Why most founders optimise the wrong constraint
Ask a founder what is holding their business back and you will usually get one of two answers: not enough sales, or not enough people. Both feel true. Both are usually wrong, or at least not the whole picture.
Sales and hiring are visible constraints. They show up as line items, as open roles, as a pipeline that is not full enough. They are also, in most cases, downstream of a constraint that is much less visible and much less comfortable to look at directly: positioning, distribution, or the founder's own capacity to think clearly under load.
This is not a new idea. It is the theory of constraints applied to a business instead of a factory floor. Every system has one bottleneck that actually determines throughput. Everything else is slack. The mistake most founders make is optimising the parts of the system that feel urgent rather than the one part that is actually limiting the whole.
Why the wrong constraint feels so convincing
Sales targets are measurable. Hiring gaps are visible on an org chart. Both produce a satisfying sense of progress when you work on them - you can point to a new hire, a new deal, a number that moved. Positioning problems and distribution problems do not offer that same immediate feedback. They are structural, slower to diagnose, and harder to fix with a single decisive action.
So founders default to the constraint that offers a clear next step, not the constraint that is actually load-bearing.
I see this constantly with the SMEs I work with in Trøndelag. A business will tell me their problem is that the sales team is not converting. We look closer and the actual issue is that the product is being pitched to the wrong segment entirely - a distribution and positioning problem masquerading as a sales performance problem. No amount of sales training fixes a message aimed at the wrong audience.
The Clarify step of the Lion Ethos exists specifically for this. Before you fix anything, you define what is actually happening, what the gap costs, and what the right outcome should look like. Skip that step and you optimise whatever is loudest, not whatever is limiting.
The constraint no one puts on the whiteboard
There is a fourth candidate that rarely makes the list: the founder's own energy capacity. Not motivation - capacity. The actual bandwidth to think clearly, make good decisions, and hold a long horizon in view while operating day to day.
A founder running on four hours of sleep and back-to-back reactive decisions is not short on sales tactics. They are short on the cognitive clarity required to see which constraint actually matters. Every decision gets made from inside the tunnel, and tunnel vision picks the nearest problem, not the real one. TLE Fitness Lab's piece on the long game problem makes this case directly for operators: treating energy as infinite is the quiet way strategy gets replaced by reaction.
This is uncomfortable to hear because it puts the constraint inside the founder rather than outside the business. But if the person making every allocation decision is operating from a depleted state, the constraint analysis itself is compromised before it starts.
What removing the wrong constraint actually costs
Every hour spent optimising a constraint that is not the real one is not neutral. It is not extra effort that cannot hurt. It is opportunity cost, and it usually comes with a side effect: it delays the moment you finally look at the constraint that matters, because the business now has evidence that "we worked hard on this" without the outcome you needed.
This is the same discipline behind what simplifying actually removes. Real work is subtraction as much as addition - and the most valuable subtraction is often effort spent on the wrong problem entirely.
Finding the actual constraint
The test is simple, if not always easy to apply honestly. For any lever you are pulling, ask: if I doubled the effort here, does the business actually move, or does it just get busier?
Sales training does not fix a positioning problem. A new hire does not fix a distribution problem. And no operational fix survives a founder who cannot think clearly enough to diagnose the real bottleneck in the first place.
Find the actual constraint before you optimise anything. Everything else is activity dressed up as progress.
Murphy Alex builds operational AI systems for Norwegian SMEs from Frøya, Trøndelag. IPRESTANDA is at iprestanda.com.