests you sent, too. Say 300 customers last year and 40 came back. The other 260 already know you and haven't heard from you since. If this is your worst stage, last year's invoices are where the fix starts.
Check your own room
Capacity. How many weeks out are you booked? How much work did you turn down last month, how many bids did you skip, and how many evenings went to paperwork? A friend of mine ran a successful landscaping company and lost apartment-complex and government bids to bigger firms, even when he was cheaper, because the paperwork made bidding not worth his time. His constraint was his own hours. I added this stage for local shops, where that happens a lot. Capacity only wins when the numbers show it, though. Booked two weeks out with half your quotes never followed up is still a Convert problem.
Pick the worst and break it down
Take the stage with the worst number and write its goal at the top of a page: book more of the people who call. Keep asking how until each line is something you could do this week. Call back within the hour. Text anyone you can't pick up. Follow up on every quote after three days. Many of those need no software, and some are a switch in a tool you already pay for. Do those first, and fix the way you already work before you invent something new. Then count the same number again in a month. If you never counted it, you can't tell whether a fix worked, so starting to count is often the first fix. When that stage is fixed, a different one becomes the constraint. That's normal, and it's the next thing to work on.
Go do this yourself. Every step is here. If you'd like a dedicated pair of eyes with 20 years of experience on the problem, that's what I do, and it's when to call.
The idea that a business moves only as fast as its constraint is from Eliyahu Goldratt's The Goal (opens another site). Reach, Acquire, Convert and Expand are Nick Saraev's four stages, from his video (opens another site); capacity is my addition for local shops.
