Free tools
Every bottleneck has one right next move. Three questions find it.
Playable right here. No email, no download, nothing to fill in.
Every bottleneck in your business has one right next move out of four. The hard part is not doing the work. It is knowing which one before you spend money on the wrong fix.
Your answers stay in your browser, the sort itself sends us nothing and stores nothing. Like every page on this site, this one loads our analytics if you've accepted cookies.
The four outcomes
One rule first you cannot hand off or automate what lives only in your head.
The Bottleneck Sorter is a three-question test that tells you which of four moves a specific bottleneck in your business needs: automate it, hand it off, split it, or write it down first. The sort takes about thirty seconds per bottleneck, it runs entirely in your browser, and it asks for nothing.
Not everything can be automated, and that is the part most owners get sold wrong. Work that changes case by case needs a person's judgment. Work that repeats the same way every time can go to a system. Telling those two apart is most of the decision, and it is what this tool is for.
The one rule before anything
You cannot hand off or automate what lives only in your head.
Right now your bottleneck probably exists as a habit: steps you do on autopilot and have never written down. That is exactly why it cannot leave you. So every bottleneck starts the same way: get it out of your head and onto paper. The messy ten-minute version counts.
You are not writing a manual. You are making the invisible visible. That one act usually cuts the task's time on its own, because you spot steps to drop, and it makes the pile obvious.
The Bottleneck Sorter
Pick one bottleneck and hold it in mind: the estimate, the scheduling, the follow-up that only happens when you remember. Then answer three questions.
1. How often does that land on you?
2. Same steps every time, or does it change with judgment?
3. If you wrote the steps down, could someone with two weeks' training do this?
That was one bottleneck. It's a quick example of the method, not the whole job.
Want it written up so you can act on it? The Bottleneck Finder runs the same three questions and builds your playbook from the answers: the move, and a fill-in page for the ten-minute write-down.
It's a consultation you run yourself. That's the point: nobody gets to sell you something you don't need. Us included.
What each answer means
All four outcomes, in full, so this page is worth reading even if you never touch a button.
- Automate, same steps, someone's attention
Work that runs the same way every time and that a person with two weeks' training could do. It does not have to run through you: sometimes a system takes it, sometimes a person is the automation, and someone still approves the result. Start where it is cheapest: check whether the tools you already pay for talk to each other. One condition: if it only comes up a few times a year, write it down and move on.
- Hand off, judgment, but not yours
Work that changes case by case, where someone else could carry the judgment with the steps in front of them. Hand over the process, not the loose task. 'Handle the scheduling' bounces back. 'Here are the seven steps, here is what good looks like, here is who to ask when it is unclear' sticks. If it bounces back once in the first month, that is a missing step, not a bad hire.
- Split, judgment that is genuinely yours
Keep the one decision that actually needs you. Everything wrapped around it leaves your desk: the gathering, the chasing, the typing, the sending, the follow-up. One condition: you cannot split what you have not written down. Write the whole thing out first, then draw a line around the part that is really you.
- Same steps, still yours, write it down first
When the steps really are identical, what makes it 'only me' usually is not skill. It is that nobody has ever seen them written. Ten messy minutes (a list, not a manual) then run the three questions again. The last answer can change.
A real sort
What this looked like for a Kansas City contractor
An award-winning flooring and remodeling company in the Kansas City area hand-built every estimate: measure the rooms, do the square-footage math, then retype every line into a second program.
They wrote the steps down. The moment they did, the bottleneck was obvious. It was not the measuring or the math, it was the retyping. Same motion every time, so it went in the Automate pile. They connected two programs they were already paying for. Staff enter measurements once, the system builds the estimate, and a person approves every one before it goes out.
Run it again
You keep this one. Run it on the next bottleneck, and the one after that. The sort takes thirty seconds; the writing-down takes ten minutes, and that is the half nobody can do for you.
Do that enough times and the business stops running through you, one sorted bottleneck at a time. If you want the longer version of that argument, including a five-day method for finding the bottlenecks in the first place, it is in the owner's guide.
Want a second set of eyes on your sort?
That is exactly what the Architecture Assessment is: you point, we look, you decide. 60 to 90 minutes, no pitch, and you keep the written map either way.
$250. You leave with what's slowing you down, what it costs, and what the fix is. It credits in full toward the first work you hire us for.