I spent most of 2017 working 50-60 hour weeks.
Revenue stayed flat.
I had a content calendar, a launch pipeline, three half-built funnels, a podcast I was trying to grow, and a product idea I kept tinkering with on weekends. I was busy. And I had almost nothing to show for it.
If you’re running a six or seven-figure business right now, there’s a decent chance you recognise that feeling. You’re not lazy. You’re not stupid. You’re just spread across too many things that all feel important.
Most founders confuse activity with progress. And the cost of that confusion isn’t what you’d expect. According to Forbes, devoting half your focus to something makes you one-tenth as successful at it, not half. Split focus doesn’t halve your results. It decimates them. Not 2x the cost. 10x.
That means every “side project” you’re running, every initiative you’re half-committed to, is silently destroying the thing that actually matters.
So the question of how to know what to focus on in your business isn’t really about discipline or time management. It’s a diagnostic problem.
The real question is: which single thing deserves all of your focus right now?
I’m going to walk you through a framework that combines Jay Abraham’s three growth levers with Gary Keller’s focusing question, and stress-test it against three real businesses: a £750K cohort business trying to double, a language learning company (mine) that scaled to tens of millions, and a £2.5M training business with stalling growth.
By the end, you’ll have a repeatable process for diagnosing your own constraint instead of guessing.
It starts with a surprisingly simple equation.
Step 1: Map Your Revenue Using Jay Abraham’s 3 Growth Levers
Most business owners have never done this maths, and it changes everything.
If you improve three specific areas of your business by just 10% each, your revenue doesn’t grow by 30%. It grows by 33%. And if you improve each by 26%, your revenue doubles.
Not because of some magic trick. Because of compounding.
Jay Abraham (who’s generated over $75 billion in client revenue across 10,000+ companies) boiled every business on earth down to three levers:
- Customers: the number of people who buy from you (leads multiplied by conversion rate)
- Average Transaction Value: how much each customer spends per purchase (price, upsells, bundles)
- Purchase Frequency: how often each customer buys again (repeat purchases, retention, renewals)
Your total revenue is simply Customers x Average Transaction Value x Purchase Frequency. Every growth initiative you’ve ever run, whether you realised it or not, was pulling on one of these levers.
The maths is worth seeing. Say your current numbers are all at 1.0 (baseline). A 10% lift across all three: 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1 = 1.33. That’s a 33% revenue increase from three modest improvements. The compounding does the work.
Push each to 26%: 1.26 x 1.26 x 1.26 = 2.0. Revenue doubles. From three 26% improvements, not one heroic 100% push.
This is why founders who obsess over “doubling traffic” are playing the game on hard mode.
Now, the diagnostic move. Grab a pen. Write down your current numbers for each lever. Even rough estimates work. Then ask yourself three things:
- Which lever is weakest?
- Which has the most room for improvement?
- Which one am I completely ignoring?
Most business owners default to “get more traffic” when they want to grow. That’s only one lever, and it’s often the hardest, most expensive one to move.
The three-lever approach reframes what to focus on in your business. Maybe you don’t need more customers. Maybe you need each customer to spend more, or to buy more often.
Research from Bain & Company shows that a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25-95%. That’s the Frequency lever doing its work. Most founders never even look at it.
I’ve written about the 3 levers that 2x a business in 12 months in more detail elsewhere. But knowing the three levers isn’t enough. You need to know which one to attack first.
Step 2: Identify Your Single Constraint
Most business owners pick the wrong lever. Not because they’re unintelligent, but because of a specific cognitive bias.
They pick the one they’re good at.
Alex Hormozi puts it simply: every business grows only up to its constraint. Fix the constraint and the whole system grows. Fix something that isn’t the constraint and nothing changes. Zero improvement. You’ve just burnt three months optimising something that didn’t matter.
This is Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints applied to your business.
Hormozi tells a story about a company that lost millions because they blamed their sales manager for slow growth. They pressured him, threatened him, nearly fired him. Turns out the real bottleneck was the hiring pipeline, which was sending him one qualified candidate per quarter instead of the six he needed. They were optimising the wrong thing. It cost them years.
So how do you find the real constraint? Three diagnostic questions:
- Which lever has been flat or declining for the past 6-12 months?
- If you could magically double one lever overnight, which would have the biggest impact on revenue?
- Which lever are you avoiding, or have you delegated without oversight?
That third question is where the truth usually hides.
I call it the competence trap. Product people build more products. Marketing people run more campaigns. Engineers optimise what’s already working. We all gravitate toward the lever we’re best at, because it feels productive.
But the constraint is almost always the neglected lever. The one that makes you slightly uncomfortable. The one you keep meaning to get to but never quite do.
If you’re a brilliant product creator with inconsistent lead flow, your constraint probably isn’t the product. If you’re a marketing machine with no backend offers, your constraint probably isn’t traffic.
Look at your own business honestly. Which lever are you spending the least time on? Which one, if someone forced you to fix it this quarter, would make you slightly nervous?
That’s probably your constraint.
Step 3: Stress-Test With the Focusing Question
One question, asked properly, can collapse months of strategic uncertainty into a single clear action.
Gary Keller’s focusing question goes like this: “What is the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
“The ONE thing” forces singularity. No hedging with two or three. “Such that by doing it” demands a causal chain, not just a task. And “everything else becomes easier or unnecessary” is the real test. It filters out busywork and surfaces only the moves with cascading impact.
It doesn’t ask “what should I do next?” That gives you a to-do list. It asks what single move would make multiple other problems easier or irrelevant. It forces you to find the domino.
Keller uses a neat metaphor here. A single domino can topple another domino 50% larger than itself. Line them up right, and a 2-inch domino eventually topples something that could reach the moon.
Now, apply this to your constraint from Step 2.
If your constraint is lead generation, the focusing question isn’t “how do I get more leads?” That’s too broad. It’s: “What is the ONE thing I can do for lead generation such that everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”
Maybe it’s hiring a YouTube editor so you can publish consistently. Maybe it’s building one high-converting lead magnet instead of five mediocre ones. Maybe it’s fixing your landing page before you spend another pound on ads.
The answer should feel uncomfortably specific. If it’s vague (“improve my marketing”), you haven’t gone deep enough. Ask the question again, narrower.
This works at every scale. Popsa, a photobook app, changed a single tagline to “Photo Books in Five Minutes” and quadrupled their install conversion rate. One specific action, massive cascading impact. That’s what you’re looking for.
The validation check is simple. If your answer makes multiple other problems easier or irrelevant, you’ve found it. If it only solves one narrow problem, keep asking.
You’re not looking for the biggest domino. You’re looking for the first one in the sequence, the one that tips the next, which tips the next.
The next three steps show what this looks like in real businesses.
Step 4: Case Study – Doubling a £750K Cohort Business Through Lead Gen
John had four plausible growth strategies. Three of them would have wasted his year.
John runs a cohort-based business. £750K a year. He wanted to double to £1.5M. On paper, he had four reasonable options:
- Run more cohorts per year
- Build a backend offer for existing customers
- Raise prices
- Invest heavily in lead generation
All four sounded logical. But when we ran them through the framework, something became clear.
More cohorts? He’d need more leads to fill them. Without a bigger pipeline, extra cohorts just meant half-empty rooms.
A backend offer? Promising, but he didn’t have enough customers yet to make it worthwhile. Backend revenue at that stage would be a rounding error.
Raise prices? Worth testing. But a price increase on its own wasn’t going to bridge a £750K gap. It’s a tactical move, not a strategic lever.
Every path traced back to the same place: lead generation.
John’s offer was proven. His delivery was strong. His constraint was that not enough people knew he existed.
So we applied the focusing question. What is the ONE thing John can do for lead gen such that everything else becomes easier?
The answer: build a YouTube team.
Not “do more marketing.” Not “try five channels.” One channel, done properly, with a team behind it. (If you’re curious about what that transition actually feels like, I wrote about why building a team is the hardest part of scaling to 7 figures.) More leads would fill more cohorts, justify a backend offer, and give him pricing power.
One focus. Not four.
Six months later, the pipeline was growing. A year in, those “other three strategies” were suddenly viable, because the underlying constraint had been removed. The backend offer made sense now that he had the customer volume. The price increase stuck because demand was higher.
None of that would have happened if he’d split his energy across all four options from day one.
If you have a proven offer but an inconsistent pipeline, this is probably your pattern too. Fix the constraint first. The other strategies will still be there when the pipeline is flowing.
Step 5: Case Study – Scaling to Tens of Millions by Expanding the Product Range
This business had plenty of traffic and a proven product. More traffic was the obvious next move.
It was also the wrong one.
The business was my own, StoryLearning. High six figures at the time, strong organic traffic, one flagship product that converted well. The instinct was to pour fuel on what was working. Get more eyeballs. Scale the traffic.
But when I mapped the three levers, something didn’t add up.
The Customers lever was already strong. People were finding us. They were buying.
Purchase Frequency was the problem. We had one product. Customers bought it, loved it, and then had nothing else to buy. We were leaving money on the table with every single customer who walked through the door.
The constraint wasn’t getting more people in. It was having nothing else to sell them once they arrived.
The focusing question made it obvious: build more products for the same audience.
Not new audiences. Not new channels. New products for the people who already trusted us.
That single shift in focus is what took the business from high six figures to tens of millions. Not by doubling traffic. By giving existing customers more reasons to come back.
We didn’t touch the Customers lever. We dramatically improved both Average Transaction Value (more products per customer) and Purchase Frequency (more reasons to return). Two levers moved. One strategic decision.
This is your pattern if you have strong traffic and a proven product but only one thing to sell. If you’re pre-product-market-fit, skip this and go back to Step 4.
Step 6: Case Study – Reinventing Stale Marketing in a £2.5M Business
Rachel had a great product, a solid team, and marketing that had been on autopilot for five years. Revenue was plateauing and nobody could figure out why.
Rachel’s training business was doing £2.5M. The product was genuinely good. Her team was capable and executing well. On the surface, everything looked healthy.
But the numbers told a different story. Growth had stalled. New customer acquisition was slowing.
When we ran the diagnostic, product wasn’t the issue. Delivery wasn’t the issue. The team wasn’t the issue.
Marketing was the issue.
Not because they weren’t doing marketing. They were. The same marketing they’d been doing for five years. Same messaging. Same angles. Same playbooks. Rachel had delegated it years ago and stepped away. Her voice, the thing that had built the brand in the first place, had disappeared from the marketing entirely.
The focusing question: what is the ONE thing Rachel can do for customer acquisition such that everything else becomes easier?
Reinvent the marketing infrastructure with her voice back at the centre.
New messaging. New creative. Rachel’s personality and perspective woven back into everything the audience sees.
This is a pattern I see constantly in businesses above £1M. The marketing that got you here won’t get you there. What worked three years ago has gone stale, and the founder has stepped so far back that the marketing has become generic.
This is the difference between an early-stage constraint and a growth-stage constraint. Early stage, you’re usually missing a lever entirely (like John’s lead gen). Growth stage, a lever that used to work has gone stale and needs rebuilding from the foundation up.
FAQ
What if I have multiple constraints at the same time?
You don’t. One is always more binding than the others. Run the focusing question on each candidate. The one whose solution makes the other problems smaller or irrelevant is your true constraint. Start there.
How long should I focus on one thing before switching?
Minimum 90 days. Most strategic moves take a full quarter to show real results. Switching after six weeks because you haven’t seen a transformation yet is one of the most common mistakes I see. Commit for a quarter, measure honestly, then reassess.
What if I pick the wrong lever?
Still better than splitting focus across all three. A focused bet on the wrong lever teaches you something concrete. Scattered effort across three levers teaches you nothing, because you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t.
If you want someone to walk through this diagnostic with you and help you identify your one thing, that’s what I do inside my mentorship programme.
