I just built an ATM that only gives out coins. I don’t know why no one’s thought of it before: it just makes cents!

Hey! Andres here,

Welcome to the networking desk & SORRY ABOUT THAT JOKE!

Father's Day is near, and I had to do it, at least one dad will have to appreciate that one.

Here’s what we got this week:

• Business Bottlenecks + Where to invest in your business?

• Events from the community

Alright, let’s do this.

“Lean forward moment” of the week - 🍾 Business Bottlenecks + Where to invest in your business?

If you were to get an extra $1000 … $10,000 … $100,000 where would you invest that in your business?

I feel like the answer is not as easy as it sounds, after all, more money anywhere in the business is good, right?

WEEELLL… Not if you are an optimizer like me, lol.

How do you make the most of that money? What area really needs it?

For this, I learned recently, you need to understand the “Theory of Constraints”, which goes a bit like this:

If you keep working on the same area of your business (or investing in it) you can only improve it so much, and eventually it stops making a big impact on your business. It’s like going to the gym and only doing arm day.

Instead of muscles in our business, we have the following:

Marketing → Sales → Delivery → Retainer

Now, the way you identify which area of weakness you have is by asking the following from left to right: “If I were to double this area of business, will the business break?” if not, then move into the next one.

Ex. Can you handle double the leads? (outreach) Can you handle double the sales? Can you handle double the projects? Can you handle double of retained customers?

IMPORTANT: Sometimes multiple areas can be broken, so target one and then move to the next.

A business owner friend of mine told me about how his business was not going well.

They were growing quickly, so much so that he had to hire quick and thought the best way to scale was selling more things, so he started to add more offers to his business.

However, the sales team was not trained correctly, making them lose leads.

They focused on delivery rather than sales (the natural next bottleneck) thankfully they were able to understand their problem, and are restructuring the business better now.

I like to have these conversations with my clients even before I do websites for them.

My services are part of that first step, marketing. But because of my personality, I like to understand if this will actually drive an impact on their business.

Sometimes a good indicator of wanting “more leads” might be a constraint in another area of business, many times people think they need more leads, but they need to retain more clients, always chasing the next deal is not ideal.

Personally, I have been struggling with delivery, I thought my issue was leads, as the leads I get are not predictable. But I notice the following:

If I were to double my efforts to get leads (by doing more of what I do, in this case: events, ads for this newsletter, or improving the core offer) I would not be able to handle it because my team depends on me too much to deliver, so I took a step back and focused more on training which has been my priority in the past few weeks, I can tell you that I already feel more relieved by doing a better job at training and providing SOPs for my team and contractors.

Hopefully this can help you! Look forward to meeting you guys around again once I am done with all this training, haha.

🖥️ Convert more website users into clients

🗓️ Now, the events…

How was today’s newsletter?

Feedback helps us improve :)

• 💖Loved it!

• 🥱Average

• 💢Do better.

Thank you for reading! Quick thing before I go:

1. If you are new or would like to read older posts, check out this page. There is a backlog of previous weeks of “The Networking Desk”

2. Know someone who would benefit from this newsletter? Be sure to share it with them! 📩 (just copy the link or forward this email) I will keep putting out great newsletters for them and for you. That’s a promise.

See you next week.

- Andres Inciarte