Find Your Bottleneck

The pipe

Every income passes through seven stages, in order. Reach: people who could pay you find out you exist. Fit: of those, the ones with the problem and the budget. Trust: they reply, ask a question or book a call.

Offer: they receive a specific thing with a price on it. Close: they say yes. Deliver: the job is finished on the date you promised. Repeat: they come back, or send somebody else.

The narrowest stage decides the money. A shop with four people kneading dough and one oven sells what the oven bakes. Hire a fifth kneader and sales stay the same.

The drop is normal

Each stage loses most of the people who enter it. That is true of every business, from an airline to a university. It is the shape of income, not a sign that something is broken.

A worked example. Harvard College had 47,893 applicants for the class of 2029 and admitted 2,003. 2,003 divided by 47,893 is 4.2%. Then 1,675 of the 2,003 enrolled. That is 83.6%. A tiny early stage and a huge late one, both chosen on purpose.

Price sets how steep the drop is. Something cheap gets many yeses. Something dear gets few. A fair planning rule is one in a hundred buying a cheap thing and one in a thousand paying for the expensive one.

It is an hourglass, not a funnel. A funnel ends. An hourglass gets turned over: a job delivered well sends a referral or a second order back to the top.

Count your own seven

Take the last ninety days and count each stage from records: your messages, your email, your bank. Never from memory. If you truly cannot count a stage, write unknown.

The cheats to avoid. Counting the same twenty people as new reach every month. Counting admirers as buyers. Counting likes as trust. Counting a vague money chat as an offer. Counting a maybe as a yes. Counting late work as delivered. Counting a compliment as a referral.

An unknown is a clue. The stage you cannot count usually sits right beside your bottleneck, because nobody keeps records of the thing they avoid.

Name one stage

Find the steepest drop, or the number so small that nothing after it could save you. If two look equally bad, take the earlier one. If they still tie, take the one that is cheaper to fix. One word, never a list.

Two shortcuts. Look for the pile: work heaps up in front of the shut stage. And zero is an answer: if your pipe is empty, the shut stage is Reach.

Three worked pipes. Sixty reached, forty talking, six prices given: shut at Offer. Nine reached and almost all of them buying: shut at Reach. Twenty-four yeses and fourteen finished on time: shut at Deliver.

People fix the wrong stage because they work on the one they enjoy. Someone with no reach redesigns the portfolio. Someone with no offer learns another skill. Real work, done sincerely, producing nothing.

How many people you need

Work backwards from the money. Divide your monthly target by your price. That is how many yeses you need.

Then multiply up the pipe with your own ratios. If one in three priced people says yes, three yeses need nine prices. Where you do not know a ratio, use one in three.

A worked example. A target of 180,000 at 15,000 each is 12 yeses. One in three says yes, so 36 prices. Keep going up the pipe and the top number is usually a few hundred people a month, not millions.

Opening each stage

Reach: one channel your buyers use, two useful posts a week, and forty direct approaches a month beside it. Publishing is slow and compounds. Messages are fast and do not. Run both.

Fit: name the buyer exactly — one role, with a budget and a problem. Trust: four finished pieces a stranger can open, two named people who will vouch for you, and a small paid first step.

Offer: one named thing, one price, one date, sent to ten people. Say the figure first. Close: end with a question answered in one word, and follow up on days three, ten and twenty-one.

Deliver: if you are full, raise the price first, then write down how the work is done. Repeat: propose the next job in the delivery message, and ask for one name.

The thirty-day test

Write six things. The stage, in one word. One specific action you will repeat. The one figure at that stage that will move if it works. That figure for the last ninety days, written down before you start. A review date thirty days out. And the six stages you will not touch, by name.

Measure the stage, never the income. Income moves too slowly and too noisily to teach you anything in a month.

On the review date you continue, adjust, or accept that the diagnosis was wrong. If the figure moved and the money did not, the bottleneck has moved. That is progress.

Count the seven on the last day of every month. Twenty minutes, from now on.

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