Bullet Points:
- Strategy for doubling and accelerating business growth
- Importance of identifying business constraints or bottlenecks
- Conducting time studies to pinpoint where time is being spent
- Hiring specifically to relieve identified bottlenecks
- Role of AI in business operations and the need for human oversight
- Common bottlenecks in ecommerce, such as PPC management and product sourcing
- The cycle of identifying constraints, hiring for them, and focusing on growth
- Caution against hiring roles that do not address the main constraint
- Importance of ongoing attention and iteration in the hiring process
- Building a scalable and sustainable business through disciplined approaches
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast
Host Josh Hadley introduces himself, his ecommerce background, and the podcast’s purpose of sharing strategies for business growth.
00:00:56 The Key to Doubling Your Business
Josh reveals his number one strategy for rapid business growth: identifying and hiring for the main constraint or bottleneck.
00:01:52 Identifying the Business Bottleneck
An example of how a growing ecommerce business hits a bottleneck, such as PPC management consuming the founder’s time.
00:02:52 How to Find Your Constraint
Josh recommends conducting a two-week time study for yourself and your team to pinpoint where time is being spent.
00:03:52 Solving the Bottleneck: Hiring vs. AI
Discusses two solutions for a constraint: hiring a person or using AI, emphasizing the need for human oversight with AI.
00:04:50 Reinvesting Time into Growth
Once a constraint is solved, the founder’s freed-up time must be redirected toward new growth opportunities like product launches.
00:05:46 The Evolution of a Business Owner
Describes the ongoing cycle of identifying a new bottleneck, hiring to solve it, and reinvesting time into further growth.
00:06:40 The Danger of Hiring for the Wrong Role
Josh shares personal examples of hiring for roles that were not the actual business constraint, which proved to be mistakes.
00:07:38 A Real-Life Hiring Dilemma
Josh recounts his decision between hiring a Director of HR versus a Director of Ecommerce by identifying the true constraint.
00:09:36 Final Warning and Conclusion
A final caution against hiring roles based on what other companies are doing instead of focusing on your own bottleneck.
Links and Mentions:
E-commerce Platforms:
“Shopify“: “00:00:00”
“TikTok Shop“: “00:00:00”
“Amazon“: “00:00:00”
Business Concepts and Tools:
“Hiring for the Constraint”: “00:00:56”
“Time Study”: “00:02:52”
“AI Agents”: “00:03:52”
Recommendations:
“Hiring Strategy”: “00:09:36”
Call to Action:
“Share and Subscribe”: “00:10:21”
Transcript:
Josh Hadley 00:00:00 Today, I’m going to share with you the best way I know how to double a business and help it grow even faster. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. My name is Josh Hadley. First and foremost, I’m a man of faith. I’m a husband to a beautiful wife and the father of four children. I’ve been selling in the e-commerce space for over a decade now, doing over $20 million in annual revenue and multi-millionaire on Shopify, TikTok shop and Amazon. And I am also the host of the number one business strategy podcast for ecommerce entrepreneurs, which is Ecomm Breakthrough. So let’s dive into how I would double or grow a business. What is this magic trick that I’m saying that, hey, this is the exact best way that I know how to grow a business the fastest.
Josh Hadley 00:00:56 And that simply comes down to hiring for the constraint of the business. Nothing more and nothing less. And I’m going to talk about why this is so important, because ultimately, every business at every part of its pathway is going to hit a constraint. This is also referred to as the bottleneck for a business where, you know, things are flowing, flowing, flowing until you get to the bottleneck. And then it just seems like things really slow down. Now let’s talk about like what is the true constraint? Like, let’s give you some ideas. When I say constraint to the business, I want to give you a few examples of what that actually looks like in an e-commerce perspective. And then we’re going to talk about why hiring is the solution to that. Or it could also be AI by the way. So let’s talk about that and how I’m going to basically relieve the bottleneck of the business and point it in a different direction. So let’s talk about this. A new e-commerce entrepreneur that gets started on Amazon and finds some initial success.
Josh Hadley 00:01:52 First and foremost, you’ve got to go find some products. You got to go source those products. You got to then get them launched up on Amazon. And then you need to manage those products and make sure that they’re successful. Well, if you can continue to do that, rinse and repeat Time and time again. Eventually, it’s going to get to a point in time where the founder is no longer able to do everything themselves, and ultimately, the bottleneck will reveal itself in whatever processes in the business takes the most time and is the most labor intensive. So let’s for a hypothetical situation. Let’s say PPC is the constraint. In this case, the business owner has launched product after product after product. They found really good opportunities, but then PPC just continues to suck up more and more and more of their time. So much so that now they spend less time coming out with new products, because what used to be only a few hours a week has now turned into 20 or 30 hours of their week.
Josh Hadley 00:02:52 Just trying to manage and optimize PPC campaigns and day partying, and staying up to date with the latest and best practices on PPC. So if that’s the case, and how do you reveal where your time is going? Go back and take a look at my two week time study. This is how you identify the bottleneck of the business by actually going through the processes, understanding where your time is going, and this applies to you and your team if you have an existing team. They should all be doing this time study. That’s how you’re going to reveal where the bottleneck in the business truly sits. So let’s say we’re going to go solve for this bottleneck. I’ve got two possible solutions. I can either go hire somebody that can go manage these PPC campaigns for me and give me more time back onto my calendar, or I can create some automation rules. I can create an agent agent that will go out and execute my process over and over again. The downside with that is that process, or that agent is not going to stay up to date with the latest, you know, trending changes.
Josh Hadley 00:03:52 And, you know, some of those processes could, you know, get outdated, no longer work. So I’m a big fan first and foremost. Before you’re ever just like implementing AI agents into your business is making sure that you have somebody that’s overseeing them that is, you know, quote unquote, the manager of those AI agents. And so they’re the person that’s responsible for the strategy, continuing to refine the AI agent to make sure that they’re they are executing on the best and the latest and greatest updates as it relates to PPC management. So those are your two things. So first and foremost I’m going to go higher for that constraint. And guess what. When I hire for that constraint let’s say that that business owner has been able to get up to $1 million up until that point, but now they’ve just spent all their time in PPC. I’m going to go hire somebody. Doesn’t matter what that person costs, but as soon as they’re plugged in, guess what’s going to happen? That 20 or 30 hours a week that was sucking up that founder’s time is now going back as free time for that founder.
Josh Hadley 00:04:50 And guess what they’re going to go back to doing. Oh, well, now I have more time to go back and find new products, more products I could launch, or I could go find new sales channels to go sell my existing products to. And so the real opportunity is if you hire for the constraint. And then as that relieves pressure in the business, you then take that excess capacity and point it towards new growth opportunities in the business. That’s the only way that this works. So let’s say we’re able to go increase the number of products that we’re releasing every year, because the business owner now is able to find more and more products to launch. That’s how we go and double the business. Well guess what? Again, at some point the business owner is going to find, well, crap. Now all of my time, 20 or 30 hours a week is spent sourcing products because I’m spending all my time finding new ideas. I have so many ideas, but now going back and forth with manufacturers like that’s super tedious.
Josh Hadley 00:05:46 That ultimately then becomes the bottleneck of the business. So what do you do? You hire and you solve for that bottleneck, that constraint to the business. It frees up more time than at that point. That business owner is then going to be able to go maybe spend their time scaling on another sales channel, such as TikTok Shop or Shopify. Whatever it is, they’re able to go reinvest what used to be 20 or 30 hours, going to just routine work now can go back to growth opportunities. That is the process of evolution as a business owner. Now this is also kind of a slow growth approach. This is also the bootstrapped approach, so don’t be frustrated with yourself when it takes time. And it takes time to hire people, and it takes time to train them and to make sure that they’re following and executing your processes. Okay. It’s an ongoing battle. It’s definitely not set it and forget it, but that is the path of how we as a business went from just my wife and I working in inside the business to having over 35 team members.
Josh Hadley 00:06:40 It was identifying the constraint, hiring for the constraint, and rinsing and repeating that every 90 days to every six months, just on repeat, trying to find the right bottleneck in the business and then hiring for that constraint. And I share that with you, because there have been 2 or 3 times in my career in, in growing the business where I have tried to hire someone, that is not the constraint to the business. A couple examples. Number one, having a kind of an executive assistant, that would just be like coordinating my personal travel and coordinating, you know, more personal aspects of my life, such as like my coaching responsibilities that I have with my kids for basketball, football, etc.. That role was, frankly speaking, like a nice to have. But if I were to do a time study, it was only taking up, you know, maybe five hours of my week at best. And so was that the thing, like stealing time away from me, being able to, like, focus on the business? No, it was not.
Josh Hadley 00:07:38 And so that is my biggest caution. I’ve done this multiple times. And if you listen to one of my previous episodes, about two weeks ago, I talked about the dilemma between hiring a director of HR and a director of e-commerce. When all is said and done. What I realized was what’s preventing growth in the business? What’s preventing me from being able to focus on new growth initiatives in the business? Is it me being able to hire new people and have the right bodies in place? Are we lacking people in humans in the business to be able to scale, or are we lacking a machine, a sales engine machine that is predictable, that allows us to have growth on repeat that I could then reinvest into new and growth initiatives and sure enough, like it was the director of e-commerce where a I was spending a majority of my time because I had to be the one managing those team members, I had to be the person that was setting the strategy, making sure that the somebody looking at the profit and loss statement every single day.
Josh Hadley 00:08:36 Did we have a profitable day on Shopify or TikTok shop or not? And then what changes do we need to make because of that? And so before I made the mistake of, hey, just saddling myself with extra overhead, which would have been in the form of a director of HR, it’s really coming back to home base and saying, what is the actual constraint to the business when you focus on the constraints of the business, that’s the only role that you should hire for. And that is my biggest caution. I see this time and time and time again where somebody goes to a conference and they hear that, well, you know, Jack and Sally, and their e-commerce brand, they just hired a director of finance. And so they’re only a couple million dollars ahead of me in terms of revenue. So surely that’s that’s probably who I need to have on my team. Next. False go back, conduct the time study. Have your team conduct the time study. Identify where most of your time is going, and what of those things that you are doing, if given to somebody else, would give you more time back to then grow the actual business, focusing on the growth levers of the business.
Josh Hadley 00:09:36 So I know this is relatively short and sweet, but it’s my biggest warning because too many people just hear because x, Y, and z has x, y, and z, I need to have that same type of person in my business. And then you go down the rabbit hole of trying to hire for a role that is actually not the constraint to the business. Anytime I’ve done that, I have failed. That’s been not the right person to bring on to the business, and ultimately I’ve had to exit them from the team. But anytime I have actually hired for the constraint to the business, number one, the results speak for themselves sooner than they would otherwise. And that’s how we found our best A-level talent in the business. So I hope you get found value in this podcast. If you found value, make sure you share this with another operator who needs to hear the same message. And if you like today’s episode, make sure you leave a comment. Make sure you subscribe. Leave me a review.
Josh Hadley 00:10:21 That way I actually hear people that are listening to this podcast. With that being said, go out there and crush it and we’ll see you. Until next time.
