How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Consulting Firm

All right, so I want you to really listen in closely today because whether you have a consulting firm, you are the owner, or if you are a solo consultant and have a couple of contractors, you are still experiencing this problem at some point. If you have reached a cap in revenue and can't seem to get past it, like growth has stalled, but you know or you get this sense that you are the bottleneck, then I want you to lean in. You know, in the very beginning of your business, you being the only path into your business, the only route, and working really super hard to get everything off the ground, that's that's normal.

That's expected. There is a point though where you're going to outgrow that phase. And if you are in this place of realizing that you are a bottleneck in your own company and growth has stalled, then it's possible that you have outgrown that phase and now need to shift into doing things differently. You stop being the bottleneck when the work that grows the firm has an owner other than you.

You cannot do it all. Right now most of it has no owner at all, the growth work that is, and it's all you, as I said. It isn't assigned to anyone else or for that matter an asset or to say it differently, it isn't built into anything. So of course it defaults to you, and then it waits behind whatever delivery is on your plate.

It will always get pushed back behind that. Every piece of growth work, as I said, needs to go to a person or an asset and you only keep the parts that genuinely need your discernment. And that should be a small pile, by the way. We're gonna get to that.

So I want to give you this analogy. Picture a restaurant where every plate has to pass under the owner's eye. They have to take a look at it, check everything, make sure it's exactly the way they want it, and send it out of the kitchen. Now that isn't a big deal when things are slow.

Let's say it's a slow Tuesday and that looks like a lot of care and attention to detail. Great, but on a very busy Friday. When nothing is leaving the kitchen on time and maybe sometimes not at all, that's a big problem. And it isn't that the owner needs to work faster, or for that matter, you as the firm owner needs to work more and faster.

That is not the solution. But it's actually that we need to create a different design that routes everything through multiple people or assets instead of just you. You are not the bottleneck because you're busy. You are the bottleneck because you're the only route, the only path.

When that is the case, all delivery work, anything in terms of business development, gets shifted right behind the delivery work, which, you know, ideally, if you're a busy firm, that delivery work never ends, right? But then there's a problem with business development. typically this happens when business begins to thin out a bit, the pipeline is thinning out a bit. And if that's when all of this stuff gets handled, that is a rescue mission model of growth.

And it's, as Chris says, the road to and into the valley of death. If you are at, let's say, five hundred thousand in revenue, everything up until then, as I said earlier, it's perfectly sensible that you were driving all of that. You were the only route, the only path. You were doing all the work and pushing.

~ that's very typical. But again, you reach this threshold, this revenue growth point where if things are stalling, then you may need to look at whether you are the bottleneck. It's not, because you haven't put in the work. Obviously that's a necessity in the early stages, but it's being aware of what phase you're in and when you've outgrown that phase and can pivot and shift to facilitate the next phase.

So obviously growth isn't an intelligence thing, ~ a lack of it's really just an infrastructure issue and the way things are built and structured and and we can fix that. you can't think your way to a system that runs without you. You're already at max capacity for thinking. So we're gonna go through a simple audit in a few minutes here, I think that will help you.

The one thing I want to discourage against is you may automatically think I need to delegate more. And while it is incredibly important to delegate, you already know this as a business owner, delegating more without v very specific explanations, definitions, triggers defined without those things in place, what that ends up looking like is something that wasn't explained fully enough so that It ends up coming back to your plate within just a few weeks, and that frustration returns.

And then the team is blamed that they just weren't ready or they weren't doing a good enough job when actually they just didn't have the full clarity to run with what was given them. So make sure that when you delegate that it's very, very clear what needs to happen, whose responsibility it is. What's the trigger that says this thing needs to happen? And make sure all of those things are fully defined.

Something like that should be done only once and then it doesn't need to come back to you. Because the goal isn't that you become uninvolved in your firm. It's actually to be optional in the parts that were never really yours to begin with. Maybe you had to take them on for a time, but you've reached that point where it it's time to hand them off.

So let's sort all of this then. think of it as three piles. And every piece of growth work in your firm belongs in one of them. You're either gonna give it to a different person, that does not mean you, or you're gonna give it to an asset, or you're going to keep it on your plate.

But that pile should be the smallest. And I want to share with you the ladder framework because that helps to further sort these and identify which piles everything should go in. The ladder framework is an approach to distributing business development across a consulting firm so that growth doesn't rest entirely on the founder. Makes sense, right?

There are seven rungs to this ladder framework. The first is open for business. This is basic visibility. The second is quality client service and that's using the scale question where we ask clients on a scale of one to ten, how are we doing and what would it take to get to a 10.

Third is asking for referrals proactively and at the right time. Fourth, debrief and diagnostic conversations, uncovering unmet needs at project wrap-up. Fifth is build referral sources, developing strategic multipliers. Sixth is network expansion, intentional growth of reach.

And seventh is building awareness through focused campaigns, targeted niche marketing. Here's what I want you to do with that. I want you to write all seven down, and you're gonna put a name beside each one. So that means a person's name, or you could just write asset.

and come back to that and keep. What I don't want to see is that next to those seven is your name seven times. That does us no good here. So the idea is to make the work, the growth work that you do a small pile.

let's look at pile one, which is giving it to a person. Rungs two, three, and four all happen inside engagements that you're already delivering. They need somebody in the room with a client, and your team is probably already doing this, so they don't need you. Rung two is client service and quality at that.

So that's asking that scale question. Again, you're not needed for that. The answer to the second half of that question, by the way, is the scope of your next project. It's the client is literally going to describe what to sell them next.

Rung three is asking for referrals proactively, mid-engagement ideally, or right after a big win, which is when your credibility is at its highest. Rung four is the debrief at wrap-up. So instead of just closing the file, have a real conversation about what's next for their team. Now, handing one of these over is just asking these three sentences.

You do not have to create a policy again. That's just going to add to the bottleneck. So just ask these things. Who does it?

When does it get triggered? And what happens with the answer to that? it sounds like this. Gail asks the scale question at the midpoint review of every engagement.

And anything below an eight comes to me that week. That's a described job. Saying, Gail, help me stay closer to clients, that's not. And that's the version that's going to come back to you like a boomerang, you know, in the next month.

Start with one rung in the latter framework, one live engagement this week, not all three, and test that out. Let's look at pile two. Give to an asset. Rungs one, five, six, and seven are about being found and understood by people who haven't met you yet.

And so this doesn't, again, this does not need you if you have the system built to deliver it. It doesn't need your personal presence, mostly. For example, an opportunity engine is a deliberate, repeatable system that aligns your business development with how clients naturally make buying decisions. An asset is anything that does that work while you're in a delivery meeting.

A clear statement of the problem that you solve, in the words that your buyers would actually use, an explanation you give on every first call, it's written down. Perhaps it's your framework explained, like the way you think, explained in multiple places that people might visit. And you can ask one question to test whether something is for this pile or not. Does this still work in a week where I do nothing?

for example, a networking lunch doesn't, but a written point of view does. An asset also has a property a person doesn't have. It doesn't need managing. And that's a big deal when the thing you have least of right now is management capacity.

Now, pile three is keep it. This is your plate. And again, I want this to be the smallest pile of the three. If it's not, then you have not done this right.

And I want you to go back through it. This is the work that only you can do, truly only you can do. The diagnostic conversation early on in the relationship stays with you. That's where your discernment does the work, and it's the thing the buyer is actually paying for.

Direction on rung seven stays with you too. Which market, which problem, which point of view? Deciding that isn't something you can delegate, although producing it is. and here's what keeps this whole thing from collapsing back on you.

Piles one and two are manager work. And manager work only exists if it's scheduled. You have to schedule it. Maker versus manager is the time blocking requirements to separate project delivery from business development.

Is this maker work or manager work? Maker time is delivery. Manager time is building the firm. Manager time gets scheduled and protected even when the maker is busy, especially then.

So start with just a half day. If you try to just block out an hour, which is typically what's done, it's gonna easily get eaten by other things and it won't be effective. A half day has enough mass to it that it will survive a real week. And if nothing visible ever gives, meaning, you know, when something has to give on your calendar, you haven't protected anything.

You've just found spare hours. And as Chris will say, there are no spare hours in a busy firm. So here's the part I want to leave you with so you can get on with your day. A bottleneck isn't a person who's too busy.

It's a job with no name and no owner or no asset. So it defaults to whoever cares most, which is always going to be you. I'll give you this example of a client of ours, Stephanie, who runs an executive consulting firm. Now she was the classic founder as engine.

Every opportunity in her firm started with her showing up somewhere, and her revenue was capped exactly at the point where her calendar was full. She relied on fortunate timing and high effort networking, and both of those are her. Personally in a room, you know what that's like. What changed wasn't hiring a bunch of people and it wasn't better time management.

She removed herself as the engine. Hopefully that makes a lot of this kind of sink into place. She clarified her wedge, a structured diagnostic that let a client experience how she thinks without committing to a large delivery project first. And that turned the entry point into something repeatable rather than something she had to perform each and every time.

Her revenue went from one million to two million dollars in eighteen months. Once the infrastructure was in place and the founder bottleneck was gone, the business doubled yet again to four million. So think about the shape of that. The first doubling came from a better system.

The second came from her no longer being inside the system. The ceiling was never her capacity. It was that the firm had exactly one route in and it ran through her. Let me just finish here with a few quick notes.

Because these are questions we often get asked. What if you don't really have a team? You just have a couple of contractors. Then pile one is small and pile two is your leverage.

So start there with one written asset that explains the problem you solve. Get really super clear on that. And contractors on live engagements can still run rung two. Because asking a client how it's going on a scale of one to ten is a service move.

This is not a sales move. What about clients who hired you personally? Won't they be annoyed that it's not you? They hired you for discernment, not for attendance necessarily.

Nobody has been disappointed that a senior person on the team asked how the work was going. What clients notice is silence, and silence is what happens when the only person allowed to ask that has been in back-to-back delivery for six weeks. Where do you start if literally everything routes through you? Write the seven rungs down and put a name beside each one.

Do the audit. Then take rung two and give it to one person on one engagement this week. One rung on one engagement is a real change. A reorganization of your entire approach to business development is a plan that you'll abandon in just a couple of months.

Last one, how do you know it's working before revenue moves? Something happens that you didn't cause, a referral conversation you weren't in, a scope expansion that started with somebody else's question, a prospect who arrives already understanding what you do, those show up months before the revenue does, and they're the real signal. Okay, so run through the audit. I hope this helps.

Till next time.