re: why not fix it all up front?

Last week I told you about the MSP that quit over a 20% show rate — right before their lead problem was about to become a sales problem.

One reply summed up the pushback I received:

"If you know what problems you're going to experience, why wouldn't you just solve for that in advance?"

Fair question. The answer is one of the most useful things I ever learned in business school.

It came from a novel.

In my MBA program, we got assigned a work of fiction in an operations course: The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt. It follows Alex Rogo, a plant manager with 90 days to save his factory.

The scene everyone remembers has nothing to do with the factory. Rogo takes his son's scout troop on a hike and can't figure out why the line keeps stretching out, no matter how fast the group tries to move.

The answer is Herbie — the slowest kid, buried under an overloaded pack.

The troop starts out together. Then the fast kids pull ahead, the line stretches, and Rogo keeps calling for everyone to close up. They close up, and the gaps open right back up a few minutes later.

So he tries the obvious fix: push the front harder. Move the fast kids faster. All that does is stretch the line further, because the boys ahead of Herbie can walk as fast as they want and the boys behind him can't pass him. The troop hasn't gained a step — it's just more spread out, with the same kid setting the pace at the back.

The troop can only move as fast as Herbie moves. The fast kids up front don't make the hike go faster. They just make the gaps bigger.

They finally make real progress when they move Herbie to the front and take weight out of his pack.

Because once Herbie is at the front, nobody can get ahead of him and the line can't stretch. The troop's speed is now Herbie's speed — visible, measurable, and the only number that matters. He's the constraint in the system.

And when they identify the core constraint, they start looking for ways to alleviate it. When they pull weight out of his pack, Herbie speeds up. The whole troop speeds up with him.

Making Herbie faster is the only thing that makes the hike faster. Every other adjustment just moves boys around inside a line that arrives at the same time.

Same with the factory. Same with your business: every system grows to its constraint and no further.

Your business has one core constraint right now. One. And any effort you pour into anything else while that constraint stands doesn't produce growth — it produces fast hikers stretching out the line.

I'd been managing this way on instinct for years. The book gave it a name: the Theory of Constraints.

Ahead of a Vegas meeting for a mastermind we're in with Alex Hormozi's team, we got sent a video and told to watch it before we showed up.

It's Hormozi telling the story of a quarterly leadership meeting at one of his own companies. That video took my instinct on this and turned it into conviction.

He's got his whole leadership team flown in for two days to set goals for the coming quarter. His sales manager stands up and commits to adding six outbound reps.

Reasonable goal. Everyone nods. Everyone writes it down.

Except Hormozi had heard that exact goal the quarter before. And the quarter before that.

For context: each outbound rep is worth roughly $2M a year to that business. Six reps is $12M of top line, sitting on a whiteboard for the third straight quarter.

So he stopped the meeting and asked the manager what happened last quarter.

The answer: they hired some reps, but lost about as many. Ended the quarter right where they started.

And the quarter before that? Same thing.

So how are you going to solve it this time?

"I don't know."

That's when it clicked for him. He'd spent two quarters leaning on the sales manager, and the sales manager was never the problem.

So instead of pushing harder, he traced the system backward — turned to his HR director and started working the front of the pipeline.

How many qualified candidates are you handing the sales manager each week? One.

How many interviews does it take you to produce that one? Five.

And how many of those finalists does the manager sit with to actually hire somebody? Four.

Twenty people into the top of the funnel to get one rep out the bottom. Call it one new hire a month.

Then the other side of the equation: that role churned about 20% a quarter. Round numbers, a team of ten loses two people every quarter.

Three in, two out. Net gain of one rep per quarter, against a goal of six.

The sales manager could have worked eighty-hour weeks, run flawless interviews, and coached like a champion. He still would have missed. The math didn't allow anything else.

The constraint was never the sales manager. It was the number of candidates getting to him in the first place.

And the fix was almost embarrassingly small. Hormozi asked the HR director why she was running one-on-one interviews for this role. She said she assumed she had to.

Nobody had ever told her otherwise. That assumption was the $12M.

They moved to group interviews — five sessions in an hour, pulling the one or two people worth onboarding and moving them fast. A goal that had been frozen for two quarters came loose almost immediately.

That's what a misdiagnosed constraint costs. Not effort — everyone in that room was working hard. Order. They were solving the wrong problem first.

Back to the question, because it deserves a straight answer.

"If you know what problems you're going to experience, why wouldn't you just solve for that in advance?"

Solving the constraint you have doesn't mean zero advance work. When we build outbound engines, there's a set of failure points we've hit so many times we handle them before the first dial: a clean list, a real offer, a tested script, a booking and confirmation funnel.

That's the 80% — the constraints you can predict because they show up in every build.

The last 20% only reveals itself under live fire. And it arrives one constraint at a time.

Trying to pre-solve all of it does three things, all bad.

It dilutes your focus and your resources, which lowers the odds you solve anything well. It slows the whole build down. And it has you burning weeks on problems that never actually occur.

You solve the constraint you have, not the constraints you imagine.

Then the constraint moves — lead flow gets fixed and it shifts to your sales process, that gets fixed and it shifts to delivery — and you move with it. One problem, solved in the right order, while everyone else works on everything at once and wonders why nothing changes.

My question for you this week: what's the one constraint your business is growing up against right now?

Leads. Show rate. Unqualified opportunities. Close rate. Onboarding. Retention. Referrals.

Not the 27 problems you can list on a whiteboard. The one thing the other 26 are stacking up behind.

Or, to steal from Gary Keller in The ONE Thing: "What's the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"

Because until you name your Herbie, every hour you spend on the rest of the line is just speed the hike can't use.

Adios,

Ray

P.S. — The Goal is the only assigned reading from my MBA I'd tell you to actually go buy. It reads like an airport thriller and teaches more operations than any textbook I've touched.