The Question Every Busy Business Owner Avoids
The Question Every Busy Business Owner Avoids
One of the hardest parts of running a business isn’t knowing what you could do.
It’s deciding where to focus first.
Where to direct the time and energy of your team?
Where to spend money?
What to say yes to right now and what to leave for later?
Most business owners aren’t short on options. They’re short on clarity about which move actually matters now.
Over time, I’ve found that two things should guide those decisions.
The first is where you’re trying to go - the vision and goals of the business. What are you optimising for? Is it profit alone, or are there broader outcomes that matter as well?
The second is what’s currently limiting progress. Every business has a constraint that’s quietly setting the pace for growth, capacity or results. Until that’s understood, even good decisions may not work well.
This is where things get tricky.
At any point, you’ve got a long list of priorities competing for limited resources.
Do you invest in new machinery to increase production capacity?
Implement automation to improve productivity?
Hire another salesperson?
Run a new marketing campaign?
Launch a new product or offer?
All of these can be sensible moves. And all of them can be the wrong move at the wrong time.
To help make sense of this, I use a simple diagnostic lens. This isn’t used as a checklist or to decide what to do immediately. It’s to understand where the leverage or constraint is sitting in the business.
I look at five key areas in my 5 Lenses of Leverage.
Capital: Capital looks at how money is being used in the business and whether it’s creating capacity and reducing risk, or just covering up deeper issues.
People: People looks at whether the team and key relationships are setup to work at their best or are they actually limiting progress.
Operating Model: Operating Model looks at how work actually flows through the business and whether the way work is organised helps or hinders momentum.
Automation: Automation looks at whether technology is removing friction and scaling good work practices or simply speeding up inefficiencies.
Intellectual Property: Intellectual Property looks at whether the business is building things once and reusing them over time or continually starting from scratch.
These aren’t things to work on all at once.
They’re lenses to help you see where attention and effort are most likely to make a difference right now.
In the last edition of The Move That Matters, I explored one of these pillars, Automation and why AI is best understood as an operating decision, not a technology one. It’s a good example of how pulling the right lever at the wrong time can create more noise than progress.
In future editions, I’ll unpack how to identify the real constraint in a business, why growth often feels bumpy rather than smooth, and how to think more clearly about where to focus as conditions change.
For now, the question I’ll leave you with is a simple one:
How confident are you that your current focus is actually where leverage sits?
Until next week,
Kylie.
