Are you frustrated with your lack of business growth? Does it feel like most days are full, and yet, you’re just not getting the results you want? They certainly don’t reflect the effort you’re putting in? In this article, I’ll explain what the 60-30-10 Rule is and why it’s crucial to your business success. Trust me, it’s a game-changer.
Business advice often says, “focus on your strengths and delegate your weaknesses.”
It sounds smart, but it’s incomplete. The truth is your business grows at the speed of its biggest constraint, not its strongest area.
If you keep improving what you’re already good at—marketing, product, design—you’re ignoring the choke point that’s actually limiting your growth. This is what I call strength addiction.
It feels productive to polish strengths, but your bottleneck remains untouched, silently strangling progress.
That’s why so many entrepreneurs hit frustrating plateaus, even when they’re “busy.”
The stats are sobering:
And it’s rarely because of weak demand. Instead, businesses collapse under the weight of operational bottlenecks.
Harvard and McKinsey studies reveal that businesses lose up to 30% of productivity each year due to inefficiencies. More than half of leaders admit bottlenecks are their biggest growth blocker.
Here’s the kicker: most entrepreneurs know their constraints but do nothing about them. Why? Because fixing them usually means working on the area you’re worst at. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also boring.
Entrepreneurs are visionaries. You come up with a new, exciting idea. It’s only natural to want to pursue it. But in chasing the next high, you shift focus, diverting attention away from existing problems.
And while you’re small, these problems seem inconsequential. Until you begin to scale. That’s often where bottlenecks become substantial roadblocks.
Every constraint in business falls into one of four categories:
Be brutally honest: which one is yours? Until you name it, you’ll waste time being “busy” instead of solving the real problem.
This framework is vital to addressing business constraints. Here’s how it works:
Simple. By implementing the 60-30-10 Rule, it forces discipline. Instead of chasing shiny objects, you focus on what matters most.
I spent years chasing my next great idea. The experts said, “You need a low-ticket item.” So I introduced one. Then I added a course. After speaking with fellow coaches, I realised they wanted a certification program. So I created it.
But my team was small. And switching between different offers meant we weren’t laser-focused. Instead, our time, money, and energy were scattered, and the results showed.
Since simplifying our offer down to coaching, the business has scaled rapidly.
And every quarter, my leadership team gets together to identify our biggest bottleneck.
It routinely shifts.
For a while, conversion was a major issue. Then, it shifted to churn. Now we’re focusing again on lead generation.
My point. It’s important to routinely revisit what your constraint is.
This is where most entrepreneurs drop the ball. They identify their constraint—say, conversion—but still spend 80% of their resources generating more leads.
That’s backward. Strengths don’t limit growth. Bottlenecks do.
If you’re great at marketing but your sales process is broken, every extra lead you generate just leaks out. That’s why you need to pour the majority of your energy into fixing the bottleneck first.
And here’s the kicker: you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Systemization is often the fastest path to removing constraints. I’ve laid this out in 3 Ways To Eliminate The Bottleneck In Your Business: Systemize.
Systemizing gives you leverage, consistency, and freedom from repetitive tasks, so your bottleneck doesn’t come back once it’s fixed.
Bottlenecks are predictable. Once you solve one, the next one is waiting around the corner.
That’s why 30% of your time and resources should be spent preparing for what’s next. It’s like laying track ahead of the train. You won’t be surprised or overwhelmed when the next bottleneck emerges; you’ll already be building solutions.
This forward-looking allocation is what separates businesses that stall at each stage from those that scale smoothly.
The final 10% is reserved for the long game. This is about playing chess instead of checkers with your business.
By thinking two or three moves ahead, you avoid complacency and start anticipating challenges before they appear. This mindset keeps you sharp, strategic, and prepared for growth at every stage.
As stated earlier, most entrepreneurs are aware of their bottleneck. They just avoid it.
Why? Because it feels better to stay in your comfort zone. If you’re good at marketing, you’ll keep doing marketing, even if the bottleneck is sales. If you’re strong in product development, you’ll polish features, even while operations are falling apart.
But growth only happens in the discomfort zone. As I wrote in Why You Can’t Break Through That Plateau, most businesses stall not because they lack opportunity, but because they refuse to confront the constraint holding them back.
If it feels awkward, you’re probably working on the right thing.
And if you don’t know how to do it, hire an expert who can guide you. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on books, courses, mentor programs, and events to help solve our bottlenecks.
When sales became an issue, we hired sales experts to guide and coach our team on improving our pitch.
When churn became a concern, we attended a Taki Moore event to gain clarity on how to build a better community.
If you want to be successful, address your bottlenecks.
Take Janet, who ran a luxury wedding stationery business. She excelled at marketing—Pinterest ads, Meta campaigns, endless content. Her traffic tripled year over year.
But her real constraint was conversion. Her site attracted visitors, but few people requested quotes. She was pouring water into a leaky bucket.
Applying the 60-30-10 Rule, she focused 60% of her energy on fixing conversion. She simplified her quote process, added phone calls, and streamlined her sales follow-up. Within months, her conversion rate skyrocketed.
At the same time, she devoted 30% of her time to preparing operations for growth and 10% to strategic marketing projects. The results? March 2025 became her best month ever, both in terms of invoices and profit.
Your business doesn’t stall because you’re bad at everything. It stalls because you avoid the one thing that’s holding you back.
The 60-30-10 Rule forces you to:
That’s how you break through plateaus and build a business that scales predictably and sustainably.
🎧 Want the full framework?
This is just one of the strategies we use in the Lean Marketing Accelerator to help entrepreneurs smash through bottlenecks and grow faster—with less stress. If you’re stuck at a plateau, it’s time to apply the 60-30-10 Rule.
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