Your Growth Has Stalled. Let’s Find the Constraint.

When growth stalls, the leadership team doesn’t run out of ideas. It runs out of agreement.

• The head of marketing wants another campaign.

• The head of sales wants more leads, or another salesperson.

• Somebody wants a new website. There is always somebody who wants a new website.

• Product wants to build something new.

• Finance thinks the price is wrong.

The problem is that each person thinks they have the fix because they’re looking at it through their lens. 

So where do we start?

A few years ago, I read The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a book about the theory of constraints, and the core idea is straightforward: any process, in any business, has a bottleneck that limits the output of the whole system. If you think like a manufacturer, you can find yours. Where is the bottleneck in this business?

That’s the question I’m trying to answer before I suggest anything else.

When we find the constraint and shift it, we make an impact that the client actually feels.

Then I get to look like the hero.

So why am I telling you this? I’m going to show you how to work through it. You can use the same method in your own business and look like the hero in your next meeting. You can even claim you thought of it yourself. I won’t be there.

Start with the result

Before we diagnose anything, we need to be specific about the result.

“We need growth” might mean more new customers. It might mean larger contracts, better retention, stronger margins, or a way to win business without the founder joining every important sales call. All of those are very different assignments.

If the business is signing customers but losing them six months later, a lead generation campaign might produce an impressive sales board but no scale. If the company delivers brilliantly but only meets two suitable buyers a month, rebuilding onboarding is unlikely to be the move.

I ask the team to agree on one outcome, put a number and a timeframe around it where they can, and then walk backwards through how that outcome is produced. Where does progress actually slow?

That question sounds almost insultingly simple. A mentor of mine used to call this a “blinding flash of the obvious.” and is surprising how rarely people ask it.

Follow a real buyer, not the average buyer in the dashboard

In the following example, I’ve changed the names and the industry to protect the innocent (guilty). I’ll call it Relay. Relay sells workflow software to businesses with teams working across multiple sites.

Over three months Relay runs 54 demos. Thirty are with companies that seem to fit. Eighteen receive proposals. Three buy.

At the management meeting, sales asks for more leads. Fair enough. Three new customers isn’t enough, and the team is probably tired of looking at an empty calendar.

But before I give marketing a target for another 100 enquiries, I want to know what happened to the 15 proposals that didn’t turn into customers. We open the deals, speak to the people involved and reconstruct the decisions.

Suppose we find that nine operational buyers liked Relay but couldn’t make a credible case to finance. Four were nervous about implementation and never got a straight answer. Two chose competitors.

We still have questions. Were those buyers genuinely suitable? Was the problem urgent? Were the proposed terms sensible? But we have a much better starting point than “more leads”. We can test a business case buyers can actually use and an implementation plan that answers the awkward questions early.

If that improves decisions, great. If it doesn’t, we have learned something. Either way, we haven’t spent a quarter pouring more water into a leaky bucket.

The six places I look

I don’t start by scoring six departments. I use these areas to challenge my first explanation. A symptom in one area can have its cause somewhere else.

The market. Is this a problem the buyer intends to solve, or one they “politely agree” would be nice to solve? Relay might find that businesses with 100 field staff generally like the demo, but companies that have just won a large contract suddenly need a new workflow. Same product, different urgency. I’d compare who buys, what changed in their business, who feels the consequences and what happens if they do nothing. 

Pro tip: If you can get a customer to explain what happens if they do nothing, you’re significantly further along to getting a deal.

The message. Can the buyer understand the value without the founder there to explain it? “AI-powered operating platform for distributed teams” sounds impressive until you ask a service director what it means for the missed jobs and rework on their desk. I ask prospects to explain the offer back to us. If the right people care after a conversation but cannot see the point from the website or outreach, I investigate the message. If they understand it and still don’t care, I look elsewhere.

The pipeline. Are enough of the right opportunities arriving? A hundred leads can keep the team busy. They can also keep a sales team talking to people who were never going to buy. I separate sources and follow each through to sale. If nearly every “good opportunity” comes from the founder’s contacts, I want to know how the business plans to find the next group without asking the founder to make another hundred introductions.

The sales system. What decision is the buyer making at each stage? Sending a proposal tells me the seller completed a task. It doesn’t tell me that finance agrees with the business case, the implementation team is comfortable, or anyone has decided what happens next. I pay particular attention to deals that move rapidly when the founder joins. What did they do that the process and the team currently cannot?

Customer value. Do customers get the result they bought? If Relay wins six customers a month and half of them are back on spreadsheets by Christmas, the problem is not solved. I look at how quickly customers see value, (think velocity to value) who actually adopts the product, and why customers expand or leave. Selling more into a leaky customer base can look like progress for a long time.

Capacity. Can the business handle the growth it wants? Perhaps Relay doubles sales, but every implementation still needs a custom integration. The bottleneck has simply moved from sales to delivery. I look at where work waits and ask whether the cause is missing people, missing skills, unclear scope or decisions concentrated in one pair of hands. Hiring is useful when people are the constraint. It is an expensive way to deal with a muddled handover.

You may recognize two or three of these in your own company. Most businesses have plenty they could improve. The point is to work out which improvement the business can benefit from now.

Don’t let the first plausible answer win

This is where experience helps, although it has occasionally made me overconfident too. A low win rate might be a sales problem. It might be a lame offer. It might also be the wrong market, weak qualification, a message that sets the wrong expectation, or buyers worried that implementation will eat the next six months of their lives.

Remember, change management is painful no matter how you dress it up.

I ask the team write down at least one competing explanation. Then we ask what evidence would tell them apart.

Take Relay. If we think finance approval is the constraint, review the lost deals with that in mind. Ask buyers what they needed to justify the spend. Check whether deals with a finance sponsor progress differently. Test the business case with the next set of suitable opportunities. Watch what buyers do, not merely whether they say the new document looks good.

Then ask the question I find most useful: If we fixed this one thing and changed nothing else, would we move meaningfully towards the result we want?

If the answer is “only if we first fix something else”, that something else may be the real priority.

Leave the meeting with a decision

You don’t need a 60-page strategy document to do this. At the end of the meeting, I want six lines:

1. The result we need to improve.

2. Where progress currently breaks down.

3. Our best explanation and the evidence for it.

4. The other explanation we have not ruled out.

5. One change we will test.

6. What we will review, and when.

Perhaps the answer really is a campaign. Perhaps you need a salesperson, a clearer offer, a product improvements or even that new website. I have nothing against new websites. I would just like to know what problem the new one is meant to solve before we all spend three months talking about fonts and colors.

Find the constraint.

Make the change.

Be the hero.