It’s been a busy one internally as we’ve been onboarding three new coaches for Lifestyle Business Academy (LBA) as we look to scale the product further over the next few months, and the reason for hiring those coaches is actually what I wanted to write about today.
And that’s the idea of bottlenecks, or more specifically, the idea that there’s usually one bottleneck in a business at any given moment. Not ten. Not twenty. One. And until you identify it and deal with it, almost everything else is basically a distraction.
Now, historically, we’ve been pretty bad at identifying these and addressing things in order 😅 If I’m being honest, we’ve had long stretches where we’d have a bunch of important things we could’ve improved – marketing and onboarding and copy and dashboards and pricing tests and a new funnel idea and “better systems” and “better content” and all the other stuff that feels like “being a serious business person” – and we’d convince ourselves we were being strategic by doing a little bit of everything.
But what we were really doing (and I’m very much including myself in this) was avoiding the one thing that was actually holding the whole business back, because the bottleneck is rarely glamorous, it’s rarely fun, and it’s almost never the thing you can tinker with for 45 minutes and then feel smugly productive about. There are occasions where that is the case which increases that satisfaction further but if anything, it’s usually the thing that forces you to make an annoying decision you’ve been putting off.
And when you don’t make that decision, what happens? You end up spending your time on the important-but-not-urgent stuff: the Notion tidy up, the colour-coding, the “I’ll just tweak the copy a bit more”, the new shiny object, the minor optimisation that makes you feel like you’re moving forward without actually moving the needle. All useful. None of it the real constraint.
There’s a framework in operations called the Theory of Constraints, which is a fancy way of saying that a system can only grow as fast as its constraint, so the right question isn’t “what can we improve?” but “what is the single thing that, if we fixed it, would make everything else move faster?” And the other slightly annoying part is that once you fix that constraint, a new one pops up, and that becomes your job. Over and over again. Find the bottleneck, fix the bottleneck, repeat.
This whole idea really clicked for me years ago with my YouTube channel. Back in 2019 I genuinely thought the thing holding back growth was the usual suspects: “I need better ideas”, “I need more time”, “I need to be more consistent”, all of which sound reasonable and productive, and all of which are very easy to tell yourself when you don’t want to look at the actual bottleneck.
Then I had a session with a business coach who made me literally draw out the production pipeline on a piece of paper – idea → script → film → edit → thumbnail → upload → publish – and when we looked at the whole chain it was suddenly obvious that the bottleneck wasn’t ideas, and it wasn’t time, it was editing. Specifically, me editing. I was spending hours in Final Cut, which meant every single video had to route through me, which meant the entire pipeline could only run as fast as I could sit at my laptop and drag clips around on a timeline.
So the solution wasn’t “work harder”. The solution was to stop being the constraint. I outsourced editing, and almost overnight the whole system sped up: more output, more consistency, more momentum, and in hindsight a pretty big chunk of the growth in 2019 and 2020 came from that one decision.
Which brings me back to the new coaches. For the last few months, the bottleneck for LBA has been coaching capacity. We’ve got demand, we’ve got students who want support, we’ve got a product that we genuinely believe can help people build businesses they’re proud of, but the thing that capped our growth was how much high-quality coaching support we could actually deliver each week without the whole thing becoming chaotic.
So we did the least sexy thing imaginable: we hired. In fact, our goal was to hire 2 coaches in the first 90 days of 2026 but given that we knew that we’d need to hire more coaches within a month or two as we scaled, we increased capacity further to avoid this returning as a bottleneck within just a few weeks. Not because hiring is fun, and not because onboarding is exciting (if anything it’s slightly terrifying, because every new person you bring in forces you to confront all the weird little ways your team does things), but because that was the constraint. And I think it’s easy to forget this when you’re in the thick of it – sometimes growth isn’t about more hustle, or more ideas, or more “motivation”. Sometimes it’s just about removing the one piece that’s jamming the machine.
I see the opposite mistake a lot with early-stage founders too, and honestly I’ve made it myself in different seasons of life. People will obsess over content and sales call scripts and logo design and fancy funnels before they’ve even finalised the offer, which is basically like trying to decorate the house while you’re still pouring the foundations.
And then slightly later on, when things are working and you’ve got momentum, a different trap shows up: shiny objects. A new platform. A new product idea. A new “growth lever”. And suddenly your attention gets pulled away from the thing that’s actually holding the business back, because constraints are often boring, and shiny objects are… shiny.
Anyway, if you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, there’s a decent chance you’re trying to fix too many things at once. So here’s a prompt that might help: if you could only fix one thing in your business in the next 30 days, what would it be? And if you did fix that one thing, which other problems would magically get easier (or disappear entirely)? That’s probably your constraint.
And if you’re yet to start your business, that’s fine – the one constraint you have is your offer so the prompt for you is: what’s a problem you’ve already helped someone (/your business) with (even informally), and how could you turn that into a simple offer?
Talk soon,
Ali xx