As a consultant focused on helping companies break through to the next level, Josh Long knows a thing or two about the obstacles that typically hold a business back and how to bust through them to unlock massive growth.

Josh says you must first identify your business’s biggest issues – the bottlenecks that waste your time and money. 

You take on the biggest of the biggest first… then the next (which is usually obvious once you solve the first one)… and so on… until your company is more efficient, productive, and profitable.

We get into the details of how to implement that strategy, and also talk about…

• Why entrepreneurs are often wrong about what’s needed to improve their business
• The first problem you must solve in your business – it’s not lead generation and it’s “closer” than you think
• A four-part approach to more productive meetings that get results
• The dangers of “under-communicating” with your team
• And more invaluable knowledge from experience regarding business optimization and growth

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

• https://bottleneckbreakthrough.com

Transcript

Doug Hall: Hi folks. This is Doug Hall, the host of your podcast Go for Growth with Doug Hall and today I have a special guest coming to you from the big island of Hawaii. Josh Long, the founder of Joshua Long Consulting and the author of Bottleneck Breakthrough, is with us today to share his insights on growing a business, both his own business, businesses he’s been involved with in the past and how he’s helping clients now. So Josh, welcome to the show. 

Josh Long: Thanks Doug. Great to be here. 

Doug: So my first question is always tell me your origin story. How did you get where you are? What are some of the influences along the way? And maybe a big lesson learned as you got towards, you know, got out in the wild as an entrepreneur? 

Josh’s Entrepreneurial Journey

Josh: Yeah. Yeah, happy to. So I won’t go all the way back too far, but I wanted to be a surgeon, wanted to be an article surgeon and was dead set on that through college. applied.

Doug: By the way, let me inject is that entrepreneurial or not In your view?

Josh: You know, it’s really funny. It’s not but I’d always viewed myself as being a successful orthopedist with lots of interest in businesses out of the funds that I would have made. And so I yeah, I always made money in creative ways as a kid, whether it was recycling cans to buy my first bike, or mowing lawns or detailing cars in high school. I just always made money in unique ways and never thought, what to myself, I need to get a job because I always had enough money to do whatever I wanted growing up. 

And so I bought my first car from detailing cars. And yeah, it just went from there. So got into the orthopedic track. I thought being a doctor was the bee’s knees and worked in an ER for two years at the end of college, applied to med schools. I couldn’t quite get in. I was, it was perfect. It was exactly what was perfect for me to not get in. 

But getting into med school in the early 2000s, during the height of affirmative action, being a white guy with very average scores, it was tough sledding. And so I ended up going to get my MBA waiting to get into med school and didn’t even know what MBA stood for, but had a professor that she convinced me to do it instead of going and being a ski lift operator in Jackson Hole for winter. 

Doug: I would have voted for Jackson Hole personally. 

Josh: Yeah, looking back now, I would have gone either way, but I met my wife while I was getting my MBA and decided, you know, I think I’d rather marry her then go to med school and everybody I’d known that had gone to med school married was unmarried after med school. So yeah, I had a friend whose dad was a neurosurgeon I Got to go to for counsel. And he said, Go the business route medicines, not what it used to be. And I’ve never looked back. 

And so I jumped out, I got an MBA, actually in entrepreneurship of all things. Fresno State was one of the pioneers of apps in college. And so it was great. I got to write business plans for a handheld charting app that I was doing for the medical community and got sent to the venture capital roadshow because all these MBA programs had venture capital competitions. And I became the poster child of Fresno States and got to go and jump in front of these VCs at the age of 22 and 23 and do my dog and pony show and it was a lot of fun. 

On the heels of that, figuring out what I was going to do the software venture had a fatal flaw. It couldn’t connect with billing systems. So we had a hospital that had a home care division and they were ready to use it. We were building out the app so that the nurses could do their charting from the old HPI packs before smartphones existed.

Doug: Oh my gosh, I remember those.

Josh: I know it shows how old we are right?

Doug: Yeah, right, exactly. Sorry. I don’t want to expose that. But

Josh: It’s fine. So we realized that it needed to integrate with the billing system, which was created by McKesson, which at the time was an $18 billion company. And there was no such thing as an API and trying to crack into it would have probably gotten us thrown in prison or fined heavily so it was a fatal flaw. 

Doug: Right. Big lawsuit.

Josh: Yep. And we shut it down. So I had a roommate who was in the mortgage business, and he was making good money and I thought, well, if he’s doing it, I could do it. And had gone to a bunch of real estate investor conferences and was looking into flipping homes. I thought, well if I do mortgage maybe it’ll give me better access to properties to flip. And so I started that, about six months before I got married in 2004, and had a bunch of bumps and bruises along the way and ended up growing it well got to about 250,000 a year in revenue by about 2006. And then it was fall of August 2007 Indie Mac. 

I remember August 2007, they went insolvent, the run on the bank, and that was the beginning of the end, and I got to meet with a bank. My one of my advisors from grad school was a bankruptcy attorney. And I got to meet with him in February 2008, a week after my firstborn was born, and got to file bankruptcy later that year, which was a great gift at the age of 29. So had quite a few miles at that point on my legs and trying to figure out what to do next. 

I ended up reaching out to a guy I really liked his book called The Ultimate Sales Machine, and his name was Chet Holmes. And I reached out to him later that year in 2008 and became his first hire for a consulting division he was building because his book had done well and he had a great info business but wanted to help more companies that were more in the million to $10 million range. And then at the same time, went back and taught at Fresno State, taught business plan writing to undergrads in the entrepreneurship program. 

So had a lot of fun with that had a lot of ego-bruising, going through bankruptcy and working for somebody and but it was good. I learned a lot working with Chet and got to work with a lot of different businesses meet guys get close with guys like Jay Abraham and I had already worked with a guy named Dan Kennedy who I looked up to and had gone through some training with Michael Gerber’s company and E Myth. So I kind of had this who’s who in the info world that I work with, and working with Chet my network, just exploded more. 

And worked with him, ended up being his marketing director for two years while he partnered with Tony Robbins, and launched the business mastery program and went out on my own about 2010. And I’ve been, as a buddy of mine says, buttering my own bread since. So as a freelance consultant. And about 2013, I had a couple clients that really just let me do whatever in their companies, and we can talk more about them later. But it really helped me noodle in on this concept of the bottleneck theory I had in 2006, or seven, and I knew I hadn’t invented anything there.

 I knew somebody else had probably come up with it and had a student in 2011 Give me a book called The Goal by Eli Goldratt who’s the godfather of Theory of Constraints, and I said, there we go. I knew somebody created this. It wasn’t just me. By about 2012 or 13 realizing The right clients that let me do whatever I wanted in their businesses, we could noodle in on bottlenecks and unlock massive growth. And so then my wife challenged me in 2015 to write a book. And that’s what became the Bottleneck Breakthrough book that I published in November 2017. 

Doug: So your bottleneck theory was then and how you developed it and how you saw it, break the breakthrough that you’ve engineered and talked about? 

Breaking the Bottleneck

Josh; Yeah, that’s a great question. So running my mortgage brokerage back in 2005, and six, and I’d gone to a conference with Dan Kennedy that he put on and I was just so overwhelmed. Like I didn’t know how to organize a company. It was before I had gone through E Myth and really fallen in love with their seven centers of management attention to organize a business around. 

And I just had stacks of paperwork and things falling through the cracks and I was sitting in this conference and I was like, you know, if I could just figure out the next thing that matters to work on in the business and fix it and move on. I think I can compound growth. I think I can get some sanity, stop being a fireman walking around with fire extinguishers all day just putting out fires. And so I got back from that conference and I just started looking at my mortgage brokerage. I was like, What is the biggest issue? And at that time, it was underwriting loans. 

We were getting too many conditions back from the lenders from the underwriters, it was taking too long to get to approvals. And so I really focused on how do we streamline getting approvals? So it means a checklist, right? We need, it’s been, gosh, 15 years. I don’t know if I can remember all of it, but it was essentially like tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements, and an appraisal. And if we could get all of that upfront, then we could submit a more complete package and hopefully get approvals faster. And lo and behold, in a couple months, we got it down to where we were getting loans approved in three days. 

And we just sit there twiddling our thumbs till escrow had to close. And it just made life so much easier. And so then from there, it was moving on to the next bottlenecks. And I was, I felt like I’d finally hit my groove by about march of 2017. And then August, it just bottom fell out and too little too late to try to recover from some mistakes I had made financially up to that point. And so that was the beginning of the Bottleneck Breakthrough method. 

And so when I went to work for Chet, and we’re working with these clients, he had a big, comprehensive kind of overkill process of building out new marketing systems and it all built around the ultimate, sorry, the stadium pitch and building your core story. And these companies would come to us and it’d take six months for them to get results. And this is on the heels of the recession. And some of these companies are in the red and just needing a quick. A lot of stress and it and it, a lot of them couldn’t survive the long build-up process that Chet’s system had. 

And I was sitting with Jay Abraham one day having lunch, and we were talking and I said, this system that Chet does is good on paper, but it just, these guys don’t have the fortitude to stick it out. He says, Well, that’s why we ended up stopping working together because they were working together in the early 2000s partnering and he said, it’s, you’re right. It’s great in theory, but it just takes so long and he says my approach has always been, and this was a huge nugget Jay gave me, and it’s something that I’ve held onto ever since was he said I try to come in and figure out what a company’s already doing that’s working well that I can make work a little better. 

That’s something that I can tweak or add some added horsepower to. And we get a quick win and he says often it creates such a win that it pays my fee for the next year. So it takes all the pressure off because it adds enough revenue to the owner and it gets them a trust, gets them confidence that whatever else Jay is going to do has a high likelihood of working. And so for me, it really helped me see Gosh, if I can just go in and figure out where the quick win is then it’s self-serving as a consultant, right? 

Because if we’re not producing results, our runway is pretty short, our lifetime with a client is measured. And so I would go in and say okay, they think they need x right? Every business owner thinks they need something and it often is around lead gen. I haven’t found many business owners who aren’t focused on generating more prospects. They just, it’s the crack cocaine of small business ownership, right? 

Doug: I agree. It’s a universal desire. 

Josh: It is. And it’s not that they’re wrong, it’s just maybe it’s changed or evolved over time. Because at the start, everybody needs leads, and that that’s the lifeblood of getting off the ground. But as things change, and I found these revenue plateaus at half a million and a and 2 million and five million and 10 million were these patterns, change the demands. The needs really changed for the business, and there’s these common bottlenecks that are unique at each stage. And so, I found, gosh, that everybody’s hiring me for marketing and for lead gen, but oftentimes, they have a systems problem. 

And so this allowed me to say, for the right clients, the ones that trusted me and would let me just kind of noodle around wherever, say, Okay, well, we’re coming in here. Let’s say that you think you need more leads, but really, it’s a systems problem. So the first, one of the first real wins for me was a mountain guide school and they had three facilities, three locations. One in Alaska near Denali, one in Chile near Patagonia, and one in Spain near a rock-climbing haven. 

And the owner was working his brains out and thought he needed, he really thought he needed an operations manual, like for staff to, because he was writing into the million-dollar plateau and just thought, Gosh, if I could just document systems, I’ll be fixed. And I said, well, let’s not focus on documenting systems yet. Let’s focus on where all your time is going. And he was spending about 20 to 25 hours a week just on Q&A calls with prospective students. And their program was a four-year full alternative university equivalent, it was like 140 grand. 

It was the most thorough thing in anything with mountain guiding, ski patrol, rock climbing anything of that nature. It produced fantastic students that got fantastic jobs anywhere in the world. And was incredibly thorough, but he was kept running into this million-dollar ceiling and bouncing back. And so he spent about 20 to 25 hours a week on calls. And I said, Well, what are the calls about? He says, Oh, just a lot of the same questions. And so I said, Well, have you thought of creating a webinar that you can give? Because just seemed like an obvious solution is all Yeah, with what time? 

And I said, Well, how many of those end up becoming students? He says, one or two a week, and but the follow-through is low. And they really only needed about 20, 10 to 20 new students a year and they were doing fine. And so I said, What if we make it more of an application that instead of five questions that you ask them that are pretty basic that get them on your calendar, what do we make it more like a university type application? And we make the calls more of an application process instead of a Q&A with the owner. 

And he was game for it. So we ended up making 55 question application and charged them 50 bucks at the end of it to submit their application. And his call volume obviously dropped like a rock but in the three to five calls a week that he would get. 80% of them were qualified and would sign up. And so he was getting more enrollments on the fifth of the calls. And so it was a huge bottleneck to save all that time. And it freed him up instantly to lead the school better. And so that was the first bottleneck. And then the second bottleneck we worked on was his staff, figuring out who’s available, what are they doing, how do we rearrange the roles. 

And so we did personality. assessments and figured out that he has a funny line in the foreword of my book, I can’t remember what he says. That she was like the facilities manager making sure they had enough ropes and carabiners or something. She ended up becoming the Operations Manager overnight. And she was a great gal, she had all this organizational leadership skills needed to take on that role, which freed him up even more. 

And then another small efficiency gain was we tested out Facebook ads because he was spending about 30 grand a month on Google ads. I’m sorry, spending about five grand a month on Google Ads getting leads for about 30 bucks apiece. And we went and tested out Facebook ads and saw that we could target personality demographic details better. And I think we were getting lead we ended up start out getting leads for like eight to 10 bucks apiece and then ended up getting it down to about 4.50. So We increased his lead flow by about 600%. And the quality was the same. 

And so then they’re coming into a more thorough application process, and that, we got done with all three of those in about 90 days. And he went from 785,000, ending that year, to the next year doing about 1.35 million. And then the year after, did about 2.4 million. And so that was really my first full swing at focusing on bottlenecks and what happens thereafter. 

And it just, it really is the best way for small businesses to grow in my opinion. So that’s what I focused on sense and not everybody’s submitted to the process or willing to overhaul their business in certain ways. And at the end of the day, it’s the mindset of the owner, that’s the ultimate bottleneck. But when business owners do go through it and realize they have to change as their company changes. as it grows, it needs a different version of them, the results are fantastic.

Doug: Very cool. So when you, that’s a great story. And so now step back a little bit and say of the client of the business owners you’ve helped who have been open-minded and willing to go through the bottleneck identification and solution process. Are there any common themes of what it looks like afterwards? Before I would posit is, is the owner is almost always the bottleneck.

Beyond the Bottleneck

Josh: Yeah, I mean, afterward, change is that the owners end up with more time and more money. Like I know that sounds

Doug: It sounds idyllic. It sounds like it. How can that be?

Josh: Right. Right. Well, and a big part of it is management. And I know management’s a four-letter word for small business owners. But once you can develop some basic management skills, and I write a whole section of my book three chapters on management and give the core solution to management is a weekly meeting, one on one, with all of your direct reports. And a lot of owners think, Oh, that’s so tedious. 

What am I going to cover? Well, I give them a worksheet that covers four basic things. What do you get done last week? What didn’t you get done that you thought you were going to get done? Why didn’t you get it done? And how can I help? And then what are you going to do this next week? 

Doug: That’s pretty basic stuff. But how many business owners 

Josh: It really is. But the amazing thing is having that weekly meeting going through those four topics, those four bullet points. It solves 99% of all your management issues. And so, if you fix a couple of the key bottlenecks, that are sucking up your time and stabilize your business and revenue and then you manage around that weekly one on one framework, you really have a ton of free time and ability to focus on more strategic things or more fulfilling things. 

And so it really is the best approach I’ve ever found a growing a company and the ultimate bottleneck does become the owner’s willingness or unwillingness to lead and become more of an organizational leader instead of a harebrained entrepreneur.

Doug: And it also in the community, I’m part of, it, we use the term letting go of the vine. So to let, to make other people responsible and accountable for key pieces of work the owner has to stop doing it. Stop interfering. Let go of the vine and free fall and believe that their team is going to catch them before they hit the bottom and the ravine. They’re clinging to this, they’re clinging to this vine on the edge of a cliff and they can’t climb back up to the top of the cliff. They’ve fallen off. And so they’re in this business situation hanging on because they don’t know any better way.

Josh: That’s it. They’d rather deal with the devil they know than the devil they don’t know. And it’s very fearful, fear-inducing, and it’s a control thing. And I remember it was about 2011 Peter Teal, the famous venture capitalists and PayPal co-founder and his college roommate, Reid Hoffman, who founded was also at PayPal and founded LinkedIn. They were talking and I was reading a transcript of the conversation and Peter asked Ried, he said, what percentage of small business owners do you think are sociopaths, like narcissists, the world revolves around them?

 And Ried says, I don’t know maybe 30%, 40% and Peter’s like, no, no way. It’s 50%. And it was really healing for me because I was on the heels of a bad stretch of frustrating projects with clients and realized that I was taking on their burdens and scope creep running amok and saying yes to everything and that every last one of them was some form of sociopath or narcissist, and that it wasn’t all me. I mean, I had to become stronger and healthier inside to deal with people like that or even not even attract them anymore into my life, but it was so freeing because I was like, okay, it’s not all my fault. 

And so, when owners get to that point where they’re grasping onto the vine on the edge of the cliff, and they can’t think of anything else, I mean, it really is an internal game for them to get healed to trust other people to know that they don’t have to be in control of it all. To know that the self-made man bs that everybody or a lot of people promote. It’s not self-made. I think Arnold Schwarzenegger did such a great tribute recently to his friend Franco that, can’t remember Franco’s last, name. He’s is a bodybuilder. 

They both ended up growing up together in the US and Arnold said how much Franco was key to Arnold’s success and along with the thousands of other people in Arnold’s life that helped make him who he is today and that there’s no such thing as a self-made man. It’s all part of the community that builds us up. And I think so many business owners just don’t have anybody in their life to challenge them or give them a different perspective that there is a better way and it’s not their way or the highway and it isn’t all down to them doing it or else it won’t get done right. Or all the lines you and I’ve heard over the years, right?

Doug: So you mentioned management a few minutes ago, and you got me thinking apart from the weekly one on one, what other secret sauce or you know, almost always successful advice would you have for business owners who

Overcommunication Always Pays Off

Josh: Yeah, it’s a really funny one. These I mean, these are such basic things, but, like Ink Magazine’s never going to write about any of this stuff, because it’s not sensational. But overcommunication, it’s a really fascinating thing. I mean, I say it 10 times a week now, and it, that the clients need to overcommunicate with everybody probably four times more than they think they need to. And the reason I say overcommunicate is because as the owner, you’re already having these conversations in your head with yourself, right? 

And you’re saying, Oh, I think I need to deal with this for taxes or this client’s a headache.  And it’s like in a dating relationship, or even a marriage that goes south, right? Like one person decides I’m out and they have all these conversations of breaking up with the other person and they think through all the reasons and then they finally tell the other person is often shocked, because they had no idea and the person doing the breaking up, realizes, never realizes Oh, I’ve had hours and hours and hours of conversations in my head about this. 

And it’s the same in a business that the owners know everything. It all originates from them. They are involved in every level. of the business. They’re involved at every stage. They’re involved in every decision. And so they get exhausted thinking or wanting to talk about it at all. And so they under-communicate with their staff. So their staff is sitting, most staff sit and wonder in fear about what’s really going on behind the scenes about the stability of their job or the company, or what their potential is for growth. And it’s all, they’re all just waiting and they all want more information. 

And whether it’s an open culture that the owner is approachable but maybe doesn’t share clearly enough or the typical culture where the owner is a caged animal that’s behind closed doors that nobody wants to go in and deal with, the staff are left in the dark. And so I tell clients all the time, you need to be communicating changes. You need to be communicating direction shifts. You need to communicate that these changes don’t mean anybody’s going to lose their job or that if they fail, that they’re gonna lose their job because change is bumpy. And that overcommunication always pays off. 

I’ve never met an owner who came to me and said, You know, I told my staff too much I talked about this changed too much. I talked about these initiatives too much and it blew up in our face. Like it just, it never happens. And so realizing that you have to overcommunicate, and even if it’s with key management, and let them repeat what you’re saying to the staff as they see fit, but overcommunication is the number one change that business owners have to go through to become better leaders and managers.

Doug: Awesome. So let’s say that the business owner goes through some work with you or they figure it out on their own or they work with somebody else and they get to the point where they do have more time freedom and they do have more income. What do you see as sort of the typical next level for that kind of business owner? 

Josh: Yeah, so a lot of times that business owner, so let’s talk about revenue plateaus first because that leads really well into that question, Doug. And so a good reference a rattle them off earlier, about a half a  million, two million, five million and 10 million are common revenue plateaus. And so it’s, it’s really looking at those revenue plateaus from that question is where I can answer it better. And so at a million dollars, this is where everybody needs an operations manager of some kind. Somebody to run the fulfillment and so that the business owner can go and be more of the rainmaker. 

And that’ll get you up to two or three million pretty easily because it takes all that fulfillment headache off the owner’s plate. And then at two million the question really becomes what do I want to become because a $2 million business that’s very profitable run like a well-oiled machine can be super fulfilling. Whereas I’ve never seen a company stuck at 5 million that’s a joy to run its own. It’s kind of purgatory until you get to 10 million. 

And so that question becomes, your question of what to do next really depends on what revenue plateau you’re at. So in reality, nobody’s going to be at 5 million and have more time and profit and freedom because they have to get to 10 million. It’s like this really weird no man’s land in the ecology of the business world. Like it’s just a funny funny black hole on Bermuda Triangle. 

And I don’t know why and I don’t care to figure it out how to keep somebody there profitably. It just, either choose to stay at 2 million and be super profitable, or choose to move to 10 million to create more economies and leverage and have something more sellable as a sellable asset business that you can get more multiples for because there’s more buyers of $10 million companies than there are $2 million companies. Surprisingly enough.

Doug: Yeah, I agree. I’ve heard that from business brokers and in various industries, like you got to get to 10 million or you’re really not, you can’t be a strategic purchase.

The 10 Million Sweet Spot

Josh: Exactly, exactly. You could be a cash flow purchase, but we know those don’t demand the multiple,

Doug: They don’t pay them multiples. They’re not a big multiple, 

Josh: You’re not going to get as big of a windfall. So yeah, like, for example, let’s say you have a $2 million business and you’re netting 20%, and you’re getting 400 a year, and you might get five times that. So let’s say it’s 100% of gross cash flow. So you get 2 million for it, whereas you go to 10 million and let’s say you’re only getting 10% net profit, right? Because not everything’s more efficient and you’re getting a million a year. But let’s say it’s a strategic buy and you get 15 times net profit or EBITDA or something, so you’re getting 15 million instead of 2 million. 

So you’re getting 15 times your profits instead of just five times. And since it’s five times larger at 10 million than 2 million, I mean, the multiple, the change number of zeros at the end of that acquisition for you is staggering. But it doesn’t always mean it’s worth going to 10 million. I’ve got a client right now, they’re, they just were 50 grand shy of 2 million this last year. And we’re just looking to keep optimizing and we might get them to 3 million in the next couple of years and they’ve got a fantastic lifestyle business. 

They’ve got all the debts paid off, their buildings almost paid off. They’ve got tons of cash in the bank. They take this year, I think they’re taking eight weeks of vacation. And it’s a fantastic lifestyle business. So I think that’s the question of what do you really want? And the biggest problem I see if business owners, once they get some cash stability, is they tend to either self-sabotage, through boredom needing novelty and they start changing everything, or they go and become so distractible somewhere else that they completely leave the business and it devolves into shambles. 

And so I know that most entrepreneurs love novelty, need stimulation have ADHD tendencies. And so I tell them go find a hobby somewhere else that’s not inside your business. Go find something that’s stimulating somewhere else and if it comes to it and you have nothing better to do go get a mistress. It’s less damaging to have a mistress on the side of your life than to use your business as your place of novelty and run it into the ground.

Doug: Yeah, good point. That’s solid advice. Maybe not so great on your marriage, but it’ll preserve your business.

Josh: It helps you stay in perspective. Like it. It’s less damaging in my mind and then some of the stuff these business owners do to themselves.

Doug: Excellent. Well, that’s some solid advice. And I, I can identify among my clients that self-sabotage, fiddling around with things versus running away and ignoring the business. Those are two common approaches to dealing with the next level. You know, I can’t figure out the next level so I’m just going to muck around until it appears. And then the core business devolves. 

Josh: Well, and that’s what I see so often for guys stuck at 5 million is they really don’t want to become the leader. They really don’t want to let go of that vine. And so it just becomes purgatory being stuck there. And they’re more miserable there than they were at 2 million. And yeah, it just it’s a fascinating pattern.

Doug: Yep. I can think of a client I have. It’s about 4.5 million right now. They’re stuck in that purgatory. 

Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s bizarre that nobody’s talking about this stuff. Like, that was one of the reasons I wrote the book was I couldn’t find any other books talking about these things. And so I because obviously, I don’t want to be a derivative, I don’t care to be redundant or me too out there. I don’t think, I don’t need to hear my own voice or read my own writing to feel good about myself. So it was really just identification of these revenue plateaus and that nobody else is talking about it. Nobody else is helping business owners transition, that the business needs a different version of them at each revenue plateau.

Doug: So tell us how we can learn more about what you do and your book and what’s the best place for folks to go.

Josh: Yeah, so my books on Amazon. It’s available in Kindle or hardcover. Bottleneck Breakthrough. There’s some great resources I give that you can get to from the book on the website that I go through. Just added resources, trainings, whatever, it’s all free. If you are interested in working with me go to my website bottleneckbreakthrough.com and there’s an application process there and happy to talk to anybody that wants help. 

My approach is evolving. I’ve been taking on larger and larger scopes over the years essentially becoming the marketing director for my clients and it just was too much for me for it to be sustainable. So I’ve moved more into the sales side, helping build sales processes, close bigger deals. I love closing big deals. Anything nearing six figures or more is fun. I enjoy that. And building out and managing sales teams I really enjoy. 

And then for those that aren’t quite there yet, just I call it coachsulting where we just talk monthly, and I help you with guidance and accountability and supportive coaching but then also with telling you the next steps and the bottlenecks to solve and then connecting you with providers to get that done. Whether it’s copywriting or web design or graphic design or marketing automation systems, whatever. So that’s super fulfilling for me as well under the coachsulting model.

Doug: And a combination of those two you feel is sustainable for you. And it energizes you.

Josh: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I realized it’s funny, I’m a good copywriter. I’m an A minus or B plus copywriter. But it’s one of those things that just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean I need to be doing it. It is not fulfilling at all to write copy. And so I’ve told all my clients that I’m no longer writing copy for them because it just is such a time drain for me. And I do better live and closing than writing copy. So

Doug: Yeah. That’s the move, the pivot to sales systems and sales process. Makes perfect sense. Well, excellent. We’ll check out your stuff. Thanks. And I know you’re very generous. You give a lot of information away, and I appreciate that. 

Josh: Yeah, my pleasure. 

Doug: So it’s been great interviewing you. Wish you the very best and look forward to talking again soon in the future.

Josh: Yeah. Thanks, Doug. This has been fun. Great questions and hope it’s useful for everybody in your audience. And I know that EOS communities’ fantastic. So I’m a huge fan of everything you’re working on.

Doug: Well, thanks for that encouragement. Okay, folks, that was Josh Long. Thanks, Josh. Have a great day.