The Bottleneck Isn’t What You Think It Is
How we turned a cost into a profit center
Most business owners can’t name their biggest bottleneck. They can name the ten things driving them crazy this week. They can list every fire burning on their desk. They can tell you exactly which team member frustrated them yesterday.
But the actual bottleneck? The one thing that, if fixed, would unlock the next stage of growth? That one usually hides.
And the reason it hides is because we stop asking questions too early.
The Problem With Your First Answer
You take time to sit down to figure out why growth has stalled. You identify a problem. You come up with a solution. You throw resources at the solution. And six months later you’re stuck in the exact same place, just a little more tired and a little more confused about why the fix didn’t work.
The reason is almost always the same. You solved the symptom, not the root.
At Incite, we hit a wall years back. Growth had slowed. Not catastrophically. Just enough to be annoying. We were doing everything we had always done to keep the machine moving, and the machine wasn’t moving at the same pace anymore.
My first instinct was the same one every business owner has. Work harder. Push the team. Run more marketing. Put more meat on the grill.
None of it worked.
The Tool That Changed the Conversation
What finally broke the log jam wasn’t more effort. It was a different kind of question. A simple exercise you’ve probably heard of but, if you’re like me, probably haven’t taken time to actually sit down to do this.
It’s called the Five Whys.
You start with one question. What is the top bottleneck to growth right now?
Then you ask why. You write down the answer. Then you ask why again. And again. And again. Five times.
Most people get two whys deep and stop because the answer feels obvious. That’s exactly when you need to keep going. The obvious answer is almost never the real answer. It’s the most recent thing that went wrong on top of a much older structural issue that nobody wanted to look at.
A Real Example From Our Business
Let me show you what this looked like for us in real life.
Why aren’t we hiring enough new accountants? Because we don’t have enough qualified candidates in the pipeline.
Okay, why don’t we have enough in the pipeline? Because we need more lead and candidate flow coming in.
Why don’t we have enough candidate flow? Because we don’t have a recruiter working on it full time.
Three whys in, and already the conversation was different from what I had been telling myself. I had been blaming the market. The industry. The “talent shortage.” All of which are real. None of which I can do anything about.
But a missing recruiter? That I can do something about.
Most people would have stopped right there. Hire a recruiter. Problem solved. Next.
We didn’t stop there. And what we found in the next two whys changed the entire direction of the business.
Why I’m Paying The Rest of This Article
I’m moving a portion of this article behind the paywall, and I want to be straight with you about why.
Everything I’m about to share past this line is the part I’ve never published anywhere else. It’s not in the book. It’s not in the podcast. It’s the actual decision-making process that led to us launching a second company, what the remaining two whys revealed that nobody saw coming, and the exact sequence I walk my leadership team through every quarter to find the bottleneck nobody’s naming out loud.
If you’re serious about figuring out what’s actually holding your business back, this is the part you want. Upgrade to paid and keep reading. The rest of the article is below.
If you’re not ready yet, no hard feelings. Come back when the question “what’s actually stopping my growth?” starts keeping you up at night. You’ll know when.
Take breaks. Work better.
