Show Notes
Jessica asks: "I've been hovering around $10,000 a month for a very long time now, and it's starting to mess with my head. Every month I tell myself, this is the month it finally moves. And then I look at the numbers and it's basically the same again. I'm working all the time. If I step back even a little, things slow down. If I stay fully involved, we hit $10,000 again. Is this the upper limit of my business?"
In this episode, Scott reveals why revenue plateaus aren't ceilings—they're capacity constraints in your systems, how to use the "weakest link" framework to diagnose where you're stuck, and why adding more people or leads is the wrong answer. You'll hear Scott's own bottleneck discovery (26% more website traffic but zero lead growth), learn how to walk through your business step-by-step to find constraints, and understand why doing more with what you have beats adding more resources every time.
The bottom line: Your business isn't at its ceiling. Your systems are. Find the bottleneck, remove it, watch revenue flow to the next constraint, then repeat. That's plateau busting mode.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: https://scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you get your business unstuck. I'm Scott Todd. I diagnose business challenges so that you can keep moving forward and growing your business. Today's question comes from Jessica. She says, I've been hovering around 10,000 a month for a long time now. is starting to mess with my head. Every month I tell myself, this is the month it finally moves. And then I look at the numbers and it's basically
the same again. Is this the upper limit of my business?
Jessica, I don't think it's the upper limit of your business. In fact, what happens is my role when I run into plateau situations like this is that I'm going to encourage you to look at the capabilities of your business. And specifically what I'm saying is I believe you've reached the capabilities of the systems that support that business. The business will only grow.
in terms of revenue by its weakest link. And if your weakest link is stopping you from hitting 12,000 a month, stopping you at 10,000 a month, that's as high as you're ever gonna go until you change something within the organizational structure of the business. And that doesn't always mean people either. A lot of times it's just systems that have become a bottleneck, a work load or workflow or a spot of the work
where it's just stuck. And the way that we're going to fix that is we're going to start to go step by step through the entire business. We're going to start at the very beginning. We're going to look at every single piece, every single data point of the business, where the work goes, what happens next. We're going to find out where the capacity limiter is, and then we're going to fix it. So let me give you an example.
Let's say that you're walking through your business and you're like, hey, wait a minute. marketing, how many leads are we generating? And you look and you go, okay, well, we're generating 20 leads this month. Okay, that's great. Sales, how many of those leads are you selling every single month? Two, ⁓ that's 10%. Okay, can your business survive on two sales a month? Probably not. So therein lies potentially your problem.
So what you're going to do is you're going to take all of the possible resources, every single human being on that team and say, guys, we have a sales conversion problem. Either marketing, you're not giving me the people that I need to convert, or sales, you're not converting them. All hands on deck for the sales team to support them. So now we're going to try to increase that number to whatever it needs to be. Let's say it's four. We just doubled it.
So all of a sudden, we found the bottleneck. Wherever it is in your company, you have to find the bottleneck and constantly remove it. Here's the bottleneck, we're gonna remove it. And look, the temptation is to go and add more people. ⁓ man, my salespeople can only sell two contracts a month. No, you need to figure out how to maximize them. How do you get them to double production, triple production, whatever it is. And I'm picking on the sales team, it could be something else, I don't know what it is.
Obviously I don't know what it is. You have to figure that part out. But what we don't want to do is we don't want to just continue to add more. I just had this conversation with my own team recently and what happened was the team was telling me, hey Scott, look, we generated 26 % more visitors to our website in the last year, 26 % higher.
which is that it gets a lot of traffic anyway, which is a very big number. I was like, whoa. And then I went to the next step and I looked and our leads, our conversion of visitors into a lead was flat. And I told the team, wait a minute, I don't need more people coming to the website. I need to figure out how to convert the people that are already coming into leads. See, by being the leader and asking a different question, you start to get a different answer.
Because if I think, I just need more leads, or I need more people, or I need more, we don't always need more. We need to figure out how to do more with what we already have. First, get that going, because when we do that and we remove that obstacle, all of a sudden, it's like water gushing through the business until the next bottleneck.
So if I can remove the bottleneck as to why they're not converting into leads, all of a sudden, once I do that, the leads will rush into the business. And when those leads rush into the business, then I will then see the next bottleneck. Okay? So we're going to have to do this work. And I got to tell you something. It's tedious work. Without a doubt, it is a lot of work. It is a lot of painful looking at the business.
getting people involved, asking people for help, asking your team for help, looking under every single rock. Where's the bottleneck? Where's the bottleneck? And as you remove these bottlenecks, again, the business begins to flow more. And you remove one bottleneck and you might see it jumps up to, let's say, 11,000 a month. But then that's not even the upper limit. That's not the upper capacity. You keep removing the rocks. Don't add more.
You don't necessarily need more. You need to do more with what you already have. And when you do that, I think you'll see that the plateaus get busted very quickly until the next one. And then you just follow the same pattern. This is what I do every time I see a plateau. This is what we're going to go do. We're going to go into plateau busting mode. All right. If you have a business question, a business challenge that's holding you back from growing, I want to hear from you. Head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask.
and let's get your questions on the table, get them answered so you can keep growing your business. And I will see you in our next episode.
Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you get your business unstuck. I'm Scott Todd. I diagnose business challenges so that you can keep moving forward and growing your business. Today's question comes from Jessica. She says, I've been hovering around 10,000 a month for a long time now. is starting to mess with my head. Every month I tell myself, this is the month it finally moves. And then I look at the numbers and it's basically
the same again. Is this the upper limit of my business?
Jessica, I don't think it's the upper limit of your business. In fact, what happens is my role when I run into plateau situations like this is that I'm going to encourage you to look at the capabilities of your business. And specifically what I'm saying is I believe you've reached the capabilities of the systems that support that business. The business will only grow.
in terms of revenue by its weakest link. And if your weakest link is stopping you from hitting 12,000 a month, stopping you at 10,000 a month, that's as high as you're ever gonna go until you change something within the organizational structure of the business. And that doesn't always mean people either. A lot of times it's just systems that have become a bottleneck, a work load or workflow or a spot of the work
where it's just stuck. And the way that we're going to fix that is we're going to start to go step by step through the entire business. We're going to start at the very beginning. We're going to look at every single piece, every single data point of the business, where the work goes, what happens next. We're going to find out where the capacity limiter is, and then we're going to fix it. So let me give you an example.
Let's say that you're walking through your business and you're like, hey, wait a minute. marketing, how many leads are we generating? And you look and you go, okay, well, we're generating 20 leads this month. Okay, that's great. Sales, how many of those leads are you selling every single month? Two, ⁓ that's 10%. Okay, can your business survive on two sales a month? Probably not. So therein lies potentially your problem.
So what you're going to do is you're going to take all of the possible resources, every single human being on that team and say, guys, we have a sales conversion problem. Either marketing, you're not giving me the people that I need to convert, or sales, you're not converting them. All hands on deck for the sales team to support them. So now we're going to try to increase that number to whatever it needs to be. Let's say it's four. We just doubled it.
So all of a sudden, we found the bottleneck. Wherever it is in your company, you have to find the bottleneck and constantly remove it. Here's the bottleneck, we're gonna remove it. And look, the temptation is to go and add more people. ⁓ man, my salespeople can only sell two contracts a month. No, you need to figure out how to maximize them. How do you get them to double production, triple production, whatever it is. And I'm picking on the sales team, it could be something else, I don't know what it is.
Obviously I don't know what it is. You have to figure that part out. But what we don't want to do is we don't want to just continue to add more. I just had this conversation with my own team recently and what happened was the team was telling me, hey Scott, look, we generated 26 % more visitors to our website in the last year, 26 % higher.
which is that it gets a lot of traffic anyway, which is a very big number. I was like, whoa. And then I went to the next step and I looked and our leads, our conversion of visitors into a lead was flat. And I told the team, wait a minute, I don't need more people coming to the website. I need to figure out how to convert the people that are already coming into leads. See, by being the leader and asking a different question, you start to get a different answer.
Because if I think, I just need more leads, or I need more people, or I need more, we don't always need more. We need to figure out how to do more with what we already have. First, get that going, because when we do that and we remove that obstacle, all of a sudden, it's like water gushing through the business until the next bottleneck.
So if I can remove the bottleneck as to why they're not converting into leads, all of a sudden, once I do that, the leads will rush into the business. And when those leads rush into the business, then I will then see the next bottleneck. Okay? So we're going to have to do this work. And I got to tell you something. It's tedious work. Without a doubt, it is a lot of work. It is a lot of painful looking at the business.
getting people involved, asking people for help, asking your team for help, looking under every single rock. Where's the bottleneck? Where's the bottleneck? And as you remove these bottlenecks, again, the business begins to flow more. And you remove one bottleneck and you might see it jumps up to, let's say, 11,000 a month. But then that's not even the upper limit. That's not the upper capacity. You keep removing the rocks. Don't add more.
You don't necessarily need more. You need to do more with what you already have. And when you do that, I think you'll see that the plateaus get busted very quickly until the next one. And then you just follow the same pattern. This is what I do every time I see a plateau. This is what we're going to go do. We're going to go into plateau busting mode. All right. If you have a business question, a business challenge that's holding you back from growing, I want to hear from you. Head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask.
and let's get your questions on the table, get them answered so you can keep growing your business. And I will see you in our next episode.