How I'd Find the One Constraint That Matters

The next principle is arguably one of the most important, if not the most important, to scaling your business. It's figuring out how to solve your main constraint. You can think about constraint from a quantitative perspective as the area in the business where you will get the highest returns on effort or improvement. If you think

about it from a manufacturing perspective, it's going to be the bottleneck. So, if I've got a four-lane highway that goes into a one lane and then to four lane, what's the limit of the business or the rate of cars going? It will be a onelane highway. So, I could make four lanes into five lanes.

it's still not going to change the total throughput in the system. And so the idea is we have to focus on that bottleneck. And the thing is, and the reason the theory of constraints is so powerful is that every business has just one constraint. But the reality is that most business owners are not working on

that constraint. They're working on something they believe to be the constraint. Or even more commonly, they're just working all day long, not even thinking about the constraint is hoping the business will grow. So I'm going to share a six-part framework for thinking about constraints to help you identify any constraint that you have in

your business. This is a a newer framework um that has only come from doing like 10,000 Q&As's um was thinking through like what is the actual decision tree that that I go through in order to do this and it turns out there is one um and I'll walk you through it but basically this is the deconstraining

meta framework that we use as a company um that you can apply to your business over and over and over again and I I walk through this for me. So if I'm like what should I do next I like I'll just go through this. So the fundamental question that we always have to answer