Diagnostic
Why isn’t your agency growing?
Because one stage is capping it, and it is probably not the one you are working on. Any business that sells people’s time runs in series, so throughput is set by the narrowest stage. Pick the one that sounds like you.
Constraint 02 / Conversion
Enough conversations, too few of them close.
- Leads go quiet after the proposal
- You discount to close and can't say no
- Only the founder can run a sales call
What we change first
Rebuild the offer and pricing so the same conversation closes higher, then take the call off founder time.
Common questions
Why has my agency stopped growing?
An agency stops growing when one stage of its business caps throughput. The four candidates are acquisition (not enough qualified conversations), conversion (conversations that do not close), delivery (no capacity to service more work), and margin (revenue grows but profit does not). Because the stages run in series, only the narrowest one limits output, so improving any other stage produces no additional growth.
How do I find my agency's bottleneck?
Test each stage against a symptom. If pipeline tracks the founder's calendar, acquisition is binding. If proposals go quiet, conversion is binding. If every new account requires a hire before it is profitable, delivery is binding. If your largest account is your least profitable, margin is binding. Fix only the binding one, then re-test, because resolving one constraint always promotes another.
What is the Theory of Constraints?
The Theory of Constraints is a management principle stating that any system running stages in series is limited by its single slowest stage. Applied to an agency, it means total throughput equals the capacity of the narrowest stage rather than the average of all stages, so improvement effort must be directed at that stage to produce any result.