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Business bottlenecks are like flat tires. They slow you down and happen at the worst times. Nobody likes them.
What are the most common business bottlenecks and what can you do to avoid them? Entrepreneur coach, Laurent Notin explains.
What You’ll Discover About Business Bottlenecks:
* The 3 most common business bottlenecks
* How to know when you have a business bottleneck
* The first thing you need to do to get unstuck
* How to hire the right team to solve and anticipate business bottlenecks
* And MUCH more.
Guest: Laurent Notin
Laurent Notin is an Entrepreneur Coach, Start-up Mentor and Host of Inter:views Cracking The Entrepreneurship Code.
He is a French national who left France at 23, spent 20 years in South-East Asia, before relocating to Finland in the summer of 2019.
His professional background is in market research and advertising, where he ran 7-figure businesses across 3 countries.
Throughout the years, he’s developed a passion for coaching, mentoring, advising and training people. Combined with his entrepreneurial mindset, becoming a coach to entrepreneurs just made sense.
Today, Laurent help entrepreneurs deal with the biggest risk they face: being stuck, or what he calls becoming the bottleneck in their businesses.
They are many ways you can be a bottleneck, but the result is always the same: you’re stuck.
And when you’re stuck, your business is stuck because you can’t think about anything else. This is exactly when Laurent comes in, helping entrepreneurs get so they can focus on growing their businesses again.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Entrepreneurship episodes.
Contact Laurent and connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Check out his podcast — Inter:views Cracking The Entrepreneurship Code and his website.
You can even schedule a free call with him: https://tinyurl.com/book-your-free-call
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BUSINESS BOTTLENECKS ENTREPRENEURS NEED TO BE AWARE OF WITH LAURENT NOTIN
Business bottlenecks are like flat tires. They slow you down and happen at the worst times. Nobody likes them. What are the common business bottlenecks, and what can you do to avoid them? When we come back, we’ll find out.
This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.
Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the weekly podcast for smart executives, managers, and entrepreneurs looking to improve their business performance and bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got an amazing guest for you today. He’s Laurent Notin.
Laurent is an entrepreneur, coach, startup mentor, and host of the podcast, Inter:views, Cracking the Entrepreneurial Code. He’s a French national who left France at 23, spent 20 years in Southeast Asia before relocating to Finland and whose professional background is in market research and advertising, where he ran a seven-figure business across three countries. What a tremendous experience.
Today, he helps entrepreneurs deal with the biggest risk they face business bottlenecks. So, how perfect is that for today’s topic? Let’s bring him on now. Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Laurent.
Hello. Thank you very much for having me.
It’s a pleasure to have you. It’s always interesting to get different perspectives, and business bottlenecks is such an interesting way of framing the entrepreneurial challenges that new business owners and even existing small business owners face. In your experience, what are the two or three biggest business bottlenecks entrepreneurs experience?
It’s interesting, the bottlenecks because they can happen at any time and several times throughout your entrepreneurial journey. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new entrepreneur or an experienced entrepreneur, you will always face a bottleneck and you will always be the bottleneck in your business at one point.
The three most common bottlenecks that are identified, the first one is kind of the most “popular.” It’s what you see. It’s when you are lost into details. As an entrepreneur, it’s very easy to do everything, right, because there are so many things to do. You have a lot of decisions to make. You have to bear a lot of pressure. You have to make sure your clients are happy. You have to make sure your people are happy.
You have to make sure that your bottom line looks good. So, at the end of the day, you kind of tend to be able to make sure that everything is fine. You want to control everything but this is when you get your head stuck into the details, into all those things that you shouldn’t be doing.
See now, for example, why is this client not replying to the proposal that was sent three days ago by my staff? Okay, let me call the client. Well, why is the digital marketing not working as per my expectation, or let me call the agency? Right? So, that’s the number one being lost in the details. Number two is what I call a lack of clarity. A lot of entrepreneurs and I’ve seen that across seniority. They always know why they start a business most of the time.
But at one point, they may find themselves misaligned with their sense of purpose. And when that happens, they lose clarity of direction. They’re not sure what they should be doing. They’re not sure they should go left or right. They’re not sure at the end of the day why they’re doing the things that they are doing.
And that’s very important because when you have clarity, you know exactly what needs to be done. You know where you want to go, and you’re able to find out how you’re going to get there. And the last one that I have identified is when entrepreneurs don’t let go. If everything goes fine throughout your entrepreneurial journey, you’re going to start from an idea or paper to something that grows beyond yourself.
You will go to different stages. You will go from doing everything yourself to building something, building an organization that will do it for you in theory. But to be able to do that, you must make sure that your role evolves as the company grows. You cannot evolve if you don’t let go.
To give you an example of typical things that you should let go is when you start hiring leaders. I’ve seen many, many times entrepreneurs hiring their first leaders. Building a leadership team, though not empowering those leaders with decision making. And at the end of the day, all the decisions go through the entrepreneur. So, what is the point of hiring leaders and not giving them the authority to make decisions by themselves?
That’s a good point. That’s a good point. Now, you mentioned before that one of the bottlenecks is getting lost in the details, trying to control everything. All right? What advice do you have for someone who is trying to let go but the people they delegate to, it seems, are making mistakes?
At what point do you let them kind of like keep going before you jump in and say, no, this is wrong? Here’s how we do it. Here’s how it should be done because of X, Y, Z. What advice do you have for that?
When you think about the people you want to hire, what we see a lot in the newspapers and magazines, be it online job announcements are announcements that focus a lot on technical skills. Right? So, if you want a digital marketer, you’re going to want someone with a lot of experience in digital marketing. It makes sense. But if you ask someone the question, think about the ideal candidate, 80% of the answers.
That person or the group of people, you ask the questions. 80% of the answers they will give you is based on soft skills, attitude and behavior because you want to make sure that you’re able to work with that person. The future recruit and technical skills will come after. So, the first thing is about when you want to recruit someone, make sure that instead of focusing on your technical skills, focus on attitude and behaviors.
Make sure that you recruit someone that who will be aligned with your values, who will understand your purpose, someone you will be able to work with over a longer term because attitude, behavior are very difficult to be told. Sometimes they can’t be told, right? Technical skills can be.
So, that is the first thing I would say, recruitment. Now, if you already have the people, ask yourself the question, are they the right people? By that, I mean do they have the right attitude and behaviors, and they do have the right skills?
If they are the right people, maybe they’re not doing the right job. Yes. So, maybe you should consider giving them some other responsibilities. Think in terms of what are they very good at? What are their strengths? What makes them happy? What will keep them engaged? To find out if you can give them all the responsibilities.
But if you don’t have the right people, and if they’re not doing those things that they’re supposed to be doing, or if you cannot find anything else for them, at one point, if they’re not performing as per your expectation, you have to let them go. It’s very, very, very, very important. I’m sure you have heard the saying recruit slow and fire fast.
It is true, but take as much time as you need to find the right people, the ones you have some difficulties with them, they’re not performing as per your expectation. They’re not delivering on their whatever they keep their eyes on. You had been talking to them. You’ve been coaching them, but nothing changes, let them go.
That’s hard to do sometimes. It’s interesting.
It is very.
These three bottlenecks that you’ve described, I can imagine some people say, “Yeah, that that makes sense,” but when you’re in the middle of the hurricane, in the middle of the tornado, so to speak, how does somebody realize that they have these bottlenecks?
This is the one-million-dollar question.
Yay, I won.
It’s so difficult. The thing is, most of the people I talk to, most of the clients or potential clients, entrepreneurs I’ve talked to, they know that it could be done better, but somehow they do not act. I can give you an example.
Please, yes.
One of my former clients, he’s been working with his director for seven or eight years, and he reached out to me because he was wondering what he should be doing with him.
We were talking about just stuff that’s on him. That’s an example of him having seen changes in his director, his director not performing as he used to do, and that was around COVID. So, he thought maybe COVID had played a role there.
He was seeing that, but he was not doing anything about it because he was thinking about the director. It was like, “Yeah, but what if he could?” It’s just a bad period of his time. Maybe it’s due to COVID. He will go back. He would come back to who he used to be.
But what if he really wants to work and is asked to let go? What is the impact on him, right? So, all these entrepreneurs, they have sort of questions like, “What if, what if, what if, what if?” Those what ifs don’t have any answers, but deep down inside them, they know what they should be doing.
Sometimes, they are stuck. That’s when they become the bottleneck, and they cannot act without the guidance of someone, someone like myself or a mentor.
So, are they just afraid or they need some sounding board like you’re saying, a mentor, somebody that they can talk to, to say, “No, you know what, Laurent? You’re right. Your gut is telling you the correct thing. This is not improving,” and maybe you’ve had conversations and you see that this person really has changed. Their interests are not aligned as closely with your purpose as you’d like it to be.
Yeah, it can be that. As you said, they can be afraid. They can be afraid of the consequences of their actions. They can be unsure of what actions to take. They may feel isolated. You hear a lot of entrepreneurs saying, “I’m alone.” And so, it could be like a moment like this as they can be having also, a fight with their own ego saying, “Oh, it’s okay. I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m an entrepreneur.” As an entrepreneur, you must have an ego because these are needs, sort of, but sometimes that ego gets on your way. So, that ego may be there telling them you’re going to find a solution. You know what you’re doing, It’s absolutely fine, and they won’t sit on it. They can maybe reach out to the wrong people without the experience that they have themselves.
So, there are a lot of different elements here at play. Maybe also, they’ve never had the experience before, so they have nothing to compare with.
Well, there’s a lot of reasons why it could happen but when somebody does realize, “Hey, I’m stuck. Something’s not working right.” What’s the first thing that they should do in order to get unstuck?
It’s a great question. If you’re stuck, the first thing that you should be doing is to realize that you’re stuck. We just talk about it. Right? Just acknowledge that you are stuck. It’s okay to be stuck. It happens to the best of us. One of my clients recently sold his business, actually, last October. When we started working together two years ago, he was stuck because he was lacking clarity of direction, you know?
And the guy is very successful. I have nothing to teach him when it comes to business, but he was stuck. So, it can happen at any time. What he did is that he realized that he was stuck. He acknowledged that the first thing, realize that you’re stuck. Accept that you’re stuck but also consider that there are solutions out there, and to be able to consider solution, that there are solutions out there.
You need to take a step back. Really, like get away from your problems. Get away from the bottlenecks. Take as much time as you need to clear your mind. It’s very, very, very, very important. I was talking about this bottleneck of being lost into details but one of the reasons that you lost into details, it’s because you never take that step back.
So, you’re always working in your business rather than working on your business. So, what you need to do is to take that helicopter view to go as high as you can, so you can have like a holistic view of what is happening. Then try to understand what brought you into where you are now, into the situation that you are locked into.
What were the patterns that brought you in? And from there, try to figure out the patterns that could take you out of it.
Okay. Well, that’s very helpful for trying to help us to get out of it. Now, let me flip that around. Is there a way to anticipate bottlenecks? I wasn’t going to say that I was going to make this easy for you, Laurent.
No, no. It’s a great question.
I mean, bottlenecks, it’s big. It’s big.
With experience, of course, there is a way. With experience, you will learn to not repeat your mistakes but one of the best way is not to stay by yourself. Again, as I said before, I hear a lot of entrepreneurs say, “I’m alone,” but let me tell you, you are not alone because a lot of people have worked the past before you.
So, one of the best ways to anticipate the bottlenecks is to go to people who have the experience, who can tell you what will happen or what may happen if you take that or that decision. If you go to the left or if you go to the right, you can reach out to mentors. You can reach out to coaches like myself.
You can reach out to experts in their field. Many, many types of people you can reach out to but don’t stay isolated. Another way of anticipating the bottleneck is to get training. One of the reasons why we experience bottlenecks is because we don’t have the right training, the right skills.
I’ll give you a basic example, financial management. There are so many entrepreneurs out there who have no clue about the basics of finance, but the problem is, as an entrepreneur, your number one priority is cash, for instance. And by cash, I mean the cash flow but also, I mean, you know how to manage cash, how to make sure that you always have a good runway of cash in front of you.
That ability to manage cash can be taught. It can be trained about financial management but if you’re not doing it, if you don’t learn it, then quickly, you will become the bottleneck because of a lack of cash flow and you cannot do anything about it and you have not anticipated it.
Very good. So, if I’m reading between the lines here, what you’re saying is there’s no shame to being stuck.
Not only there is no shame, but it’s a guarantee 100% that you will be stuck. So, better to accept it.
It’s okay. You haven’t lived until you’ve been stuck. Okay, I understand. All right, one last question, I am curious about. Fine, we understand that we need to get over our egos and all right, I’m stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck.
What to do about it? Yes, there are these options. How do I find the best person to confide in? Because really, when somebody is stuck in their business, yes, they have this image and this reputation as maybe being a very successful entrepreneur and people see that and they’re like, “Oh, no, it can’t happen to you.”
You get over yourself, but basically you’re doing an open kimono with somebody to confide with them and maybe share some of your fears and certainly where you’re stuck, and you need some help in figuring something out. How do you recommend somebody go about finding the right coach, the right mentor, the right kind of group to be a part of so that they can trust that person and also know that they have the experience to truly help them?
Let me see the question. Do you have a mentor or a coach?
Yes. In a way, that’s true, yes.
How did you select the person?
You’re flipping the question on me here.
Yes, of course. Of course, I am.
I’ll tell you something. There are some people that I’ve confided in that we’re a huge mistake. People that I’ve trusted who’ve betrayed that trust, and it has been a painful learning curve in certain situations that you trust them to take care of X, Y, Z, and they fall short, and it sets to you back.
It happens. It’s like two steps forward, a half a step back. So, I don’t know what a good answer is. That’s why I’m asking you. This is your business.
Yes, but what you said is really important. Because if you reach out to a coach, for instance, you have to understand that coaching is really about long term results, right? It’s not like something that is going to fix you overnight.
You really think in terms of six months, one year, sometimes even longer than that. I recently was talking to a client whom I coached two years ago, and based on those discussions that we had two years ago, he recently made the decision to close down his company, reopen a new company with new staff, and it got immediately funded by investors and that took him two years of process.
And of course, this was not only because of the coaching conversation that we had, but what I mean is long-term results. So, when you reach out to a coach, you need to really be thinking in terms of, again, long-term results. I am going to spend time with that person over the next six months, one year.
I want to make sure that it is the right person for me. Now, most of the coaches, they offer free calls or free coaching discovery session. Use those. It’s absolutely free. What do you have to lose? Apart from nothing, even better, you may suddenly win something out of it.
Think in terms of assess the type of questions they ask you. Are those questions challenging you or you don’t feel any purpose, any structure behind the questions? What is the coach saying? What are the values of this coach? Ask about them. What are their uncompromising principles? What do they abide by? Do not hesitate to also check out the references.
So, one thing that I do, for instance, with potential clients when they ask is that I hook them up with past clients. So, I got my former clients or my current clients doing the talking for me, and then they can ask whatever questions they wanted to that are relevant to them.
And I will not know what is happening here. Also, simple things like do you prefer men, or do you prefer women? It is very important because men and women have different sensitivities. Do you want someone who has the same experience as you do? But for instance, myself, I am an entrepreneur coach because I speak the same language as entrepreneurs.
I have learned a thing or two about entrepreneurship. I keep myself educated about entrepreneurship through my podcasts, for instance. I will never be a life coach because I have nothing to tell you about life coaching. My life is a little bit more a mess than my business. So, it’s really about making a list of questions is what I would advise.
Make the list of questions before you go and talk to your coaches, to mentors, and don’t hesitate to approach different people. And then also trust your feelings, trust your emotional bound that you are connected with that person. I hope I answered your question.
Yes, you did. Actually, thank you. This has all been very great. It’s just an interesting perspective on bottlenecks and so many of the challenges that entrepreneurs face. I appreciate your time and all that you do to help entrepreneurs deal with those bottlenecks.
And if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Laurent Notin, and his podcast Interviews, Cracking the Entrepreneurship Code, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found at the show notes for this episode at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.
Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Business Confidential Now. So, until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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