How to spot your agency's biggest bottleneck 🔍

Last month, one of our clients kept missing deadlines despite having plenty of staff.

Turns out, their bottleneck wasn’t in delivery—it was way back in their client onboarding process.

We discovered this using value stream mapping—an exercise for visualizing how value flows through your business from first contact to final payment. 

Many agency owners don’t realize it, but founder dependence often hides in these bottlenecks, keeping them stuck in the day-to-day.

The Water Flow Analogy

Think of your agency like water flowing through containers. 

The water represents your leads, moving through four main containers: client attraction, client conversion, operations, and customer support.

• Client attraction: Turning prospects into appointments

• Client conversion: Converting those appointments into clients

• Operations: Delivering work and fulfilling promises

• Customer support: Ensuring clients stick around

When one container gets clogged, everything after it slows down.

Your agency can only handle as much work as your smallest container allows. 

If you can attract 100 leads but only convert 10, guess what? 

The rest of your containers don’t matter much.

Optimizing Your Flow

The real alpha is in measuring (and optimizing) your “throughput” (how much flows through all containers successfully). 

Value stream mapping helps you track this flow and spot holdups, allowing you to unlock your agency’s growth potential.

For example, let’s say you’re a video editing agency.

If you can handle 50 videos a week from start to payment, that’s your throughput. 

Knowing this number changes everything about how you make decisions and lets you scale without burning out.

Start by watching where work piles up in your agency. 

That pile-up shows you which container needs fixing first. 

Maybe it’s proposals sitting unfinished, or projects stuck in review limbo. 

Whatever backs up is your bottleneck—and removing these blocks opens up room for growth without adding more work.

The coolest part? 

Once you spot these blocks, fixing them is straightforward. 

You’re no longer guessing anymore—you’re just unclogging one container at a time, creating more flow and a more sustainable workload.

Taking Action on Your Bottlenecks

This kind of systems work isn’t easy to do alone (many have learned that the hard way 😬). 

It’s why I run the Agency Alliance mastermind—seeing how other agency owners tackle these bottlenecks can save you months of trial and error.

For example, we worked with Susan, who was developing complex strategy documents for clients that often took 2-3 months to complete. 

Together, we streamlined her process to deliver the same high-quality strategies in just 3 weeks.

The faster delivery helped her close deals much quicker which led to doubling her business in 6 months.

Imagine what scaling looks like when each part of your agency is free to flow. 

If that’s what you’re after, the Agency Alliance mastermind is designed to help you get there faster.

If you’re interested in getting this kind of hands-on help with your agency’s systems, we’ve got a few spots opening up in the Alliance next month.

Want to learn how 8-figure agencies are built?

Grab some time with me here. 

We’ll jump on a quick call to see if it’s a fit!

Until next time, 

Jesse Gilmore

CEO & Founder @ Niche in Control