You moves as fast as your slowest point
My Annual Retreat Aha moment
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This past weekend I got home from a retreat with seven other entrepreneurs, each running a multimillion-dollar business.
This annual retreat always does one thing. It hands me an aha moment I didn't see coming.
We were talking about bottlenecks. First, what a bottleneck actually is.
There's a business book called The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. It introduced an idea called the Theory of Constraints.
The idea is simple: Every system has one weak point that limits how much it can produce. No matter how fast everything else moves, the whole thing only goes as fast as that one slow point.
The most famous example in the book is a troop of Boy Scouts on a hike. The group can only move as fast as the slowest kid, a boy named Herbie.
Herbie is the bottleneck.
Speeding everyone else up just makes the gaps worse. So the leader moves Herbie to the front, and then takes some weight out of his backpack and spreads it among the faster kids. Now Herbie walks faster, and the entire troop moves at a steady pace.
Fix the slowest point and you speed up the whole system.
So at the retreat we ran an exercise.
Sit down with an actual piece of paper.
Turn off distractions.
Take a breath, center yourself, and answer one question honestly.
"What is my single biggest bottleneck right now?"
The thing that, if you removed it, would catapult you forward. The one constraint standing between you and where you actually want to be.
A friend of mine worked on removing himself as a bottleneck from his business.
Recently he happily shared that he overheard his team talking about a huge deal they had just closed. He had no idea it had even happened.
The company was now growing without him. That was the whole point.
So this week I'll leave you with the same question that I got at the retreat.
Where is your #1 bottleneck? And what's the one thing you can do to remove it?
Talk next week,
Noemi