My client, let's call her Sarah, is the founder of a really exciting tech startup.

When we first met, she was putting in absolutely relentless hours at work. She was juggling investor meetings, she was pushing hard to make tweaks to the business's core product (based on really valuable customer feedback that she had diligently collected), and she was constantly adding more and more into efforts to keep her team aligned as it grew.

Sarah, and her team, was dedicated to the Mission of the company. Everyone at the company felt like they were genuinely giving it their all but progress still felt painfully slow. Sarah felt like she was running up a 'down' escalator. She kept seeing her competitors, both direct and indirect, posting about their wins and she was becoming increasingly more despondent each day. Deadlines were slipping, small issues kept to snowballing into bigger problems, and it was all causing so, so much infighting.

By the time we met, Sarah was honestly close to throwing in the towel and saw working with me as a her final attempt to save the business before she gave up and went back onto the job market.

If any of this feels familiar to you, your company might have been infected with the same virus as Sarah's. It's a tricky little virus that bleeds into the nooks and crannies of a company and quickly overwhelms the system. We call that virus 'operational roadblocks' and it's killed a lot of promising startups before they could properly make their mark on the world.

Often, you feel the symptoms of this virus slowly at first - you start realising that you're reaching the end of the week feeling a little less productive than you did during the one before. Saturdays and Sunday stop being fun days out and start being just about clawing back some sense of rest or desperately trying to finish the workload from the week.

You start to dread meetings that you used to look forward to because they're no longer an opportunity to catch up with your valued colleagues and to drive change together. Meetings have become a time to fight and nitpick each other and you start to go into them with dread, an increased heart rate and a sense of always being on the wrong footing, no matter how often you re-lace your organisational shoes.

You start second-guessing yourself because nothing seems to be working, no matter what you try, but it's really important for you to know that none of this is your fault. You're not putting in the wrong amount of effort and it isn't due to a lack of ambition or talent or an inability to connect with your colleagues.

It's not you, it's the virus. And the virus is the underlying operational inefficiencies - the roadblocks - that are killing your company. It's the unseen snags and clunky processes that silently erode productivity and undo your work and hinder the growth you're striving so hard for.

Operational roadblocks can prevent even the most driven businesses from reaching their full potential. Roadblocks don't care how good your problem statement is or how big your target market is or how hard you work, because you'll never solve the problem or reach your market or get back what you're putting in if you can't get past these blockers.

But don't worry; you can get past this and unblock growth because you have me and I'm going to show you how to blow all your blockers out of the way. Let's first make sure we're clear on how big a deal this all is.

How much growth can get lost in the details

Let's use the example of Sarah's development team. Because of a lack of clear documentation, a very convoluted code review process (a classic operational inefficiency), and no standardisation in the quality assurance processes, Sarah's developers pretty much always found themselves spending hours unpicking their previous work or fixing bugs that could have been avoided entirely. And they always fell behind on customer requests.

Sarah currently has five developers - if each of them is wasting just two hours a week on these issues, that's ten hours of really valuable engineering time (so more than a full day's work per week) being lost to inefficiency. In the UK, the average mid-weight developer's salary is about £55k a year, which means that Sarah was spending £11,000 a year on ... nothing. And, in return for that 'nothing', she was getting delayed releases and customer attrition and a loss of the company's very hard-fought competitive edge - all of which quickly led to grumpy investors and questions about the feasibility of a future round.

Any of this feel familiar to you?

How to recapture the growth you've lost to operational roadblocks

It all starts with introspection.

It would be insane of me to suggest that I can give you in one article the specific answers that are relevant for your unique business and that these answers also happen to be relevant for the next person's unique business and the next's.

That isn't the job of a Fractional COO. I work with a lot of businesses, yes, and so I have experience of a lot of different situations that I can pull from in my work. But that doesn't mean I have all the right answers, it means that I generally know the right questions.

Here's five things to ask yourself to start to blast away your own operational roadblocks:

Question one to unblock growth: Do you have clear metrics to measure operational performance and identify areas for improvement?

I love goals. Correction - I love good goals. Good goals are clear and they're quantitative. They have a definition of success, a deadline, and an owner. I rarely see good goals when I first start working with a new client. It's hard to write good goals and that's part of the reason that people like me do the work that we do.

Without good goals, you're essentially navigating without a map, and that's going to be making it very difficult to answer any of the next few questions.

I'm biassed as hell, but I recommend checking out How To Write Your Strategy to help you answer this question before diving into the rest of the work.

Question two to unblock growth: Where does your team spend the most time?

Here, we're attempting to dig into the daily activities of your team to pinpoint areas where significant investments of time might not be directly contributing to your core business objectives (namely, revenue generation by delivering value for your customers).

By understanding where the bulk of your team's hours are being funnelled (whether it's in useful work or in repetitive manual tasks, excessive meetings, fixing errors, or navigating unclear processes, or, as if often the case, all of the last four), you can identify bottlenecks and areas of wasted effort.

Uncovering these time-sucks is the first, crucial, step in removing operational roadblocks because it provides concrete data on where resources are being inefficiently utilised. You can't fix what you don't know is broken.

Once you know where the time is going, you can begin to strategise and implement solutions to streamline those broken processes, so that you can do things like automate tasks, or redistribute a bloated workload. All of which ultimately frees up your team to focus on higher-impact activities that actually drive growth.

Question three to unblock growth: Are there errors or bottlenecks in your key workflows that recur?

With this question, we're looking to uncover the level of consistency and 'smoothness' in and of your essential business processes.

Essentially, it asks you to look critically at how key tasks flow through your organisation, from initiation to completion. I ask specifically about repetitive mistakes or points where work consistently gets stuck or delayed because, by identifying the root causes (such as inadequate training, unclear instructions, or faulty tools) of frequent issues, you can blow up a collection of bottlenecks in one go.

We can solve these recurring bottlenecks in the same way as we can solve sporadic ones (strategic alignment, process optimisation, better resource allocation, technology implementation) but asking about the repeat offenders first allows you to find big wins quickly which will, in turn, improve engagement with the process of change you're implementing.

Question four to unblock growth: Do your technology and tools truly support your operations, or do they create friction?

Next, we're asking for a critical evaluation of the technology and tools (both digital and physical) your team relies on daily.

It asks whether these tools are genuinely enhancing productivity and streamlining work, or if they are instead causing frustration, or complicating tasks, or slowing things down.

Identifying technology and tools that create friction (poorly integrated systems, outdated software or manual tools, or tools that require cumbersome workarounds) is crucial for removing operational roadblocks, but it's possibly one of the hardest parts of a process of change like this.

People LOVE the tools that they're used to using (even if those tools aren't the best for the job) and you may be about to take them away. However, by pinpointing the pain points these tools and technologies are causing, you can then explore useful solutions like upgrading software, integrating systems, providing better training, or, if absolutely necessary, even replacing ineffective tools altogether.

This may be an unpopular piece of work at the start, but it will lead to a smoother, more efficient workflow, and will ultimately be about empowering your team to be more productive and efficient when contributing to your business goals.

Question five to unblock growth: Is communication across departments seamless and efficient?

It's ALWAYS about communication. Seriously. 9 times out of 10, the problems that I'm solving are communication problems.

Perhaps communication is unclear, not timely or effective, or there are silos, misunderstandings, or delays that impede your progress towards growth.

People are your most precious and difficult resource and inter-departmental communication is hard and its breakdown often leads to duplicated efforts, errors due to lack of context, and slower decision-making, all of which act as major operational roadblocks.

By identifying areas where communication breaks down or is inefficient, you can implement strategies to improve information sharing (asynchronous comms, using your project management tool for comms, finding a lingua franca). The key outcome that you're aiming for here is to ensure that all teams are aligned and working towards the same goals.

What's next?

As you can see, unraveling the knots of operational inefficiency is undeniably challenging work. It requires a willingness to look inward (which will undoubtedly turn out to be so much harder for some people in your team than it will be for others), to critically assess established processes and technologies, and to have honest conversations about where things aren't working.

This introspection can be really uncomfortable, and implementing the changes means a lot of effort and commitment from you and from the entire team. However, it's worth it, I promise; the payoff for tackling these roadblocks is potentially huge - a more productive, engaged workforce and a business that is truly equipped for sustainable and efficiency growth.

This operational improvement is vital, and it's likely to be tough. But it doesn't have to be navigated alone. By working with someone like me, a fractional COO who brings an objective, experienced perspective to the table and is capable of identifying deeply ingrained inefficiencies that might be invisible to those within the company, you can significantly accelerate this process.

Do that and the hard work you put in can yields the maximum possible return in the minimum possible timeframe so you can get back to focussing on the core mission and goals of your business.

If that sounds like a good time to you, book a free, no strings call below to chat more.

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