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bottleneck

The Bottleneck Snapshot

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How the business is steered

I could describe it, but nothing records it

It is written down, and I can name something I moved off it recently

Do you have a written list that separates the tasks only you can do from the tasks that simply ended up with you?

Several run at once, and none of them leads

I could name the lead one, but the reasoning has never been set down

It is written down with the reason, and it matches where my time and money went last quarter

Can you name the one kind of customer, or the one way of selling, that most of your income comes from?

No — the opportunity arrived first, and the reasoning was built around it

Some criteria existed informally, applied loosely

Yes — and I can state the ones I used last time

The last time you considered a new market, product or service, had you already written down the rules for saying yes or no before it came up?

Several things would stall, or it would effectively stop

It would run as normal — and that has actually happened, not just in theory

If you were unreachable for 48 hours — no phone, no email — what would happen to the work already in progress?

Habit — there is no real reason any more

The rules exist in my head, but are not written down

Nobody else has the skill or experience yet

Nothing would wait — it runs without me

No — and I have not thought through what losing it would mean

Roughly, but I have never worked out what I would do about it

I can state the percentage now, and the response to losing it exists

Do you know what percentage of your income comes from your single biggest customer or sales channel?

How the work runs

No — I know margin at whole-business level only

Approximately — it was last worked out some time ago

Yes, from memory, current to within a month

Can you say what profit is left on your best-selling line, after the costs that only exist because you sold it — without opening a spreadsheet?

Not measured — problems surface when a customer complains

Tracked loosely, or for some work and not others

I can state the figure from memory, current to last month

Do you know what percentage of last month's work went out on time and with nothing missing?

No — it would mean reconciling several spreadsheets or systems

One main place, with known gaps people work around

One place, trusted without checking it against anything else

If you needed a number like last month's sales or what you're owed, is there one place you'd trust to get it?

No — the process lives in people's heads

Partly documented, with the difficult parts left out

Fully documented, and someone has actually run it from the documentation

Could someone new do the main work you sell, working only from written instructions?

No fallback — it would be handled from scratch

An alternative in mind, never contacted or priced

A named alternative, priced, with someone who has spoken to them

If the supplier or partner you depend on most disappeared next week, is your first move written down?

How it is sold

The two figures are not known together, so nothing has been decided from them

Known roughly — they shape opinion rather than decisions

I can name a decision in the last quarter that those numbers drove

Do you know what it costs you to win one new customer, and what that customer is worth in their first year?

They have accumulated — no single decision sits behind them

Set deliberately once, adjusted piecemeal since

There is a record of when pricing was last set deliberately, and on what basis