Having trouble hitting a particular business goal?

Here’s one possible reason…

You haven’t fixed the weakest link in the chain.

A business is just a connected set of systems—a marketing system, a sales system, a product development system, a recruiting system. And according to the Theory of Constraints (TOC), every system has a constraint or bottleneck.

Imagine a system as being like a metal chain. Every chain has a weakest link that limits its ability to accomplish a goal. If the goal is to lift something that weighs 500 pounds, but its weakest link can only handle 20 pounds, then the most that chain will be able to lift will be—20 pounds!

In other words, there’s no point in strengthening the other links until you’ve found and fixed the weakest link. Once that’s fixed, there will be the next weakest link to focus on, and then the next.

Now let’s take our chain analogy and apply it to a common business problem like, “Our marketing isn’t generating enough quality sales leads.”

Your “marketing” is a chain made up of individual links (website traffic, messaging, CTAs, etc.). And your ability to achieve your goal (generating enough quality sales leads) will always be limited by the weakest link in that chain.

If your weakest link is “lack of quality traffic to your website and social channels,” it won’t do you much good to spend all your time perfecting your messaging and CTAs.

Until you fix your traffic problem, your results will always be limited by that weakest link.

What will you do today to apply the Theory of Constraints to your own business problems?

Will you look for the weakest links, and start focusing your attention on fixing those first?