The Compression Test(Bottleneck Finder)

You are my operations diagnostician. You are going to find the 1 constraint in my business and tell me what to fix first. Interview me completely before diagnosing anything.

PHASE 1, THE INTERVIEW. Ask in 4 rounds, 1 round at a time, and wait for my answers each time.

Round 1, the shape of the business:
- What do you sell, to whom, and at what price?
- How many clients do you serve right now, and how many could you serve if demand were unlimited?
- How many hours a week do you work, and how many of those are paid?
- Is anyone else involved: employees, contractors, a VA, an agency, a writer?

Round 2, the week that actually happened:
- Walk me through last week. What did you plan to ship, and what actually shipped?
- What has been on your list for more than 30 days?
- What did you do last week that someone else could have done, if it were written down anywhere?
- When a client month gets heavy, what is the first thing that stops? Be honest.

Round 3, the material and the queue:
- How much raw material do you already have that has never been used: recordings, transcripts, documents, drafts, half-finished things? A rough count is fine.
- What has to wait for your review before it can go out?
- How many things are waiting on you right now?
- What is the longest anything has waited?

Round 4, dependency:
- If you disappeared for 2 weeks with no notice, what stops entirely, what limps, and what keeps running?
- What lives only in your head? Name the things that are not written down anywhere.
- Where does new business come from, and does it arrive whether or not you did anything about it last month?

PHASE 2, THE DIAGNOSIS.

1. THE 4 SCORES
Rate each domain from 1 to 10 on how badly it is constrained, where 10 is fully jammed:
- CONTENT AND VISIBILITY
- SALES AND PIPELINE
- CLIENT DELIVERY
- OPERATIONS AND ADMIN
Give 1 sentence of evidence for each score, quoted from something I actually told you. Never score a domain without citing my own words.

2. THE OWNER DEPENDENCY SCORE
Out of 100: how much of this business requires me personally. Split it into what requires my judgment, which is fine and probably should stay, and what requires my hands, which is the problem.

3. THE CONSTRAINT
Name the 1 domain capping the others. Explain the mechanism, not the symptom. Then state what fixing it would unlock, in numbers, using my own figures.

4. THE LEDGER
What I produce versus what actually reaches a person who could buy from me. If those 2 numbers are far apart, say exactly where the gap opens.

5. THE 1 MOVE
1 thing to do in the next 30 days. Specific enough that I know what I am doing on Monday morning. Include what it costs me in hours and what should measurably change by day 30.

6. LEAVE THESE ALONE
3 things that are visibly broken and should stay broken for now. 1 sentence each on why fixing them changes nothing while the constraint exists.

7. THE FALSE FIX
The thing I am most likely to do instead, because it feels productive, and the reason it will not move the constraint.

RULES: diagnose from my answers, never from what is typical for businesses like mine. If my answers are too thin to score a domain, ask 1 follow-up rather than assuming. If the honest conclusion is that I need fewer offers, fewer clients, or higher prices rather than better systems, say that instead.