Finding Bottlenecks Slowing your business
Finding Bottlenecks Slowing Your Business
Notes from Arun Thapar's coaching session (24 Sep 2026) · [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY2Wx_Sc6mg)
The method at a glance
The speaker says about 80% of business owners slip at the "ask why" step: they act on the surface symptom.
1. The five warning signs
What "piling up" looks like
Y-axis: pending quotations (count). Example quoted in the session.
2. Tool one: write the process from start to end
No software needed. Write each step of one process, then look at the numbers or capacity at each step to see where the flow stops.
Y-axis: number of clients at each stage. Figures from the session.
8 clients paid, so 8 campaigns should launch. Only 5 did. Ask: why are 3 paying customers waiting? The problem sits after payment, not in sales.
Likely causes to check: onboarding information is incomplete; only one campaign manager, who is overloaded; slow creative approval from the client; the process is unclear or not written, so a new person doesn't know the next step.
Y-axis: capacity in units per day. The audio says "100" for quality, but the session's answer (machining) only works if quality is about 1,000.
The line can never produce more than 700 a day, however fast the other stages are. Don't blame assembly, quality or packing; upgrade machining.
3. Tool two: symptom vs root cause (the "5 Whys")
Finding the stuck department is only the symptom. Hiring another approver because approvals are slow treats the symptom. The approver may not be overloaded at all; they may be batching work, unclear on deadlines, or waiting on the owner. Keep asking "why" before you act.
Business example: late delivery
Fix: Whatever is committed to a customer goes to operations at once, or sales confirms the date with operations before promising it. (In the story, sales promised 1 October on the 24th but told operations on the 29th.)
Story: the million-dollar cleaning contract
Fix: Change the direction of the lights instead of paying for cleaning.
The speaker tells it about the Statue of Liberty; the well-known version of this story is about the Jefferson Memorial. The lesson is the same.
4. Measure the bottleneck
"My team is overloaded" is not a measurement. Overloaded compared to what? Use numbers.
| Measure | Question it answers |
| Volume | How much work is coming in? |
| Capacity | How much can the stage realistically handle? |
| Waiting time | How long does work sit before it is picked up? |
| Processing time | How long does the work actually take once started? |
| Rework | How much work comes back to be done again? |
Y-axis: service requests per week. Example from the session: a gap of 20 requests every week.
5. Fix it: five levers, in this order
6. Watch out: fixing one step can create the next bottleneck
Y-axis: quotations per week. Example from the session.
One department's output is the next department's input (marketing → sales → operations). Speeding up quotations only grows the pile at approval. Before and after any fix, check that the next stage has the capacity. Improve the flow of the whole process, not one department.
Summary
Before hiring, ask whether the problem is capacity, process, waiting, rework, decision making or a poor handover. Extra staff on a broken process only adds cost and frustration. A car can only do 120 on a clear road, not a bumpy one. Shift the question from "Are my people working?" to "Why is my business slowing?"
Homework: fix one bottleneck before the next session
Don't attempt many at once. Fill this in; it saves automatically.
Process name
Where is work getting stuck?
Process steps
Why is it happening? (5 Whys)
How much work is waiting?
What action will you take?
Who owns the action?
By when?
Q&A highlights
First prove approval really is the bottleneck by asking the approver why things are delayed. Then frame it as "we are not removing your authority, we are defining where it is actually needed." Fix the process issue first; a person issue can be handled after. If needed, give them an assistant rather than take work away. The business has to flow.