Year End Review Part 3: Choose the Next Hard Step
There’s a scene in the opening book of my all-time favorite series. The heroine is trying to save the prince using magic. She starts with all the “simple” things—protective charms, herbs, spells she already knows—and exhausts herself doing them. By the time she finally gets to the real work—the spell that requires her to go deep into her own magic and face what she’s been avoiding—she’s already depleted.
I think about that scene constantly in business.
Everyone I know is busy. Rewriting sales pages. Organizing systems. Drafting posts. Optimizing tools. Getting another certification or taking a new training.
But when I ask, “What’s the actual bottleneck in your business right now? What’s the hard thing you’re avoiding?” most people go quiet.
Because it’s much easier to stay busy with the “charms and herbs”—the things that feel productive—than to face the work that needs to be done head-on.
Here’s the truth: The bottleneck in your business is rarely the thing you’re spending the most time on.
It’s usually the thing you’re avoiding.
And what you’re avoiding often depends on your stage.
The Hard Things You’re Probably Avoiding
(Not sure your stage of business? Take the quiz).
If You’re in Seed/Sprout: The Hard Things Are Relational and Visible
Many Seed/Sprout businesses think they need another lead magnet, a better website, a perfect sales page, or more refined pricing.
Those things can matter later—but they’re rarely the bottleneck early on.
The bottleneck is usually one (or more) of these three hard things:
1. Proactive relationship building with an aligned network
Not “building an audience” in the abstract, but having real conversations with real people in the market that supports your pricing and delivery model.
Outreach messages and coffee chats. Participating in communities instead of lurking. Guest teaching, speaking, and collaboration conversations where your buyers, referrers, or decision-makers already are. One by one, mapping and building the web of relationships you need.
This is hard because it isn’t scalable, it risks rejection, and it often requires forging entry into networks that you might not have easy access to.
2. Developing and publishing a point of view
Not just sharing tips, but articulating what you believe about the problems you solve, the patterns you see, and how your approach is distinct—and putting that point of view in public before it feels fully formed. (Because putting it in public forms your views.)
This is not about follower growth that gets you views.
It’s about thinking growth that gets you noticed by the right people.
This is hard because it requires clarity you’re still developing and visibility you might not feel ready for.
3. Getting real practice doing the work
Paid projects, pilots, client work, case studies—actual reps solving real problems for people who can afford to pay for them.
Not launching perfect packages with ideal positioning, because you don’t have it yet. But also not defaulting to low-priced offers that serve your current network if you want higher-value work.
This is hard because it means starting before you feel confident, charging before it feels comfortable, and learning in public through real outcomes—not hypotheticals.
Most of the “behind the scenes” work or the work that you can do alone (like set up a new lead magnet or post daily) feels like action because you can quantify it. But unless something is actively broken (like a truly inaccurate website for an audience/service you no longer provide), those things are rarely the constraint.
The real bottleneck is that not enough right-fit people (with budget and buying authority) know you, understand how you think, or have experienced your work.
If You’re in Strengthen/Scale: The Hard Things Are About Sequencing and Commitment
At this stage, you usually have clients, revenue, and emerging patterns.
The work isn’t just about saying no.
It’s about choosing what’s next—and choosing it in the right order.
Most people at this stage don’t lack opportunities.
They’re either trying to do everything at once—or they’re so caught in delivery that nothing meaningfully moves forward.
Three hard things tend to show up here:
1. Adding scaffolding and support
Your business probably grew cobbled together with duct tape and baling wire. Or at least post-it notes and a haphazard series of spreadsheets.
But your business can’t keep growing without support. It’s time to add that automatic invoicing system, document the processes and tools you use with clients, and actually use a tool to manage your sales and client pipeline. And, it means getting help: help on the tactical (trust me, even I needed someone else to set up my QuickBooks), help on your day-to-day operations, or strategic guidance.
The hard thing is that securing support takes time and money—two resources that might be in short supply. It takes an investment up front to add the infrastructure for smooth operations.
2. Choosing “compound” instead of “new”.
At this stage, you don’t have time for a whole lot of “new”—you’re busy as hell and actually need better leverage with what you’re already doing. But new is shiny! And fun! And avoids boredom!
But starting new or starting over doesn’t compound.
Compounding work creates assets or systems that keep working even when you’re not actively delivering or posting.
That might look like:
deepening relationships with your best referral partners
building authority through durable resources, not more posts or newsletters
streamlining how you deliver so clients get better results with less of your time
The hard thing here is restraint.
Not adding more things—but strengthening what already exists, one system at a time.
3. Protecting space to build what’s next
Oof, this one is a doozy. To build what’s next, you need margin—but that doesn’t always mean you can turn down revenue or just add more hours. It means being radically intentional about creating that energetic and financial margin.
That means cutting back on overdelivering, ending the random networking, pruning misaligned offers (even if they bring in money), auditing your activities and expenses, and being laser focused on the next 1-2 steps you need to take instead of waiting for big blocks of free time.
It means turning down things that used to “work” to fiercely protect the capacity you need for what’s next.
I had to make this kind of decision myself this year.
I sunset my final Fractional COO client—even though that work reliably hit my revenue targets—because it was constraining the capacity I needed to launch my book and grow the Membership. I made less revenue this year because of that decision, but it was the only way forward if I wanted to keep building the business I actually wanted to grow.
The hard thing here isn’t just “doing less.”
It’s refusing to let all of your effort be consumed by work that only sustains today and never builds toward tomorrow.
What many people do instead is stay in stasis—continuing delivery exactly as-is, saying yes to everything, never stepping back enough to redirect momentum.
It’s not a lack of ambition—it’s protecting what’s known and avoiding the loss of what we have.
Plant, Prune, Improve
Once you’ve identified your bottleneck, the hard step that comes next, you have three options:
Plant what’s missing (a consistent outreach rhythm, a published point of view, a change to your offers).
Prune what’s draining or not working (an unprofitable offer, an ineffective marketing channel, an expense or software you don’t need).
Improve what’s working but inefficient (sales conversations, delivery systems, client experience).
All three require uncomfortable choices.
Planting something new means prioritizing the bottleneck over what feels urgent.
Pruning means letting go of something familiar or saying no to the efforts that got you this far.
Improving means admitting something isn’t good enough yet and investing time into your skills or systems to make it stronger.
So, what do I work on first?
Every business runs on six core systems. One of them is almost always the bottleneck—the constraint limiting everything else.
Read through these and notice which one feels the most pressing.
1. Authority & Positioning
People don’t clearly understand what you’re known for, who and how you help, or why your approach is distinct—making everything else harder.
2. Offer Design
Your offers are priced or scoped in ways that don’t match the effort required, your market’s expectations, or your current marketing capacity.
3. Marketing & Sales
Inquiries are inconsistent, don’t convert well, or only happen when you’re actively producing content—because your authority and relationships aren’t doing enough of the work yet.
4. Operations & Delivery
Delivery takes longer and more energy than it should, and your attention is fractured across delivery, marketing, admin, and planning.
5. People & Support
You don’t yet have—or aren’t effectively using—operational, strategic, or peer support, so decisions, momentum, and follow-through rely entirely on you.
6. Finances, Metrics, & Goals
You can’t clearly see what’s working or where to focus next—so decisions are driven by urgency instead of clarity.
You don’t need to fix all six.
You can’t fix all six at once (remember Part 2, related to your capacity and your stage).
You need to address the one that’s currently constraining everything else.
Your Next Step: Make One Hard Choice
You reviewed your reality in Part 1 and your context in Part 2.
Now comes the part most people avoid.
Face the bottleneck—not the thing that feels easiest to work on, not the thing everyone else is doing, not the thing simplest to track and complete, but the actual constraint in your business (that you may be avoiding).
Here’s how to use this:
Identify your stage (Seed/Sprout or Strengthen/Scale).
Identify your bottleneck system.
Decide whether you need to plant, prune, or improve.
Make one specific, stretchy commitment to do that in January. (Consider making a pact instead of a big goal).
Everything else is secondary.
Your yearly plan? Pick one system per quarter to focus on.
You don’t fix all six systems in January, or even in one year.
You pick one bottleneck, address it for a quarter through specific projects, then reassess.
One to two concrete business-building projects per quarter—not scattered efforts across everything at once—will transform your business over the course of a year.
That’s the plan. Not “fix everything right now.” Not “implement 15 contradictory tactics from all of the different freebies you’ve bought.”
Pick a system. Execute one meaningful improvement. See what your next bottleneck is, then go fix that next.
If you’re not sure where to focus, join the Deeper Foundations Membership and get a 30-minute welcome call where I’ll give you some realistic direction — and then each quarter you’re ready to pick your next system.
In Part 4, we’ll build realistic projections for next year—not based on what you wish would happen, but based on addressing this bottleneck within your actual context and capacity.
Stop being busy.
Make the hard choice.