In 3 minutes, spot the people, process, and profit gaps that are silently capping your growth.

Attacking Your Weakest Link: How to Actually Fix What's Broken in Your Business

If you are like most business owners you could be walking around with a giant blind spot about what's actually broken in your company.

You're hyper-focused on sales and marketing because that seems sexy or it’s what you’re good at, while your team is quietly imploding. Or you're obsessively refining your operations manual while your pricing strategy is hemorrhaging profit. This isn't just inefficient—it's borderline self-sabotage.

Here's the unpleasant truth: businesses get stuck in black holes because owners refuse to acknowledge their weakest link and then fix it.

I've seen it countless times. The owner who can't fire the loyal-but-now overwhelmed employee who's been there since day one. The founder who won't invest in better people because they're "too expensive." The CEO who keeps tinkering with what's already working instead of fixing what's actually broken.

Finding Your Weakest Link

In our Business Maturity Assessment, we evaluate six critical factors:

1. Personal Vision - What you actually want from your life and your business (versus what you think you should want)

2. Business Strategy - Do you have a plan in place that prioritizes your goals and the resources needed to achieve them?

3. Team - Do you have the people in place that can accelerate that plan?

4. Sales & Marketing - How you bring in business and close deals

5. Operations - How well you execute and satisfy customers

6. Finance - How you measure and optimize the money

Here's my philosophy: start with where it hurts most.

If your assessment reveals finance is your weakest area, why the hell would you start by overhauling your sales process? If your team is a disaster, why would you focus on implementing new reporting metrics?

The methodology is straightforward:

1. Take the assessment (it takes less than 6 minutes) or find another that looks across all the areas of your business

2. Identify your strongest area (nice job, pat yourself on the back)

3. Pinpoint your weakest area (this is what you attack first)

4. Develop a focused plan to address ONLY that area first

This isn't rocket science. It's triage. When you're bleeding out from a major artery, you don't start by putting a band-aid on a paper cut.

Why We Avoid The Real Problem

Business owners are masterful avoiders. We'll spend endless hours fixing non-urgent issues because the real problems are uncomfortable:

• Firing people sucks

• Raising prices feels uncomfortable and scary

• Acknowledging your operations are a mess means facing your own disorganization

• Realizing your vision is unclear means you've been aimlessly driving the bus

It's easier to tinker with your website (again) than have difficult conversations. It's more comfortable to blame "the market" than accept your business model needs an overhaul.

From Assessment to Action

Taking an assessment is easy. Acting on it is hard. But here's the thing about addressing your weakest link: the results are dramatic.

When you finally fix what's actually broken, everything else gets easier. Revenue increases. Stress decreases. The business becomes more valuable. And most importantly, your day-to-day life improves.

Just last week, I was coaching an owner in a stagnant industry where new leads are scarce. The standard consultant playbook suggested pouring money into Google or Meta ads. But in a non-growing market, the cost per acquisition skyrockets as everyone fights for the same limited pool of prospects.

Instead of burning cash on expensive ads, we discovered gold hiding in plain sight: 200 former customers who had drifted away during the pandemic and some operational hiccups that had since been resolved. These weren’t cold leads – they were relationships gone dormant, waiting to be rekindled.

We prioritized a reactivation campaign that the sales team is implementing now. We just increased the company’s leads by over 30% in 5 minutes. That’s how powerful facing a blind spot can be.

The Tough Love Approach

Look, as business owners, we don't need more cheerleading. We need truth. If your business is stuck, it's probably not because you haven't read enough books or attended enough conferences. It's because you're avoiding something painful.

Take the assessment. Face the weakest link. And then actually do something about it.

The assessment is free. The follow-up call is free. My advice might be uncomfortable, but that's the point. Growth lives on the other side of discomfort.

So what's it going to be? Another year stuck in the same business black hole? Or are you ready to attack what's actually holding you back?

Your call.

Keep Growing,

Alan