What’s your problem?

If balls are getting dropped, to-do lists are piling up, and you find yourself avoiding crucial tasks, you have a problem.

If you find yourself irritable and resenting your customers, your employees, or maybe turning that blaming voice in on yourself, you have a problem.

But that problem may not be what you think! It probably isn’t that your customers are demanding too much of you. It probably isn’t that every person you have ever hired is incompetent. And it also probably isn’t that you are doomed to fail because of who you are as a person.

These feelings could actually be symptoms of a pretty simple problem, a problem you are probably already having in your business and one you will definitely run into as you continue to grow: business bottlenecks.

Bottlenecking is something that is talked about in Big Business and often seems like it wouldn’t be an issue for a business with a handful of employees, let alone a single-person business! But a bottleneck is just a narrow point in your business that disrupts the flow of activity, and that can happen at ANY stage of business. In fact, it probably happens WAY earlier than you think.

In this episode, I explain the three main types of bottlenecking and give you a step-by-step process for how to identify and fix bottlenecks as soon as the symptoms arise.

Tune in this week with a pen and paper and get ready to make some lists that allow you to get out of your own way!

SHOW NOTES

0:54–What is a bottleneck and is it really YOUR issue?

4:47– Three main types of bottlenecks

6:16– How to identify your bottlenecks and what to do about it

15:23– Bottlenecks in a team

21:43– A personal theory of management

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmchappell.substack.com