You’ve got your sales pipe, your marketing pipe, your operations pipe, and so on.
Each pipe is responsible for taking the effort of the people who do the work in that system and turning it into a result (the result depends on the pipe, naturally).
Let’s say you want to invest in improving one of those pipes. How do you decide which one gets the benefit? If you ask a specialist, they’ll tell you that the pipe they know to improve needs the work.
“Look at all these inefficiencies! Why, if you hire me, I can do X and Y and Z and your pipe will be so much better!”
Now, they’re not being malicious. I have nothing against specialists. The issue here is that they simply do not know which pipe needs improving because they only know how ONE of them works.
To know which pipe would be smartest to invest in first, you need an overview of all your pipes. And that’s really only possible to get from someone who understands all the pipes in your business – namely, a polymath.
I’m willing to bet that there’s a least one pipe in your business that suddenly narrows halfway through, delaying everything that passes through it (I’m not stretching this pipe metaphor too much, am I?)
That’s the pipe you need to invest in. It’s just a matter of finding it.
