Josh @ The KBB Collective: Welcome back to this week's episode of the KBB Collective. Now, every week I speak to kitchen business owners from all over the UK, and these are businesses doing between half a million pounds, businesses doing five million pounds, and almost every conversation starts exactly the same way, which is Josh, we need more leads. Maybe, but also maybe not. Because here's what I've learned after hundreds of conversations. And that is that most kitchen businesses aren't struggling because they have the wrong solution. They're struggling because they've diagnosed the wrong problem. And if you spend the next 12 months fixing the wrong problem, you'll wonder why nothing changes, or at least why nothing relevant changes. So today I want to introduce something that I call the KBB bottleneck framework. Because once you understand this idea, you won't ever look at your business in the same way again. So before we go any further, let me tell you what this isn't. This isn't going to be another video telling you to post more on Instagram. It's not going to be another marketing tutorial. It isn't another list of twenty KPIs that you need to track. It's actually much simpler than that. Because I believe something that completely changed how I look at businesses is that every business has one bottleneck at any given time. Not ten, one. And until you find it, every improvement that you make somewhere else has very little impact. So let me give you an example. A while ago I spoke to the owner of a KBV business. It was a lovely showroom. They had a great reputation, fantastic products. and his opening line to me was, Josh, we need more leads, which sounds reasonable. I'm sure many of you think that way. Except when we started talking, they already had plenty of inquiries. The real issue was nearly half of them weren't being followed up properly. So the marketing itself wasn't broken, but sales was broken. lead nurture was broken and the follow-up system was broken. So imagine pouring another hundred leads into that business. Would it help? No. It would probably create a bigger mess. another owner that I speak he spoke spoke to wanted to double his marketing budget. And again, he was convinced that demand was the issue. He he was convinced that he was demand constrained, not supply constrained. But when we looked at the business in more detail, his gross margins were just absolutely awful. And every additional kitchen that he sold was creating work without creating much profit. So spending another five thousand pounds on advertising wouldn't have solved that problem. It actually would have accelerated it. And this is when I realized something, which is that almost every owner points at the symptom, but very few people look for the cause. We mistake symptoms for problems. Sales are down, cash is tight, the diary feels quiet, the showroom's empty. Those aren't actually problems, they're symptoms. The problem sits some somewhere underneath there, right? The root cause is underneath that. So imagine your business is a bucket. And this is an analogy that we use quite a lot. And every week you're trying to pour more water into the bucket, which is more leads, more inquiries, more staff, more marketing, more sales. But the bucket has a hole in the side. And every extra liter of water that you pour in leaks straight back out. And that's what happens when you improve something that isn't your bottleneck. More marketing won't fix poor margins. More leads won't fix poor conversion. More designers won't fix broken systems. You're just pouring more water into an already leaking bucket. And once you start seeing bottlenecks, you are going to see them everywhere. Think about traffic. Six lanes become one on the motorway. That's the bottleneck. Building another motorware somewhere else, ⁓ building another motorway somewhere else doesn't fix that problem. Think about an airport. If security is taking an hour, Hiring more check-in staff changes nothing. Or if you think about a restaurant, if the kitchen can only produce 10 meals every, say, 15 minutes, employing more waiters doesn't make the food come out any faster. And businesses work, K baby businesses specifically, work exactly the same way. And this is what I think our industry gets wrong the whole time. Marketing is visible and it's exciting. And you can, in a lot of cases, buy it tomorrow. ⁓ you can blame it when things go quiet. It's much easier to say Facebook's not working for us at the moment than it is to admit our sales process needs work or we're discounting too heavily or we don't actually know our numbers. Marketing becomes kind of a scapegoat in in this industry, ⁓ especially in the last five years. When in reality, it's often completely innocent. So over the years I've started to build a way of diagnosing KBB businesses, and it's not with 50 spreadsheets, although the numbers themselves obviously are important. It's not with a hundred KPIs. It's just a handful of questions and I will ask those questions on every single call that I jump on, ⁓ just because it gives me so much context. And these are questions that tell me where I'd spend the very next pound. Questions that reveal the bottleneck. I call it the KBB bottleneck framework. And it's the exact framework that I use before recommending marketing. Before I recommend recruitment, before I recommend growth. Before I recommend anything, actually. In the next video, I'm gonna show you exactly how it works, which are the four numbers that I ask every single kitchen business owner, why I ask them in that order, and how within five minutes I can normally tell what's really holding that business back. Because once you identify the bottleneck, the solution becomes quite obvious. And until you identify it, you're just guessing.