Graham Scott has written a nice, short book that feels like a conversation, incorporating the ideas of Theory of Constraints - focus and leverage: Practice Makes Profit: The small business owner’s guide to making more money by NOT working harder.
In fact, this is more of a booklet - it comes in less than 100 pages, though with a little extra bonus content on his website. This makes it a fast read and really lets the book focus on the key content - how to focus on things that matter most. It’s also interesting that this story focuses on small business, where most of this type of book talk about larger companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.
Graham Scott frames the book around a medical practice - that of a dermatologist running a solo practice. He also brings in a number of other stories and anecdotes from other small businesses, including his own accounting practice. I like how he uses these as specific examples of the focussing process, as well as turning them back into the main story.
The main book ends with a summary of the impact that the high level steps had on business for the dermatologist - going from modest profits and frustration to significant profits. And as I’ve seen in many of these types of efforts, the initial improvements do not require significant investment. (They also don’t start with “cost cutting” efforts that many people assume are required.)
The focussing process in question is the Five Focusing Steps from Theory of Constraints, originally articulated in Eli Goldratt’s The Goal. He also uses the language that Clarke Ching’s The Bottleneck Rules (my review) with the acronym FOCCCUS. Graham Scott brings in many of the familiar terms associated with Theory of Constraints in a fairly natural way - constraint/bottleneck, efficiency/effectiveness, buffers (time, money, resource), protective capacity, what NOT to do, and more.
The Five Focusing Steps from The Goal:
Identify the system’s constraint(s)
Decide how to exploit the constraint(s)
Subordinate everything else to the above decision
Elevate the system’s constraint(s)
If, in a previous step, the constraint has been broken go back to step 1
And the FOCCCUS acronym from The Bottleneck Rules
Find the bottleneck
Optimize it
Coordinate, Collaborate, Curate everywhere else
Upgrade the bottleneck
Start over (Strategically)
Both of these articulate a processes of ongoing improvement. Even within these cycles, there will be ongoing improvements. I’ve seen the constraint / bottleneck shift even when doing the first few steps. (The language about “bottleneck” and “constraint” varies over time and by author - bottlenecks tend to be temporary; constraints tend to be longer-lived or even strategic.)