Bottlenecks

By Isaiah O’Connor

Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam? A big one, like on a major highway that runs through a large city. You know the good ones where you are parked on the highway next to the speed limit sign that mocks you with the limit of 70 miles per hour. If you make progress at all its only inches or if your really lucky, feet at a time.

Then all of a sudden you get past whatever the cause was, the major off-ramp, the accident or toll booth/bridge, and the traffic all of a sudden parts like Moses and the Red Sea and your free, quickly forgetting the stress and frustration of the mess behind you. You have just experienced a bottleneck.

Sometimes we can experience this in our life and our business.  Sometimes you do not realize it at first, but then you start to notice everything slowing down around you. When this happens, it is good to take a step back and look at the big picture.  What you are looking for is the one or two things that are slowing everything up. Once you have identified the bottleneck you need to figure out a way to deal with it.

Sometimes, like in a traffic jam, you will not be able to do anything about it directly. In these cases, you need to find a way around it.  In other cases, you may be able to do something to directly deal with it such as buying new equipment, changing a process or getting some training.

For me, it was not having my Norwegian drivers license. When I first moved to Norway somehow there was some confusion on the rules regarding switching over your U.S. drivers license for a Norwegian one. Because of this, we missed the deadline which meant that I could not simply switch over my license. Instead, I was required to take a full drivers course and spend a lot of money we did not have on it.

This was a huge bottleneck in both my life and my business, but due to the high costs involved, we delayed it. The longer we delayed the more apparent it became that this one thing was the biggest bottleneck in my life and my business, and even my marriage.  My wife has spent many of her days off driving me around for my business, thus adding unnecessary stress to our marriage.

I finally started to realize how much this was affecting everything and started to try in earnest to get my license.  I finally got it and it felt like a massive weight was lifted off my shoulders, my wife is less stressed and I am now able to spend more time on the things I need to get done.

So when you find yourself slowing down, try to see if you have a bottleneck somewhere and attack it with all your worth, and never give up no matter what hardships you face or mistakes you make.

On that note, my next post will be about a person who faced a lot of hardship and made some massive mistakes in his life and yet never gave up and changed the course of history.

Your friendly neighborhood entrepreneur,
Isaiah O’Connor CBDO
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