Hey Reader,

If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be?

This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that.

There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love.

However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s quite dense.

Fortunately, my friend Tiago Forte (who’s brilliant at all things productivity and systems—and also a Kit customer) wrote an epic series pulling a key theme out of that otherwise dense book:

It’s called The Theory of Constraints.

I walked our team through it at our retreat a few weeks ago, borrowing some of the illustrations Tiago shared in his series. It will probably take you an hour to read the whole thing, but it’s worth your time—and it’s certainly less dense than The Goal:

​Tiago’s series on The Theory of Constraints »​

But for now, I want to share my shorter summary that I shared with the Kit team. (I recommend enabling images for this email or reading the web version since the graphics really help this make sense.)

First, understanding bottlenecks.

Every system is going to have a spot that is the bottleneck or the constraint.

In a creator business, that spot might be the number of sales calls you can take in a week or how many coaching clients you can have.

If you think of it in terms of a factory, an example would be 10 units per minute coming in. If the constraint narrows that to only five units per minute, the outflow will be five units. It's never going to exceed the constraint.

You can put effort anywhere else in the system, and it's not going to make any difference. Only effort put at the bottleneck will make a difference.

So that’s bottlenecks in a basic sense.

The Theory of Constraints takes this further.

What The Theory of Constraints argues is that effort placed anywhere besides the bottleneck will make the bottleneck worse. You might think that optimizing in other places would be harmless:

"Okay, we may have a big problem here, but I’m still going to clean up my area while someone else works on it."

If you do this, youre likely making the bottleneck worse.

Take a freeway for example. Let’s say there are eight lanes in total, but some construction narrows the available lanes down to four.

You might think, "Well it was great we at least had eight lanes for a period of time!" And it’s true. It’s fine when there is a limited amount of traffic.

But if you have a lot of cars, as everyone merges from the eight lanes into four, you actually create far more traffic, and less throughput, than if you only had four lanes from the beginning.

And this is the case with business systems—as well as so many others.

Henry Ford ran into this with the Model T because the car was more popular than his factories could produce. The way they built the Model T was to park a chassis in place and have workers move around it. That took 12.5 hours per car.

What revolutionized their production was when they changed which thing moved. Instead of the workers moving, the car moved down the line and the workers stayed where they were. Assembly dropped from 12.5 hours to just 90 minutes. An incredible 8X increase in throughput.

Sara Blakely hit a different kind of constraint while she was building Spanx. Manufacturing was going well but people simply didn’t understand the product. So she personally went to department stores and demonstrated it and talked about it until the buyers got it.

We ran into our own version of this with sponsorships at Kit. The program was growing and driving revenue for creators and for us, but about a year ago, the team noticed that operations was the constraint that would keep us from growing bigger.

So they stopped scaling, which sounds obvious. But the counterintuitive part is the team didn’t just keep things where they were at. They actually limited the program way down to focus on just a handful of creators and a handful of brands. They gave those relationships everything to ensure they were both successful and only once they consistently hit their metrics for success did they scale things back up.

Once they fixed that bottleneck, a new one appeared! Then the bottleneck became getting more brands.

I hope this got you thinking about the bottlenecks in your own business.

I’d recommend starting with the number you care about most—whether that’s revenue, or new subscribers, or whatever matters to you—and list out the steps that produce it.

Walk through those steps and ask yourself: where is the bottleneck?

Once you spot it, shift your focus to eliminating it.

Remember: effort placed anywhere besides the bottleneck will actually make the bottleneck worse.

If you work on a team, name the bottleneck out loud. If you work by yourself, write it down and remind yourself daily.

Make sure you’re working on the constraint, not just next to it.

​

PODCAST

How to Turn Your Creator Business Into an Empire

Want to see behind the scenes of a $6M creator empire?

Ben Greenfield has been podcasting since basically the very beginning of podcasts (back in 2008). He built a health and wellness brand that generates around $500k/month and still has time for family and personal passions.

The crazy thing is, that’s actually the smallest piece of his business. We break down the full revenue pie up on the board.

Ben walks through how he scaled a supplements company and a health tech platform while ensuring neither one depends on his constant involvement. If you want a business that keeps running when you step away, there’s a lot to learn from here.

​Watch or listen to episode »​

VIDEO

Is an influencer degree a good idea?

Arizona State University launched an influencer program and everyone’s bashing on it.

But compared to other degrees, I think it's awesome. Colleges are finally teaching something relevant. Though the $100k+ price tag still isn't worth it.

 Everyone is wondering how to create content and tell stories to reach more people. So all marketing is becoming creator or influencer marketing.

Here’s my full take on it:

​Watch video »​

Hit reply and let me know what you think.

—Nathan