How to Find the Bottleneck in Your Coaching Business

You want to scale your coaching business, but you don't know what's missing or what's stopping you from getting to the next level. In almost every case I've seen, the answer is one thing: a single bottleneck in your coaching business that limits everything else. In this post I'm going to break down how to find that bottleneck with your numbers, why there's only ever one at a time, and what to do once you find it.

Picture your business as a pipe

I can't tell you what your biggest problem is without ever seeing your business. It's always going to have nuance. So the best way I can describe it is with a pipe.

Water goes in on one side and comes out the other. As of right now, something in that pipe is leaking. That leak is the reason you can't make more money. And so the job is to figure out where the leak is.

Want to go even deeper? Watch the full video.

Step 1: Get your numbers before you do anything else

If your plan is "I'm just going to work really hard and it'll be all good," it's going to be very difficult to scale. Maybe you can shoot from the hip and get lucky. But if you want the highest chance of growing, you need the stats. Otherwise it's a bit like rolling the dice.

Here's an example of why. Take two numbers:

• CAC is your customer acquisition cost. How much it costs you to get one new client.
• LTV is lifetime value. The total amount a client pays you.

Honestly, the better number to use is lifetime gross profit, which is what's left after it costs you to deliver.

I worked with a coach who was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars and didn't realize this. Let's say his CAC was around $2,000. A client paid $10,000. Sounds great. But he had a big team, and between people and software it cost about $8,000 to deliver. That leaves $2,000 of profit. So he was spending $2,000 to make $2,000 back. That's not a good trade.

That's why so much scaling advice is wrong for a lot of coaches. People say "just increase your ad spend." But increasing ad spend isn't always the right move. Sometimes the margins aren't there yet, and you need to fix something else first so you can scale responsibly. If you're not sure which numbers to track, I laid them out in the metrics that matter in a coaching business.

Step 2: Understand that there is only ever one constraint

Here's a second picture. Imagine you're on a highway. One lane shuts down, then another, and now you're down to one lane before it opens back up. You could make another part of that highway four lanes wide. It doesn't matter. Every car is still limited by that one lane.

That one lane is your constraint. And here's the thing. At any one point in your business, there's only ever one. Yes, other parts aren't great either. But everything is held back by that one piece, because that's where things come to a standstill.

The tricky part is that we all have things we like to work on. And so we tend to avoid the constraint, because it's usually the thing we're not good at. We'd rather build another system or polish something that's already working. It feels productive, but it's not the thing that needs to be done.

Once you fix the constraint, a new one shows up somewhere else. That's normal. As you grow, you keep finding the next one.

Step 3: Walk your funnel stage by stage

When most people say "scaling," they mean selling more. That's the front end. There's also the back end: can you actually deliver, and does the profit per client make sense compared to what you pay to get them? Look at both. But for the front end, walk through each stage of your funnel in order:

• Ad: what percent of people click?
• Landing page: what percent fill out the application?
• Booking page: what percent book a call?
• Show: what percent show up?
• Close: what percent buy?

At each stage, ask one question. Is this above or below the KPI, the target number it should hit? The stage that is furthest below where it should be is your constraint.

Step 4: Attack the constraint until it isn't one anymore

Once you've found it, you put all your attention on it.

Say the click rate on your ads is really low, like 0.5%. That's a problem. So what can you do? Make a better creative. Try a better angle. Write a better hook. Improve the copy. There are all these different things you can try. Now you go after those with aggressive action until the click rate is no longer your constraint. Then you look at the numbers again and find the next one. If ads are your constraint, my Meta ads cheat sheet for coaches will help. If it's people not showing up, start with how to double your booking show rate.

That's the whole point of having the stats. They tell you where to focus.

What usually stops coaches from scaling

The thing stopping most coaches from scaling is that they don't know what the constraint is. If you do know it, great, because now you can go get help with it. And if you don't even know what the KPI should be for that stage, that's also part of understanding your numbers. That's when it makes sense to work with a coach or consultant, or buy a course, to learn what to do next.

In my experience it's usually not a lack of knowledge. It's a lack of focus on the one thing. And I'll be the first to put my hand up and say that's what holds me back in my own business too. I'm working on my own constraint right now.

So here's my challenge to you. If you want to take your business to the next level, do the stuff that sucks. Do the stuff you're probably not good at. Find the one constraint, then attack it. It's not the exciting stuff. But the coaches I've watched grow the most didn't do it by working on whatever felt best. They looked at the numbers, and the numbers told them what was missing.

FAQ

How do I know what's holding my coaching business back?

Track each stage of your funnel, from ad clicks to closes, and compare each one to its target. The stage that is furthest below target is your bottleneck.

Should I just spend more on ads to scale?

Not always. Check your cost to get a client against the profit each client brings in after delivery. If the gap is thin, more ad spend only makes the problem bigger.

Can a business have more than one bottleneck?

Lots of things can be imperfect at once, but only one is the main limit at any given time. Fix that one, and the next one shows up.

If you want help putting this in place, apply here: td.coach/coaches-apply