August 8, 2025
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Every business is made up of several interacting systems. These systems can be anything from logistics to marketing or even an aspect like onboarding workers. The key challenge is that each system holds the potential to hide bottlenecks that affect business performance and growth.
Sometimes, even minor issues can cause an entire system to slow down or function incorrectly. While the system will continue to function, a healthy business should be trying to iron out issues as soon as they are noticed.
In this article, we’ll look at three common bottlenecks in the form of over-engineering, customer expectations, and human reliance. Let’s dive in.
Something that’s extremely noticeable is the tendency for entrepreneurs to get a little obsessed with ensuring simple operations have complex processes. They feel that the more complex a system is, the more control they have over it. This is often visible when businesses talk about the need for ‘streamlining’.
On a basic level, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, it often comes at a high cost. For instance, data from an Intuit survey found that 51% of small business owners stated that streamlining systems and operations was a major growth challenge.
The survey found that these businesses tended to overspend by up to $10,000/month on digital solutions in their efforts to be more streamlined.
As you can see, it can be a never-ending cycle that some businesses get sucked into. The ironic fact is that in many cases, keeping things simple would help with streamlining more than anything else.
This is another aspect that can quickly become a bottleneck if ignored and affect critical areas like your sales and growth. For example, some parts of the country, like the East Coast, are simply blessed with a well-developed logistical system. Thus, customers in the region have grown very used to super-fast deliveries and shipping experiences.
If your business decides to service people in this area, but you fail to recognise their expectations, it’s a recipe for disaster. What would be the solution? The obvious answer would be looking into East Coast fulfilment services that take on the responsibility for you.
As Innovative Warehouse Solutions notes, using third-party services tends to be the only way to scale a business without stress. That said, let’s look at another example that’s also backed up by hard data.
The most commonly misunderstood expectation is in terms of delivery priority. Many business leaders believe that speed is the most important aspect. However, as data from McKinsey & Company shows, 90% of consumers are willing to wait 2-3 days if it means no shipping costs. Likewise, about 50% were unwilling to pay for shipping regardless of speed.
If a business has oriented its entire shipping experience to prioritise speed and priced things accordingly, that would be a huge oversight. This is just one of the many ways customer expectations can affect business.
With early-stage businesses, depending on team members tends to be the norm. People are expected to take initiative and wear multiple hats. They take up roles and responsibilities according to the situation, and somehow, it all ends up working well.
However, as a business grows, this type of flexibility often ends up becoming a bottleneck. It sounds weird to think of dynamic workers as a problem, but it’s true in a number of industries.
Suppose your business relies on two individuals who have taken on multiple roles and have become indispensable to your operation. What happens if one of them quits? If you were reliant on the person, you may soon find issues popping up everywhere. No one else knows how to solve them, and your business can go into a mini-crisis state.
Data indirectly supports this as well. In June, 2025, Gartner surveyed over 227 supply chain leaders (SCLs) across various industries and regions. They found that 54% of SCLs said that turnover has moderately or completely disrupted functionality in the last three years. Thus, the old adage of not keeping all your eggs in one basket is worth remembering.
Over-engineering happens when you create unnecessarily complex systems for what should be simple tasks. You might do this thinking it gives you more control, but it often results in higher costs and makes your operations less efficient.
If you misinterpret what your customers truly want, you can create a bottleneck. For example, you might invest heavily in next-day delivery, only to find out that 90% of your customers would prefer to wait a few days for free shipping. This misalignment can hurt your sales and profitability.
When all the knowledge and responsibility for critical tasks rest with one or two individuals, your business is vulnerable. If one of those people quits or is unavailable, operations can grind to a halt because no one else has the information needed to keep things running.
In many cases, yes. While some operations require detailed processes, the tendency to overcomplicate things is a common challenge. Striving for simplicity often helps streamline your business more effectively and affordably than adding more complex digital tools.
Start by looking at areas where things feel slow, costly, or overly dependent on one person. Ask yourself if your processes are simpler than they could be and whether you truly know what your customers prioritise. A business strategy review, like those offered by Robin Waite Limited, can also provide an external perspective to spot issues you might miss.
