Bottleneck Breakthrough Audiobook - Intro | Ep 21

Speaker A

00:00:01.600 - 00:02:20.500

Bottleneck Breakthrough how to find and fix your one Business Challenge to Unlock Sustainable Growth fast Written by Joshua Long Narrated by the Author Preface if you're anything like my clients, you're sitting on a gold mine waiting to be dug up. But the endless stream of books, seminars and new fads is so strong that your treasure is buried and hidden.

This book is the map you've been praying for. You can throw away every silver bullet gimmick you've accumulated.

Your business is stuck because you have bottlenecks clogging things up and you can break through them right now.

What you will learn from this book is how the problems keeping you up at night can easily be solved by pulling each of the six growth levers I give you.

Yes, even the problems that cause you to abandon your most important relationships and damage your body from stress, drinking or other attempts at self medicating. None of this is rocket science.

It's possible you might not learn anything new in this book, but if you follow the system I teach, your business and personal life will improve exponentially. I know this because I've done it for dozens of businesses of all sizes and industries every single time.

Without exception, my clients have experienced an improvement in their businesses by using the exact same framework I teach you in this book and I want to encourage you to actually read and implement the things you learn here.

You can go to www.bbg.liguide and enter your email to receive a completely customized action focused weekly email from me that adjusts to the pace you're going through this book. The last thing I want is for this book to collect dust on your bookshelf.

So I've created something I've never seen before with this advanced guided coaching email series to help you cut through the noise of the day to day and actually read about and implement the Bottleneck Breakthrough Method in your business.

And if meteoric growth and scale isn't your goal, everything in this book works just as well to streamline what you already have so you're making more profit from less effort. Most importantly, it'll help you reduce your stress by strengthening your business regardless of size.

And if at any time you'd like more help implementing the Bottleneck Breakthrough Method, just go to BBG LI Help and you can see the many ways I work with business owners just like you that might be a fit.

Now listen to the foreword by my past client and good friend Benjamin Gorelick to see how the Bottleneck Breakthrough Method transformed his business and life immediately.

Speaker B

00:02:22.580 - 00:08:34.500

You'd think the afternoon I spent shotgun in my lap, debating whether I should splatter my brains on the wall above my bed would represent the low point of my life. On the table in the next room was a stack of bills that would never get paid. As my business churned inexorably towards bankruptcy.

Downstairs, my employees went about their daily routine, oblivious to the man sobbing just above them. In many ways, however, that was the best day of my life. Because I chose life. I know now what I discovered then. Apparently, I'm not a quitter.

No matter how bad things get, I'll suffer through it. Because tomorrow's another day. And with that new day comes a bit of hope. No, the low point came a few years later. The business had been consolidated.

Financial balance had been restored. Staff had been trimmed. We had been profitable for about six quarters in a row at that point. And those dark days really were behind me.

Yet I would still wake up every morning knowing that today wasn't going to be better than the last. I'd work 14 hours, mostly putting out fires, go to sleep and repeat.

I was so overwhelmed with stuff to do, I could hardly think straight, much less take the time needed to actually solve the problems that plagued my business. There wasn't enough time in the day, and on those few days when there were enough hours, there wasn't enough energy.

By this point, my business had been around for eight years. In that time, I'd gone through nine managers. Oddly, they didn't want to spend 14 hours a day working on my business.

I'd spent countless thousands on marketing advice, webinars, mastermind groups, online chat groups, and the like from the gurus of the industry. None of them addressed the problem I had. I was caught in a terrible cycle.

I had grown the business three times, and each time it grew bigger than I could handle myself. I got buried. And then I contracted the business so I could get a handle on things again. It wasn't that I wasn't any good at my job.

I was quite capable of growing the business. I'd taken AdWords and Facebook advertising pretty quickly, and I had a steady stream of prospects and customers.

Even the suicide inducing version of things mentioned above would have been a really great position for us if only I'd been able to work 44 hours a day. Simply put, I kept hitting this barrier around a million dollars a year where I couldn't do everything myself. I'd hire someone to help out.

They'd burn out in about six months and I'd be left to clean up the mess they dropped into my lap on their way out the door. After eight years, it all felt hopeless. Sure, I was capable of suffering along for the ride, but what kind of life is that?

That was the low point of my life. And it was that depression that Josh Long stepped into with his Bottleneck Breakthrough Method.

Josh will probably spend the rest of this book telling you how easy the Bottleneck Breakthrough Method is to apply. It's not not because it's complicated or particularly onerous. It's pretty simple.

Analyzing six levers around which your business revolves and then making the small changes necessary to make a big difference. It really is a simple concept. No, the challenge is that the process requires introspection.

It requires a level of honesty with yourself that you might not be comfortable with. It requires that you accept your strengths and weaknesses and that you accept yourself for who you are instead of fighting yourself.

The goal is to fill in the gaps, either through systemization or hiring the right people. I'm sure it'll come as a surprise to you knowing a bit about things, that most of my businesses strengths and weaknesses involved me.

To solve my business's problems, I just had to solve the me problems, get out of my own way, and trust the process. The very first thing Josh did with the business was to help us better understand the strengths and weaknesses of everyone on staff, myself included.

From there, we moved most of the folks around to places where they'd actually succeed.

My new manager had two days previously been an intern I'd hired because her boyfriend was my previous manager and she needed something to do for the summer. She was in charge of landscaping the building. Seriously, her boyfriend, previously the manager, was moved to sales.

I fired myself from all the money stuff, from all the logistics, and from sales. I fired my wife altogether. In total, we moved 14 people from one place to another, about 2/3 of my staff.

Then we set about writing job descriptions for everyone so they all knew what success would look like. I invested my time ruthlessly in making myself redundant to the day to day tasks. As I came across something I needed to do to put out a fire.

I trained someone else to put out the fire and then they were put in charge of handling the problem. From that day forward, we tootled around with our payment schedules for customers, making them much more strict.

Since Josh showed me that I was such a pushover there, we made everything a little more expensive and then we cut the stuff that just didn't make money or caused a disproportionate amount of headaches. Really, none of it was complicated.

A few phone calls between Josh and me to apply the Bottleneck Breakthrough method, look at a few spreadsheets, and then make some changes here and there. In the end, I'd say we made six changes to the business over an 18 month period. That really moved things for us.

No one change required more than four hours of work to discover, identify and solve. The trick was identifying the problems the heart of it, and swallowing my pride or dispelling my preconceived notions of what ought to be done.

I'm eternally grateful for the system and organization that Bottleneck Breakthrough provided. Because it is objective, you can't really argue with what it says you should do. Equally, that objective system makes it easier to accept.

It doesn't matter how something feels to you. There's no personal judgment. No, you're a failure because you XYZ or didn't.

Abc it's just a series of hey, we did this test and the evidence says your business will be more efficient or stronger or better if you do this. Find the Bottleneck break through. Easy peasy.

It's been about three years since I started working with Josh and yeah, Bottleneck Breakthrough is still working. We've grown well past the million dollar ceiling we kept smacking against. We'll do just under 4 million this year.

My gardener intern turned manager is still the manager. I joked that she pretty much runs the place, but it's only half a joke.

I finally get to spend 80% of my time working on big picture stuff that makes the business better, stronger, and capable of growing for the future. It's still imperfect and so is the business, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was. The crippling anxiety is gone.

And even though I've flown 147,386 miles this year to lead the business, I'm more fulfilled than ever before.

Mostly, it feels great to be hopeful again, to be grateful, to be engaged and challenged, and to spend my 14 hours of work a day doing things I find meaningful. I love my job and the path my life has taken. A path that I wouldn't have found without Bottleneck breakthrough. Benjamin Gorelic 2019.