A few weeks ago, I talked about bottlenecks and the Theory of Constraints – the idea that there’s usually one thing holding your whole business back, and almost everything else is just noise until you fix it. And I shared how, for LBA, the primary constraint to our growth over the past few months has been coaching capacity. So we fixed it. Four new coaches onboarded, more support, more scalability – sorted.
Except, of course, it’s not sorted because the whole idea of thinking in constraints and bottlenecks is that there is always a constraint or bottleneck somewhere in your business. It might vary in size and impact but there is always one and ours has moved onto systems.
When it’s just you (or a small team who all share the same instinctive understanding of how things work), you can get away with a lot even if processes live in people’s heads, decisions get made on instinct because everyone knows the unwritten rules.
But the moment you start growing and bringing in new people, adding new moving parts, adding new products – all of that invisible glue starts to create friction. Suddenly, the constraint isn’t how much capacity you have but rather whether the business can actually run in a consistent, repeatable way as you add more people into the working parts of it.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because it’s a pattern I’ve seen across all kinds of businesses at different stages, including our own. And the thing is, it can seem quite dull and boring. Standing Operating Procedures (SOPs) and documented processes and handoff guides are not the stuff that gets you out of bed in the morning. But without them, you end up being the system by default, which means you become the bottleneck.
And I’ve noticed that when people hear “build better systems” they tend to imagine something quite grand like a perfectly architected Notion space or some elaborate project management setup. But that’s not really what I mean, and in my experience that kind of elaborate system is often just another form of productive procrastination.
The systems that actually matter are usually much simpler than that, but much more important. They’re things like a clear written record of how a specific process works, a consistent decision-making framework, a simple checklist that stops things falling through the cracks when you’re busy. And none of that is glamorous but the effect of having those things in place versus not having them is enormous, especially when you’re growing, and especially when you’re trying to maintain quality at scale.
The test I’ve started using is this: if I personally disappeared for two weeks, which parts of the business would continue running cleanly, and which parts would break? Whatever’s in the second category is where your systems work needs to happen. Not because you’re planning to disappear, but because anything that can only run well when you’re personally supervising it isn’t really a system – it’s just you, doing the thing.
We actually stress-tested this over the past few weeks when I’ve been away and travelling across multiple timezones making it basically impossible for anyone to talk to me consistently but fortunately everything’s held up – one of our new coaches even stepped in to deliver my usual weekly workshop for LBA that I felt was even better than some of my own sessions 😅.
Does this mean our systems are completely dialled in? No, because systems are always evolving but it does give us more clarity over which parts of that particular bottleneck still need addressing before we move on to the next constraint.
Anyway, I hope this has been another useful reminder about systems and constraints – I know I’ve used this email to repeat this message over the last few weeks but it’s only because it’s so important when you’re just starting out, or even if your business is up and running, to keep an eye on the one thing holding you back and avoiding those exciting shiny objects which ultimately slow you down or choosing to ignore the more mundane documentation which will pay off in the long term.
Have a great weekend and we’ll move away from constraints next week 😉