To work with partner and mentor business owners to get to the next level in their business…

Now I may have mentioned before that a Brian Tracy trained, certified business coaching professional has no secret powers; but, if you can find the bottleneck, or limiting factor, that is stopping your client from achieving his business goals, you are certainly going to look like a superhero. The best part is, this system development technique will work with any industry, from real estate investment companies to general contractors. It’s just that simple and practical.

Anyone who has driven in Los Angeles during rush hour knows exactly what a bottleneck is. If you have a highway that narrows from eight lanes to four lanes, you have a bottleneck. Lots of cars are ready to go, but the road structure, the limiting factor, doesn’t allow for them to pass efficiently. (Can you believe I just described a traffic jam without profanity?)

Finding the Limiting Factor is Easier For a Business Coach than for a Business Owner

At FocalPoint we have found that detecting the limiting factor in a business’s performance is much easier for a business coach than for a business owner because the coach can look for chokeholds without being personally involved. We’re trained to use perspective as a coaching and mentoring tool.  A good coach keeps in mind that, unlike the owner, we aren’t married to the business (or to the VP of Marketing for that matter!)

In his ebook, Turbostrategy (contact us to receive a free copy) Brian Tracy suggests that only 20% of all limiting factors to success exist outside of the business. That makes 80% of the problems internal. And that makes them controllable, if they can be identified and dealt with.

So, as a business coach or management consultant, ask your client: Where does he waste most of their time? Where is there always a fire to put out? Chances are pretty good that this is where your bottleneck is going to be.

Now you just need to figure out why it’s a bottleneck. What is causing the blockage?

Brian Tracy suggests bottlenecks, or constraints, to a business can be:

• The result of an incompetent employee
• The lack of a specialist in a particular area
• An out-dated, or no longer appropriate, product
• Inefficiency in production and delivery
• Personal issues such as a change in priorities or time constraints.


 Business Coaching Strategy

Once the bad spot is found, get your client to write down, step-by-step, how the broken process “works.” Make sure it is in excruciating detail, so that anyone could repeat the process. (This exercise in itself can be enlightening in its own way for whoever is involved in that particular spot of production, and for their boss.)

Finally, sit down with your client and decide which steps don’t work. And then decide what can be done to make them work. What can make the process better, faster, easier, cheaper, smarter?

If your client is serious about reaching his goals, and if you have achieved a working level of trust with him, then he is going to make the change that is now blatantly obvious. And then, you become a SuperCoach!

Thanks for visiting this blog, I hope you enjoyed the read. Let us know if you have a question about Business Coaching, Management Consulting, or Mentoring that we can answer for you. The more you ask, the better we can teach you.  If you found this information valuable, bookmark the Business Coaching Blogs and check back for regular updates.