Bottleneck Breakthrough Audiobook - Chapter 13 - Bottleneck Breakthrough Plan | Ep 34

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Chapter 13 Bottleneck Breakthrough Plan the reactionary owner earns a salary while the proactive owner builds assets. Said by yours truly. Congratulations. You've invested more effort than many of your peers to get this point in the book.

I hope you found useful insights and strategies throughout that will make you a better business owner and help you unlock new growth by finding and fixing your bottlenecks. My goal with this chapter is to reward you for the hard work of getting here.

Now we'll build on what you learned in the previous chapters, pulling together all of your notes from the action steps so you can develop your Bottleneck Breakthrough plan to implement immediately. If you want a shortcut, go to BBG LI Assessment and take the Bottleneck Breakthrough Assessment.

Before we dig into how to develop your implementation plan, remember that there's no perfect way to do this. It also means there's no wrong way to go about it either.

Imperfect action is always better than perfectly planned inaction, so don't worry about getting it right or missing something that might be critical down the road. The results will produce compound returns as you continue to execute regardless of which order you implement them in.

Only good things will come from moving forward Quick Wins When I worked for Chet Holmes, the sales and marketing overhaul he prescribed for our clients was a massive undertaking. The strategy was always brilliant, upgrading their messaging and closing process in a big way, but it took forever to implement.

Six months was the average timeline, and all but the largest and most committed clients would grow weary.

It was a dilemma because we knew it would work, but we couldn't give the clients the shot of willpower to keep them fully engaged long enough to let it achieve its full potential. While I was at lunch with Jay Abraham during this time, I asked him about this endurance challenge since he had worked closely with Chet for years.

Jay gave me an insight that has been the backbone of my consulting ever since, and it's a big reason I was able to develop the Bottleneck Breakthrough method and deliver results so effectively. Jay told me that as a consultant, he learned early on that getting quick wins for clients is the most important goal.

Once an owner sees improvement in any part of their business, their motivation, endurance, and willpower is instantly boosted. This also creates an environment in which the owner can handle the larger changes that will be necessary later.

It's also a win win situation since the business owner gets a rapid return on their investment in the consultant and his plan. As you develop your plan, my recommendation is to start with something small that will provide a quick win for you.

Consider stringing together a few small bottleneck breakthroughs to build momentum and confidence in the process before tackling a big bottleneck as business owners, many of us suffer from wild optimism, which is generally a great trait, but it can lead to disappointment if things don't unfold as expected. That's the last thing I want to happen for you.

Here are some quick wins that you can Start with Weekly implementation meetings Go back to Chapter eight and start having weekly meetings, one on one with each of your direct reports. If you have managers meet with them and have them meet with the people who report directly to them.

Every client that has ever done this has raved about all the improvements that come from it. It seems like such a trivial activity, but it makes a huge difference. Re Read Chapter eight if you need convincing to get started with it.

Document Another simple action that will get you a quick win is to have every employee document one key activity they are responsible for.

When you review the checklist they create from it, I guarantee you'll see things that are unnecessary or missing items that they should have been doing all along. Documenting what is already being done in your business supports your efforts to assess where big bottlenecks might exist later on too.

Next, draw your funnel. This is another step that is foundational for uncovering bottlenecks.

Generating leads and closing them is the most important function in your business, so inspecting it always pays off. Go back to chapter four to walk through drawing your funnel if you need help with it.

Frustration Fix Framework Other than the quick wins suggested above, there are two proven paths to finding and fixing bottlenecks in your business. My favorite place to start is with the Frustration fix framework.

At its core, it trusts that your intuition is accurate in identifying what needs to happen in your business. When bottlenecks are blocking that from happening, the result is frustration.

Over time, unresolved frustration turns to apathy, which is a fatal problem if not fixed at the surface level. Reducing your frustration on a day to day basis increases your odds of being happy, pleasant and fun to work with.

It also makes you a better family member once you leave the office below the surface, eliminating your frustration removes the mental block.

When you're in that state, your ability to be strategic, to generate innovative solutions and maintain a clear vision for the future are all improved. When you eliminate frustration at the deepest level, your attitude acts like a magnet to everything around you.

Stay in a frustrated state and you'll attract more frustration and more people that feed off that frustration. Removing it will gain you peace of mind and you'll start attracting people that feed off that inner peace. This in turn will produce better outcomes.

The first step to finding bottlenecks from this approach is to simply identify all the places you are frustrated in your business. Be specific. Don't just say broad generalities like we aren't making as much money as we should. Whatever comes to mind.

I recommend going through the five Whys process that was developed by Toyota. It helps you get to the root cause by asking why to your initial answers which lead you down to the bottleneck or root cause that needs to be fixed.

Here's how that could work with the previous example. What are you frustrated about right now? Well, we aren't making as much money as we should. Why?

We've been getting lousy leads the past six months and they're not converting. Why? We haven't changed our offer at trade shows after competitor A came out with their new solution. Why?

Well, Stephanie handled that but decided to take more time off after maternity leave and we haven't spent any time trying to fill her spot. Why? She's the best marketing director and my partners and I just don't want to replace her and then not have her come back.

This example took four whys to get to the root cause and uncover the bottleneck of finding a new marketing director.

The advice I would give this client is that they don't need to hire a full time employee to fill this role, leaving them with flexibility to respond if and when Stephanie is ready to come back.

They could tackle the trade show updates themselves or hire a freelancer or consultant or agency that can provide strategic direction on how to update their trade show offer. Spend 15 minutes right now and do a brain dump of all your frustrations or sources of apathy.

Pick the biggest one and go through the five Whys process to get to the root cause and uncover the bottleneck you need to fix. You can revisit this process by asking yourself what frustrated me today?

Anything that shows up on the list a few times in a week is a prime target to tackle whenever you're ready for a new bottleneck.

Breakthrough Bottleneck Matrix I have consulted with companies across the spectrum in revenue and business models over the years and have observed patterns in the types of bottlenecks that exist at various revenue plateaus.

Clients have found these patterns very useful to see that they are not unique in the challenges they face at each plateau as well as what they might face as they continue growing.

The bottleneck matrix is on page 209 in the printed book and here are the plateaus, common bottlenecks, and solution for each one at $500,000 in revenue. The common bottleneck is idle or confused staff or freelancers.

The solution is to define key responsibilities and assign them the $1 million plateau often has the common bottleneck of the founder beyond capacity to manage everything. The solution is to develop an operations manager. The $2 million plateau.

The common bottleneck is not enough large prospects and or too many small prospects. The solution is to expand or build traffic pillars for larger prospects. $5 million there's two of them.

The first is often quality control, so you need comprehensive project management. The second is that the founder is holding back sales or marketing. The solution is to add functional management, sales, marketing and finance.

$10 million. There's two common ones there as well. The first is losing proposals or missing opportunities. The solution is to develop niche specialization teams.

The second one is that the sales and marketing team are overwhelmed. The solution is to add sales and marketing support roles that haven't existed before now at any stage.

There are three really common bottlenecks that I see over and over. The first are flaky staff. The the solution is weekly one on one management meetings. The second is sales consuming too much time.

The solution is to qualify better and or sooner. Finally, a lack of talented staff is the most common bottleneck in so many companies.

The solution is to create recruiting and onboarding systems so you can use the Bottleneck Matrix as a reference anytime you want to proactively pursue finding and fixing bottlenecks.

You might not believe this right now, but after you go through the Frustration Fix framework enough times, you won't have many frustrations left to point you towards bottlenecks. And if you want a shortcut, go to BBG LI Assessment and take the Bottleneck Breakthrough assessment.

Your answers will go through the Bottleneck matrix and generate a report with predicted bottlenecks as well as recommendations on how to remove them.

It is continually being updated as more businesses get results from using it, so my hope is that it will become a useful tool for you anytime you need clarity on what to tackle next to unlock more growth. Define the Bottleneck Once you've identified a bottleneck, I recommend adding some detail and context to it as you develop your solution for it.

This doesn't have to be a lengthy or formal process since you're not submitting it for grant approval or the Nobel Prize. Add whatever level of detail helps you see the significance of it, as well as enough to get your team on board with the need for removing it.

Here are some questions to help you better define it. First, what is this preventing or limiting? Is it money, time, sanity, and so on? Second, what other benefits would come from improving this?

Is IT system, financial and tangible? What is this costing us? Both hard and opportunity cost are important to list here. Fourth, who is this affecting the most? Staff? Family? Vendors?

Clients? Finally, this is a problem because why fill in the blank and see what comes up to be dealt with?

Identify Breakthroughs Many bottlenecks can be solved a number of different ways. The most common bottleneck for which there are multiple solutions is lead generation.

The sources of qualified leads for many businesses today are seemingly endless, adding complexity to building a traffic pillar right from the start. Don't worry about uncovering the perfect solution to your bottlenecks at this stage.

In the next stage, we'll prioritize them to show which solution is the best one for your situation. Now what does matter right now is to start listing possible solutions and then defining them in as much detail as possible.

I recommend doing this in a brainstorming session with your partners or key staff members.

It can also be useful to do this with someone outside your company since they bring a fresh perspective and aren't factoring in emotional or historical challenges that every company has. Feel free to list as many bottlenecks as you find since the next stage will help you sort through all of them.

You can also keep it simple and start with only one bottleneck to solve for now. To help bring this to life, I'll walk you through a client example that we will also prioritize below.

When Ben at the Mountain Training School came to me in August 2014, he thought his biggest bottleneck was not having documentation for his staff to follow.

His frustration arose from having to tell his staff repeatedly how to complete various tasks, from coordinating course schedules with each student to the logistics of getting all the gear to a course location in Alaska, Patagonia, Chile or Spain.

While documentation seemed like a logical place to start, I still took him through the Bottleneck Breakthrough assessment to see what else might exist that was more important to tackle.

Since the documentation covered his fulfillment, I asked him to take me through his funnel to see if anything stood out in generating or closing leads. He had built a very successful lead generation campaign in Google AdWords.

Having been trained by the godfather of pay per click advertising, Perry Marshall, Plenty of qualified leads are coming in every day and at a profitable average cost of $29.85.

Having helped Keith Krantz, the author of the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, build some of his Facebook training programs, I wondered if testing Facebook advertising could deliver the same quality at a lower cost per lead. Going through Ben's closing process, I observed that it was thorough and achieved a profitable close rate.

When I inspected the specific steps, I noticed that a lot of one on one time was spent answering questions, the majority of which were similar.

I asked if he had thought about creating a Frequently Asked Questions video series or webinar that he could give to prospects before they applied to the school, and while it had crossed his mind, he felt it was an overwhelming task.

Another idea I offered to reduce the time spent on interviews was to add a more comprehensive paid application, just like high quality universities require. This idea seemed less intimidating to Ben, so he put it on the list.

From this session we had identified two bottlenecks, the lack of documentation and the time spent on prospect calls. We also had a possible bottleneck with a higher than necessary lead cost if Facebook proved to be a worthwhile alternative.

The solutions for each bottleneck were pretty clear, so we progressed to prioritizing them following the next stage in the process.

Prioritizing now that you've identified some bottlenecks along with possible solutions for them, you should prioritize them and then start with the one that will generate the biggest bang for your buck.

In addition to the quick wins wisdom Jay Abraham gave me, he also gifted me what I've coined as the profit priorities process, which helps clarify which bottlenecks to pursue first and which ones to get to later on or not at all. The profit priorities process involves estimating the factors involved in pursuing each bottleneck fix.

Adding up the values of each factor gives each bottleneck its own priority score. A higher score means it's a higher priority. Use these five questions to evaluate each bottleneck solution.

I've provided a client example at the end so you can see how it comes together. The first factor is time to implement. How quickly can we implement this? The faster you can get this done, the better. Which equals a higher score?

A long timeline equals 1 while a short timeline equals 10. Next is the effort to implement. How easy will this be to complete?

This factor is largely underestimated and often comes with an opportunity cost since you could be completing something else. If there is a high likelihood of you or your staff suffering burnout, then the score would be close to 1/3. Is the cost to implement.

How low can we start the budget to see if this will work? This is an inverted scale since zero capital would be a high score while significant capital would be a low score.

I always recommend fixing bottlenecks with cash on hand, even when the likelihood of success factor Number five coming up is high.

Since adding debt for a failed solution is like rubbing salt in the wound, your cost scale is going to be completely subjective based on your cash position, risk tolerance and current profitability to replenish it if it doesn't pay off. 4th profit potential what is the profit upside based on the hard cost to implement this solution?

Think of the company wide effects this solution will have on your revenue and profit over the next year. Then compare it to the cost of fixing it. Finally, the fifth factor is the likelihood of success.

What are the odds we will achieve the expected outcome? Your track record of successfully implementing new efforts will give you a sober perspective when you apply a value.

Until you have that to count on, I suggest cutting your estimate of success in half since we're all too optimistic about new things working out.

If you end up with a solution that has a very low chance of success, then I suggest figuring out how to break it out into milestones that must show progress before going further. There's nothing worse than spending a ton of time and money on something only to have it fail.

As you can see, there's a lot of subjectivity to this prioritization process, but that's okay since it's based on your deep understanding of your company, staff and market. Feel free to massage the values for each question, especially when comparing across multiple opportunities.

A variation that might help is to use a negative to positive scale like -5 to 5, which will cause some possible solutions to show a negative score helping you eliminate them. Or you could set a minimum cumulative threshold value of 20 points before a solution will be considered.

In the example from the Mountain Training School, we took the three possible solutions to the bottlenecks we identified and scored them as best we could. Surprisingly, streamlining the closing process by adding a comprehensive paid application appeared to be the best option.

To start with, it had a score of 37. The documentation solution ended up earning the lowest score and had the lowest profit potential, and we left it for later.

It had a cumulative score of 32 as referenced in Chapter 4, streamlining the closing process produced massive returns both in improving the closing rate of applicants and reducing the time spent on it.

We then tackled the lead cost bottleneck by testing Facebook advertising, and we were blown away when we saw leads coming in at around $6.40 each compared to the $29.85 each on AdWords.

The quality of leads ended up being the same as with AdWords and we were able to get the cost down in the $4.60 range within 60 days of starting, generating roughly 650% more leads with the same monthly ad budget. In the end, Ben was very happy we didn't start with the documentation bottleneck. His management frustration was relieved in the end.

By freeing up his time from streamlining the closing process, he had the time to properly train his staff on the tasks they were responsible for. Obviously, it's impossible to accurately predict potential outcomes of every bottleneck solution you analyze, so just use it as a reference tool.

Over time you'll see patterns in your assumptions, so this will become more effective as you use it. I've included a template spreadsheet in the Resources section on the website that you can copy to use as your own prioritization tool.

I use one for each client and continually add to it, so we always have a queue of bottlenecks to tackle or opportunities to pursue. We update their values as the situation evolves to make sure we're working on the biggest levers at all times.

Here's a link to access the template at BBG LI Profit Priorities Planning now that you have your most important bottleneck solution defined, the next step is to outline your implementation plan for it.

This is fundamental project management, so I always encourage a refresher on this topic, even for the most experienced managers building on what we covered in Chapter 11 on delegation to over define the task, provide a deadline, spell out the scope, and grant authority. A few other pieces are needed to round out your implementation plan goal. What is the outcome you want to achieve by breaking through this bottleneck?

Add specific metrics such as reduce time to close by 20% or improve our win rate by at least 50%. I like to include a success scale since all improvement is good even if you don't hit the initial goal that might look like anything above 30%.

Improvement is a win and over 50% is ideal. Feedback loop solving bottlenecks can be like any other new effort with a high chance of missing the mark completely on your first attempt.

Having a review process in place and knowing that you'll have to adjust as you go to find the perfect solution is important. You should plan to make three attempts at solving the bottleneck before going back to the drawing board.

This will provide enough room to get some traction.

A client example started with attempting to build relationships with undergraduate departments at universities across the US in order to generate interest in the client's supplemental study program.

We started by sponsoring a department event which was well received but was a nightmare of complexity to coordinate, especially if we hoped to do it in any significant volume. We quickly adjusted our approach. Instead, we offered to make a donation to their school.

If students were interested in the client's mission of equipping future leaders, this generated an even stronger response and was significantly easier to coordinate.

If you're delegating the responsibility of fixing the bottleneck, then add a review of the progress in your weekly meeting with the responsible staffer. If it's a big enough bottleneck, you will probably need to provide guidance more than once a week.

Budget the best investors always set a limit on their losses, which triggers an alert when to sell.

It's a great practice to follow as a business owner because we can get trapped feeling committed to the effort after investing a significant chunk of change, or only to have it drag on forever without any return.

Poker players call this being pot committed since they feel they have to keep betting to see how the cards play out after they have put so much into the pot even though they didn't get the cards they needed to improve their odds. Define a rough budget and make it contingent on seeing real progress.

You can always increase the budget as results come in, but you want to be able to reduce your risk of lost capital if it doesn't work out for whatever reason. Task List since every bottleneck you fix will require a different set of tasks, you can't make a task list template to follow every time.

I'm pretty comfortable with the uncertainty in figuring things out on the fly, so I typically jot down the first few tasks that need to be done and then spell out more as we go.

If you or the person responsible for handling implementation on this needs more certainty, then you can define as many tasks as you need in order to be comfortable with getting started. Just don't get stuck trying to perfect your planning and paralyze yourself from ever taking action.

Action Steps this chapter is full of action steps, so here is the process I recommend to get maximum results. First, start with the Frustration Fix framework and list everything you're frustrated about in the business right now.

Use the bottleneck matrix on page 209 for possible bottlenecks too. Second, use the 5Whys process from page 207 to get to the root cause of each one. Third, brainstorm possible solutions for each root cause.

There may be more than one way to solve it, so include each one you come up with. The next step will help you pick the right one. Fourth, take each possible solution through the Profit Priorities process.

Download the template spreadsheet at BBG LI Profit Priorities.

Fifth, pick the highest scoring bottleneck solution to start with, or the quickest to produce a result and outline the implementation plan from page 218. Delegate the tasks and monitor results in your weekly review meetings.

Sixth, rinse and repeat until you're making as much money and taking as much time off as you'd ever dreamed of. Then message me at resultsottleneckbreakthrough.com to tell me how the Bottleneck breakthrough method worked for you.

It is so fulfilling when someone gets results from.