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Nine years ago I found myself up a creek, without a paddle, and in a boat I had no clue how to pilot.
I blame my buddy Ryan.
A couple months before, he’d asked me to help him scale his little manufacturing business that produced polyurethane rock climbing holds and imported hardware from China.
Thing is…
I’d been a professional rock climber in a past life, so I knew a thing or two about rock climbing holds…
And only a few years before I’d successfully built and exited a window washing business doing a little over a $1M/year in revenue, so I knew a thing or two about business…
But I didn’t know jack-shit about manufacturing, polyurethane, China, or e-commerce.
And it showed.
Despite grinding around the clock, we had very little to show for our efforts.
Which is just about the most demoralizing thing in the world.
Bashing your head against the wall isn’t so bad so long as you can see it making an impact…
But when you give it your all and don’t even have so much as a dent to show for your efforts…
You start thinking maybe you’re not cut out for this.
(This, in my experience, is the number one cause of founder burnout.)
If I’m being honest, if it weren’t for Ryan I probably would’ve given up…
But that guy has a really high tolerance for brain damage, and so we kept chipping away.
Until one day we stumbled onto something that changed everything practically overnight.
Seriously…
It’s thanks to one simple framework that we ultimately 10x’d that little business over the next 3 years from $300k/yr to over $3M.
That framework is called The Theory of Constraints.
Wait, wait, wait…
I hear you mumbling over there: “Yeah, yeah, I already know about the ToC. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link and all that.”
But stick with me ‘cause that’s exactly what my student Tom said when he came to me with a business stuck at like $15k/mo…
In fact, Tom knows the Theory of Constraints so well he actually teaches it to HIS students.
But the problem with the ToC is that it’s easy to understand, but surprisingly difficult to implement (especially on your own business).
Why?
Because KNOWING there is a single constraint in your business limiting your growth is not the same as knowing WHICH constraint it is and HOW to eliminate it.
In Tom’s case it actually only took about 15 minutes to find the problem and eliminate it…
Next thing I know, I’m getting messages like this from my boy:
Now, I’m gonna walk you through the exact diagnostic framework I use to help founders doing $20k+/mo unlock effortless growth…
But it all starts with one simple meta lesson I want you to tattoo to the inside of your eyelids:
Sequence equals Speed.
Solve problems upstream of your one constraint and you just put pressure on the constraint.
Solve problems downstream of your one constraint and you just waste time.
Both are a recipe for burnout because it doesn’t matter how hard you work if you’re working on the wrong thing.
So let’s break business down to its simplest parts.
- Marketing: Get Leads (aka: your pipe isn’t full)
– not enough people know about you
- Sales: Convert into Customers (your faucet isn’t open wide enough
– you’re not converting enough people who DO know about you
- Operations: Deliver Results (your bucket isn’t big enough)
– you’re struggling to deliver your product
1. Marketing: Get Leads
“You can’t save souls in an empty church.” – David Ogilvy
Amen, David.
Listen, it’s simple math.
The MORE people that know you exist, the MORE of your product/service you will sell.
Everything in business gets easier when you have a full PIPELINE.
2. Sales: Convert Customers
Once you’ve got leads, the next step is to convince them to give you money in exchange for your goods and services.
This, in my experience, is where all sorts of self-sabotaging behavior occurs.
For whatever reason, many founders I’ve worked with are seemingly allergic to sales.
They’re afraid of coming off as too salesy, and so they completely abandon anything that even remotely resembles a sales process.
Listen, I get it…despite having sold tens of millions of dollars worth of product on sales calls, they aren’t exactly my definition of a good time.
Thankfully, there’s a way to build your marketing machine that makes sales calls almost entirely unnecessary.
Watch this video for the full break down of the system I use to sell $50,000 products (without sales calls).
3. Operations: Deliver Results
Alright, now that we’ve unclogged our Leads pipeline and have Customers converting, the next constraint we’ve got to solve is… ya know… actually delivering an awesome product.
Which is, again, easier said than done.
But it’s a problem you’ve GOT to solve, because if you can’t deliver an amazing product, then it doesn’t matter how many leads and customers you push through the pipeline, they’ll all just leak out the bottom of your bucket.
Prepare to be churned into oblivion, my friend.
Okay, so now you know WHERE your constraint lives: Marketing, Sales, Operations (Pipe, Faucet, Bucket).
Congratulations… you’re not even halfway to solving the problem.
Because here’s where most founders (and most business advice, frankly) stops working:
Knowing WHERE the constraint is doesn’t tell you WHY it’s the constraint (or HOW to fix it).
And if you don’t understand why it’s the constraint, then it’s like taking antibiotics for a broken leg.
Sure, you’re “doing something”… but the leg’s still busted, champ.
This is why I run every constraint through what I call the Scale Matrix.
All constants in a business will fall into one of these four quadrants:
1. Story (the beliefs and perspectives of the founder)
Remember: your business can’t outgrow the six inches between your ears.
If you believe “sales is gross” or “my market won’t pay my premium prices”, no tactic on earth will save you ‘cause you will constantly be sabotaging yourself.
The bottleneck in your business always starts at the top.
2. Strategy (the boat you’re rowing)
It doesn’t matter how hard you row if you’re in the wrong boat.
You can be world-class at execution and still go nowhere because the fundamental approach is wrong for your market, your offer, or your price point.
3. Systems (the tools and processes for running the boat)
Right boat, but wrong equipment. The strategy might be sound, but if the machinery executing it is broken, slow, confusing, or duct-taped together… then good luck.
4. Skills (your personal ability to operate it all)
Right boat, right tools… but you (or your team) just aren’t good enough at the thing yet.
Nothing’s “broken”.
You just need more reps.
Now here’s the part that’s easy to mess up:
These four constraints are a hierarchy and you MUST solve them in the right order.
Story -> Strategy -> Systems -> Skills
It does you exactly ZERO good to solve a SKILL problem when you’ve got a STRATEGY problem sitting upstream of it.
(Sound familiar? Sequence equals Speed. Same law just one level deeper now.)
Let me show you what I mean with Sales (one of the constraints I see botched most often).
Say your sales are stuck. If we run it through the Matrix, we might get something like:
STORY: “sales is gross”. You’ve abandoned anything resembling a sales process ‘cause you’re afraid of turning people off.
STRATEGY: You’re running ads to attract high-ticket clients and then driving them to a landing page.
SYSTEMS: the landing page loads slower than the DMV, and once it’s finally up, it’s not even clear what to do next or how to buy.
SKILLS: the copy on the landing page sucks.
Four completely different problems.
Four completely different solutions.
All hiding under the same symptom: sales are stuck.
Now watch what happens depending on the diagnosis:
Say we determine it’s actually a STRATEGY problem (high ticket buyers need a different level of warmth than a soulless landing page).
Maybe we fix that with a Signature Series -> Email -> Webinar -> Offer Doc sequence…
And boom, the moment we fix that, everything downstream shifts.
Now the SYSTEMS question isn’t “how do we speed up the landing page”, it’s “how do we automate the conversion cycle between platforms.”
And the SKILLS gap isn’t “the copy sucks” anymore… it’s “we don’t know how to create a banger Signature Series that pre-frames prospects for the Offer Doc conversion.”
Fix the wrong level and you’ll spend six months A/B testing button colors on a landing page that never should have existed.
There is no greater waste than to do with excellence that which shouldn’t be done at all.
– Peter Drucker
(I’ve had to learn that lesson a few times in my career.)
So here’s the four step process to unlocking turbo-charged growth:
Step 1: Find the ONE technical constraint (marketing, sales, operations)
Step 2: Run that constraint through the Scale Matrix
Step 3: Remove the constraint
Step 4: Repeat
The key to scaling lies in how quickly you can cycle through those four steps.
Which will not only put you ahead of 99% of founders who are working very hard on the very wrong thing…
But it’ll make the whole process of building a business a WHOLE lot more enjoyable.
Stay Hyperfocused, My Friend
AV
P.S. watch this to see how the Scale Matrix took this founder from $7k/mo to $76k/mo.
P.P.S. if you’re a business owner doing over $20k/month and want to run through the diagnostic with me to find your biggest growth lever, just reply with the word ESCAPE and let’s chat.
