From the Codex //022: Finding Bottlenecks in Your Business: The Simple Systems Audit That Works
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Learn how to run a simple systems audit so you know exactly where to start systemizing and stop wasting energy on the wrong things.
Why Most Founders Struggle With Scaling Systems
You’re brilliant at what you do. You’ve built a personal brand, incredible offers, and even started hiring to try and build a team around you.
And while money does flows in, it also leaks right back out.
You’re working harder than ever, yet not making anywhere near what your expertise is worth. Or the months you do make incredible money, it comes with stress, firefighting, and the gnawing feeling that you’re holding the business together with duct tape.
It’s not that you’re lazy, you’re far from it. It’s that you’re doing all the things you don’t actually need to be doing.
Your time is eaten away by tasks that could be automated, delegated, or eliminated but without a clear systems audit, you can’t see where your leaks are so you’re always running around, doing everything yourself. Putting out fires that never needed to exist in the first place.
Here’s the trap most personal brands and thought leaders fall into:
You know you need systems, but you don’t know where to start
You try to build everything at once
You end up layering tools and checklists on top of problems without ever fixing the root cause
You hire because you know you “need” to, but you have no clearly written SOPs or operations so you have to micromanage team members which adds even more to your plate.
That’s why so many founders feel like “building systems” just creates more work.
The truth? Systems don’t add “more to your plate.” You just need a way to identify which systems actually move the needle right now, and which systems are for a future you to set up. That’s what a systems audit is for.
The Systems Audit: A Simple Diagnostic Framework
Most founders focus obsessively on the front end of their business: the sales, the content, the marketing.
But the backend is what determines whether your business can actually hold the income growth you’re chasing.
If your operations, delivery, or internal processes are full of friction, it doesn’t matter how good your offer is, you’ll keep hitting income ceilings and energetic burnout.
A systems audit is how you diagnose that. It’s not about building more software or complicated automations; it’s about seeing where your business is leaking energy, money, or opportunity (and then trying to outsource to fix your headache and lack of willingness to look at the backend).
A systems audit is an act of clarity. It’s where you zoom out from the noise of “doing more” and examine how your business truly runs. You’re not fixing surface problems; you’re tracing them to their root. It’s less about adding new tools and more about understanding where your process breaks, so you can build systems that actually create flow.
There are only two questions you need to start with:
The Repetition Test: What are you doing over and over again without structure, or in a way that takes far more time than it should for something you do so often?
The Bottleneck Test: Where does flow get slowed, blocked, or depend entirely on you to move forward?
These two alone will show you exactly where your business is wasting capacity and where a simple system could unlock exponential ease and income.
What a System Actually Is (Energy Architecture 101)
A system isn’t a digital tool; it’s energy architecture.
It’s a pattern that repeats with structure, ie: the invisible framework that holds your creativity, like choreography holds the flow of a dance.
Think about how you create a YouTube video: research, script, record, edit, post. That’s a system. It’s not the checklist itself, but the relationship between each step. How energy moves through the process with rhythm and flow instead of friction and chaos.
The tools (Notion, ClickUp, Asana, Airtable) are just containers that help you visualize and manage that flow. But the system is the structure of interaction, the way each phase connects to the next, so your energy compounds instead of leaks.
When you build systems like this, you’re not creating rigidity, you’re creating spaciousness.
Every well-designed system becomes a supportive rhythm that anchors your creative power and keeps you moving forward without mental overload.
The Repetition Test: What Are You Doing Over and Over?
If you’ve done something two or three times and know you’ll do it again, it’s time to start noticing the pattern and intentionally designing the framework around it.
Not a rigid checklist, but a repeatable rhythm that makes the task lighter every time you touch it.
Think about how you create content: when you already have your ideas banked, templates prepped, and captions outlined, execution becomes almost effortless. You’re not reinventing the wheel each time, you’re following a familiar rhythm that keeps you in motion. This way you spend more time creating high-converting/high-engaging content, and not spendings hours outlining your content or coming up with ideas.
That’s what a system does: it turns chaos into choreography.
Start by noticing where you feel energetic drag, the things that take far more effort than they should for how often you do them. Those are your repetition signals.
Examples:
Sending the same invoice or client email every week and it starts to feel annoying.
Creating content from scratch without a batching rhythm so you always feel like you’re behind.
Rewriting your launch plan every time you open enrollment or decide to sell a new offer.
These aren’t random inefficiencies, they’re energetic leaks showing you exactly where your business is ready to evolve.
The goal isn’t to automate everything overnight. It’s to design supportive infrastructure that becomes the groundwork for growth: a flow that reduces cognitive load, so you don’t have to think about what to do. You just move, with clarity and precision.
When the system is in place, time collapses: what once took hours now takes minutes. You move through your work with ease, and bonus points; it becomes something you can eventually delegate or outsource without losing quality or flow.
Systems don’t box you in; they set you free.
They give your brilliance a container. Just like a dancer isn’t limited by choreography, your creativity expands when structure anchors it.
The Bottleneck Test: Where Does Flow Get Blocked?
If repetition reveals where to build systems, bottlenecks reveal where your energy architecture is collapsing.
A bottleneck is any step that slows or halts the natural flow of your business. It’s where momentum gets trapped because too much depends on you: your time, your decision-making, your perfectionism, or the absence of structure around a specific phase.
For example:
You’ve recorded five podcast episodes, but they’re stuck in editing limbo because only you know how you like them done.
You’re ready to launch, but your checkout flow still isn’t connected to your email automations.
Clients are asking for updates, but you’re too busy managing your team’s chaos to actually deliver.
You’ll recognize a bottleneck by how it feels: everything’s moving smoothly until one task suddenly drags. The energy stops. The pipeline clogs. You delay progress, not because you’re lazy, but because the process is missing support.
Ask yourself:
What parts of your business stop moving unless you push them forward?
Where do clients or leads fall through the cracks?
What feels like it should be simple, but always creates friction?
The key is not to judge the bottleneck, it’s to trace it back to its source. Most of the time, it’s not a motivation or mindset problem, it’s a missing mechanism in your backend flow.
The delay in posting content isn’t procrastination; it’s the lack of a content pipeline.
The endless back-and-forth repeating the same details to every single one of your clients isn’t “just part of business”; it’s a missing automation or onboarding rhythm.
The constant pressure to “do it all” isn’t a character flaw, it’s a system gap revealing itself.
When you fix the right bottleneck, the ripple effect is immediate. Cash flow stabilizes. Delivery speeds up. You regain mental space.
You don’t need more effort, you need cleaner flow.
Because when your energy architecture is intact, your business doesn’t just run smoother, it scales without strain.
How to Run Your First Systems Audit
Before you try to “fix” your business, you have to see it clearly.
The goal isn’t to overhaul everything overnight, it’s to notice where the flow breaks.
Here’s what I want you to do:
For the next 30 days, keep a running list titled “Bottlenecks.” Move through your business as usual; marketing, sales, delivery, team communication, but every time something feels sticky, slow, or frustrating, write it down.
Don’t analyze it yet. Just notice.
At the end of the month, review your list and highlight:
Which bottlenecks caused the most friction or frustration?
Which ones appeared the most often across different areas of your business?
That’s where your audit begins. These recurring points of resistance are your roadmap, showing you exactly where to start systemizing first.
How to Prioritize What to Fix First
Once you’ve identified your bottlenecks, the next step is to decide where to start.
Begin with whatever creates the most friction: the area that drains the most energy, eats the most time, or leaks the most money. That’s your priority system to optimize first.
You can absolutely keep a short list of your top three problem areas, but don’t try to fix them all at once.
Focus on one core system per quarter.
When you zoom in on a single area, whether that’s your onboarding flow, content pipeline, or lead tracking, you give yourself space to rebuild it properly without destabilizing the rest of your business. Each quarter, you’ll see the compound effect: one optimized system at a time, your business begins to flow.
Bringing It All Together
The point of a systems audit isn’t to become hyper-structured or robotic. It’s to reclaim the energy you’ve been wasting holding your business together by hand.
When you can see where the leaks are, you stop trying to “work harder,” and start leading smarter.
Because scaling isn’t about adding more effort; it’s about designing environments that support effortless execution.
Every system you build is a form of energetic leadership. You’re not just organizing your backend, you’re reprogramming your business to hold more flow, more income, and more freedom without chaos.
And next week, we’ll take this even deeper inside The 5x Systems Method, where I’ll walk you through the exact process of how to build, test, and operationalize a system across five cycles until it runs itself.
Because freedom isn’t found in avoiding structure; it’s found in mastering it.
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