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How to Spot Business Bottlenecks with AI
Published April 10, 2025 · 108 views on YouTube
Key takeaways
- Diagnose before you buy tools: map your customer journey, track your time, and 'follow the friction' to find your real bottleneck instead of guessing.
- Measure the dollar cost of the bottleneck (hours spent x hourly value, leads lost x average customer value) before deciding it's worth solving.
- Match one AI tool to the specific bottleneck you found instead of adopting tools because they're trending.
- Document your process into an SOP before automating it, then test and refine one workflow at a time rather than rebuilding your whole business at once.
What causes the gap between effort and revenue in a business?
A business bottleneck, not a lack of effort, is usually the cause. Kelly Tenny, founder of Teacher Brilliance and The Woman Who AI Summit, explains that when revenue doesn’t match the hours you’re putting in, business owners typically respond by working harder or doubting their offer, rather than diagnosing what inside the business is actually clogging things up.
What are the four most common business bottlenecks?
Tenny outlines four recurring bottlenecks she sees across businesses of every size, from solopreneurs to teams:
- Lead generation and qualification — spending too many hours manually finding prospects, or bringing in leads that turn out not to be qualified.
- Sales process — a sales cycle that takes too long, weak follow-up, or proposals that take days instead of a 24-48 hour turnaround, letting leads cool off.
- Content creation and distribution — content that’s time-consuming to create or gets posted inconsistently, which she notes is especially common among AI integrators who know how to generate content but struggle to distribute it consistently.
- Client management and follow-up — onboarding and communication handled manually and reactively, so clients miss logins, welcome messages, or promised introductions.
How do you find your business’s specific bottleneck?
Tenny gives a four-step process: diagnose, measure, select, and implement.
- Diagnose — map your full customer journey (she frames it as a flywheel, not a funnel, since it has no clear exit point), track your time with a tool like Toggl to see where hours actually go, and “follow the friction” by noticing which tasks you procrastinate on, since resistance is usually a sign of a bottleneck.
- Measure — assign a dollar value to your activities. Multiply hours spent by your hourly value, and estimate leads lost multiplied by average customer value, to see what the bottleneck is actually costing you. She cites a client capped at manually running her own onboarding calls, limiting how many $25,000 clients she could bring in.
- Select — match a specific AI tool to the diagnosed bottleneck rather than adopting tools because they’re popular, which she calls “shiny object syndrome.”
- Implement — start with one tool on one bottleneck, document the process as an SOP first (you can’t automate what isn’t documented), then test and refine before training a team on it.
How do you know if an AI tool is worth your time?
Tenny’s test is to assign a dollar value to the task the tool would help with. She describes a personal example: spending six hours on Canva graphics that weren’t tied to an offer was, in her coach’s framing, a “$6” activity rather than a “$6,000” one, because the time wasn’t directly connected to revenue. Her guidance is to ask what dollar value a tool will bring to the business before investing time in learning it, since tools not tied to a diagnosed bottleneck become part of the problem rather than the fix.
Full video transcript
Kelly Tenny, founder of Teacher Brilliance and The Woman Who AI Summit, joined the Scale with AI Summit to present on “unbottlenecking” a business with AI. She opened by describing the effort-revenue gap: the experience of working harder than ever while revenue doesn’t reflect the added hours. When business owners hit this gap, she said, they typically respond by working even longer, doubting their offer, or looking outside the business for a new solution, when the real issue is usually a bottleneck inside the business itself.
She walked through four bottlenecks she sees most often, regardless of business size: lead generation and qualification (too much time spent finding prospects, or bringing in leads that aren’t a fit), sales process (long cycles, weak follow-up, slow proposals), content creation (inconsistent posting despite knowing content needs to go out), and client management (manual, reactive onboarding and communication that leaves clients without logins, welcome messages, or promised introductions). She noted that identifying one bottleneck often surfaces others, and that the first step to breaking a bottleneck is correctly diagnosing it rather than treating symptoms.
Tenny then presented a four-step process to eliminate a bottleneck. Diagnose by mapping the customer journey as a flywheel (not a funnel, since it has no clear exit), tracking time spent on each activity, and “following the friction” — noticing which tasks get avoided or delayed, since resistance usually signals a bottleneck. Measure by assigning dollar values to activities: hours spent multiplied by hourly value, and leads lost multiplied by average customer value, referencing a client capped at $25,000 clients per year because she insisted on personally running every onboarding call. Select the AI tool that matches the specific diagnosed bottleneck, rather than adopting tools because they’re trending — she and the host discussed how easy it is to lose hours to a new tool like Pickaxe or Scrivener without it moving revenue. Implement by starting with one tool on one bottleneck, documenting the process as an SOP first, then testing and refining before scaling to a team.
She shared a story about her client Les Brown, a longtime motivational speaker, whose entire system was manual — leads he couldn’t convert, no follow-up after events, no social media presence — despite having hired many experts over the years without knowing where his own business was actually bottlenecked. Tenny offered a bottleneck assessment tool and an implementation-plan assistant, both built in MindPal, accessible inside her Women Who AI community.
The conversation closed with a discussion between Tenny and the host about the dollar-value test for tools: is time spent on a task a “$1 activity” or a “$1,000 activity,” based on whether it’s directly tied to revenue. She recounted a moment where her coach pointed out she’d spent six hours on Canva graphics not linked to any offer, calling it a “$6” day. Both speakers agreed the discipline is knowing where your business is bottlenecked first, then researching and committing to one tool that fits that specific gap, rather than chasing every new AI tool that appears.