How We Work
We work backwards from one question. Of everything slowing your revenue engine down, which constraint is actually binding, and is it one you should touch at all?
Binding is the word that matters. The binding constraint is the single thing setting the ceiling on your results. Move it and the outcome shifts; move anything else and it’s a roll of the dice.
That question has a method behind it. We call it Constraint Discrimination.
Constraint Discrimination is a method for finding the one thing actually holding a revenue engine back, deciding whether it can move, and deciding whether it should move. Three questions. Most growth work answers the third and skips the first two, which is how you spend a quarter and a budget to end up back where you started.
The method
It applies in one situation: you have a goal, a problem reaching it, and you’re stuck. If you already know what to do and you’re on your way, you don’t need us.
Inside that, the three questions break into five, asked in order, and each one has to be answered before the next is worth asking.
1. What do you want? One goal, stated plainly - shorten enterprise sales cycles, win more of the strategic deals you keep losing, grow revenue inside the accounts you’ve already landed. One goal at a time, not five.
2. Why can’t you get what you want? This is where companies stop too early - at a symptom that feels like the cause. The honest answer is usually a concrete, fundamental problem, sometimes several. Occasionally it’s “we don’t know,” which is a legitimate place to start.
3. Is that the real constraint? Take the problem, or the five problems, and keep breaking it down until you reach a single thing that is both irreducible (it doesn’t break down further) and actionable (you could actually move it). That single thing is the binding constraint. Everything stacked above it was a symptom. Occasionally the reduction lands on something real but with no path forward, and the method is willing to say so, rather than sell you a project that won’t give you results.
4. Is it a mountain or a rock? Can the constraint be reshaped, or do you have to live with it? A mountain - market structure, regulatory forces, capital you can’t raise - you spend nothing trying to move. You build the road around it. A rock you can move, even if it’s heavy. And the same constraint can be a mountain for one company and a rock for another; it depends entirely on your context.
5. Should you move it? The decisive question, and the answer is binary: yes or no. The cleanest reason for no is that the constraint is load-bearing - remove it and something you can’t afford to break goes with it. But no has other sources - moving it might be politically untenable, or bring friction you haven’t worked out how to absorb, or just be the wrong thing to do this quarter. If none of those are true, you move the constraint - redesign, reshape, rebuild.
If the answer is no, the only thing left to decide is whether that no is for now or for good. The output is the same shape either way: move it now, or don’t.
Why this isn’t Theory of Constraints
Anyone who knows Goldratt sees the word “constraint” and assumes the bottleneck in a throughput system - find the slowest station, elevate it, repeat. That’s a powerful idea for a factory. A revenue engine isn’t a factory, and elevation isn’t always the right move.
Theory of Constraints finds the bottleneck and assumes you want to elevate it. Constraint Discrimination asks the question one layer up - of everything slowing you down, which are real constraints, which are yours to move, and which are worth the cost. Sometimes the right answer is to leave the bottleneck exactly where it is.
What we do, and what we don’t
We’re the diagnostic and design layer. We find the binding constraint, decide whether it earns the intervention, and design the change.
We don’t always run the implementation. The team that rebuilds the comp plan, re-sequences the sales motion or rewires the CRM should be specialists in it, and often you already have those capabilities. We architect the engine and work alongside the people who build it.
What an engagement looks like
Every engagement starts with the diagnosis, because selling you a solution before we’ve found the constraint is the exact mistake we exist to prevent.
When you already know your problem, we start by pressure-testing it down to the real constraint. When you don’t, we start earlier: two weeks inside your data, your people and your systems, with the access to find the constraint ourselves. No access, no diagnosis - that part isn’t negotiable, because a diagnosis made from the outside is only a guess.
From there it depends on what we find. Sometimes the constraint is a rock you can move this quarter and the work moves fast. Sometimes it’s a mountain, and the most valuable thing we do is tell you to stop spending money on it. Either way, at the end of two weeks, you will know which is which.