There’s a scene in a book called The Goal that I keep coming back to.
A guy named Alex is leading a troop of Boy Scouts on a hike. The line keeps stretching out. Fast kids pull ahead, gaps open, and everyone has to stop and wait for the back to catch up.
He works out that the problem is one kid. Herbie. Herbie is the slowest, and the whole troop can only move as fast as Herbie moves.
So Alex does two things.
He puts Herbie at the front of the line, where nobody can get ahead of him. Then he opens Herbie’s pack. It’s loaded down with canned goods and gear. Alex spreads that weight across the rest of the troop.
Herbie speeds up, the line tightens, and the troop gets where it’s going.
Most companies have a Herbie
I keep meeting the same person.
She might be the Marketing Manager, VP, or Director. It varies.
She runs the email, the website, events, the social accounts, the trade show booth, and whatever sales asked for on Monday morning.
She is good at her job, but the job is built for six people.
Most companies between $2 and $20 million have exactly one of her. Then they wonder why marketing feels slow.
She’s Herbie and her overloaded pack is slowing everything down.
The hire that doesn’t fix it
The obvious move is to add someone.
Hold on, there’s a rule about this from software. Fred Brooks ran the team that built the operating system for the IBM System/360, and in 1975 he wrote down what he learned.
Adding people to a late project makes it later.
His reason was simple. New people need training, and the training comes out of the hours of the people who were already getting work done. Then everybody has to talk to everybody, and that costs time too.
In a marketing team, this is what happens…The search runs sixty to ninety days. Then the salary has to be defended to whoever holds the budget. Then the new hire needs another three months to learn the business well enough to be useful (and most of that comes out of Herbie’s week).
Six months later you have two people doing the work of six, and a bigger number on the payroll line that somebody will ask about.
Remember that instead of hiring a second Herbie, Alex took the weight out of the pack.
We’ll come back to this, but first…
Be careful you don’t end up with the whole troop
If you already did the above for a few years, you might have the other version of this company.
Instead of one marketer, there are twelve. A demand gen manager, a content person, two designers, somebody who owns the website, an events coordinator, a marketing ops hire, an agency on retainer, and a director running all of it.
Nobody is Herbie, because everybody is.
Here’s how it happened. Since you never found the real constraint, you solved the problem the way companies solve problems, by adding people. Each new hire got a slice of the work, and the slices were activities rather than outcomes. Somebody owns email. Somebody owns social. Somebody owns the website refresh that’s been in progress since March.
Then the work expands to fill the team. Reports get built that nobody reads. Channels get opened because somebody was hired to run them. Half the calendar turns into coordination, because with twelve people the handoffs are the job now.
And the line still moves at the same speed.
Alex could have hired ten more Boy Scouts and the troop would still move at Herbie’s pace. It would just cost 6X and take longer to get organized in the morning.
So you end up with a marketing department that’s expensive, busy, slow, and producing less revenue per dollar than it did back when one person was doing everything. The constraint is still sitting right where it was, because nobody ever went looking for it.
Both versions of this company have the same problem. One is understaffed and one is overstaffed, and neither one knows where revenue actually stops moving.
Finding the right Herbie
In the story it’s obvious who’s slowing the line down. You can see him. In a business it’s almost never obvious, and people guess wrong constantly.
For a long time I did what most agencies do. Client signs, we build a content plan, we execute the plan. The plans were good. The execution was fine. Revenue moved sometimes and it didn’t other times, and truthfully, the why was often a mystery.
We would fix the problem our clients told us needed to be fixed. Good job to us, but it didn’t matter to the bottom line.
So now the first question I ask is where revenue actually stops moving in the business.
WHERE IS THE ACTUAL CONSTRAINT?!?
The content plan comes after that, if it comes at all.
That question has a small number of answers.
Nobody knows you exist. People know you and never convert. Deals stall at the proposal. Customers leave before they see value. Nobody refers you.
Five different problems with five different fixes. Usually only one of them is your Herbie.
Publishing more content, when your deals stall at proposal, is expensive. It feels productive, but it changes nothing. You’re handing canned goods to a kid at the front of the line who was never the problem.
Revenue first
Revenue first means you find your Herbie before you build anything.
It sounds obvious written down. Almost nobody does it, including me for years.
The reason is that finding it requires uncomfortable conversations. You have to ask the sales team what actually happens in final-stage calls. What objection keeps showing up. What made the last three losses go quiet.
That’s a harder meeting than a content calendar review. It’s also the only meeting that tells you where to spend the next 90 days.
Taking weight out of the pack
Once you know where the line is stuck, the staffing question changes shape.
Your one marketer needs the repetitive half of her job to stop being hers.
…the reporting that takes a day a month…
…the publishing steps…
…the list hygiene…
…the follow-up that gets dropped when a trade show week eats the calendar…
…the forty small handoffs that live in her head and nowhere else…
None of that requires judgment. But all of it requires somebody, and right now the somebody is her.
Build the machine that carries it and she gets her week back. Then point her at the constraint you found, because that part does require judgment, and it’s the part she was hired for.
One person on the thinking, a machine on the rest. Then you’ve got a clear answer about which Herbie you’re working on this quarter.
And if you’re the twelve-person version, the same move works. You just have more pack to redistribute and a harder conversation about which slices were never worth owning.
What this changes about what I write
What I publish here is changing with it.
Less general marketing advice. More of what I actually see inside businesses, including the parts I get wrong.
If you run marketing alone, or you employ the person who does, most of what follows is written for you.
If you are not sure which of those five constraints is actually yours, email me the word “constraint” at Reade@RoguePine.co.
I am running a short working session on how to tell them apart using evidence you already have. You need to know what your revenue flow actually looks like, where there are “clogged pipes”, and what to do to fix it.
I will send the details when it is set.
Questions people ask about this
Should I hire another marketer, or is there a better move?
Depends entirely on whether your marketer is the constraint. If she is, adding a second one costs you six months and makes her slower in the meantime, because the training comes out of her week. If she isn’t the constraint, a second hire speeds up a part of the line that was already fast. Find where revenue actually stops moving first. The staffing answer falls out of that.
How do I find my constraint?
Ask where revenue stops moving, not where the work piles up. There are five common answers: nobody knows you exist, people know you and never convert, deals stall at the proposal, customers leave before they see value, or nobody refers you. The evidence is usually already in your CRM and in your sales team’s heads. Your win rate and your last five closed-lost deals will tell you more than a content audit will.
What is Theory of Constraints, in plain terms?
Every system moves at the speed of its slowest part. Speeding up anything else changes nothing. It came out of manufacturing, and Eliyahu Goldratt made it famous in a 1984 novel called The Goal, where the idea shows up as a slow Boy Scout named Herbie holding up a hike.
What is Brooks’s Law?
Fred Brooks ran the team that built the operating system for the IBM System/360 and wrote in 1975 that adding people to a late project makes it later. New people need training, that training comes out of the hours of people already producing, and every added person adds communication overhead. It was written about software and it applies cleanly to marketing teams.
We have twelve people in marketing and it still feels slow. Why?
Because headcount was the answer to a question nobody asked properly. When the constraint is never found, work gets split into activities rather than outcomes, and then the work expands to fill the team. Reports get built that nobody reads. Coordination becomes the job. The line still moves at the same speed, it just costs more. Understaffed and overstaffed companies usually have the same underlying problem.
What does “revenue first” mean?
Find the constraint before you build anything. Most marketing plans start with channels and tactics. Revenue first starts by asking where the money stops moving, then builds only the thing that unblocks it. Content, ads, and website work come after that, if they come at all.
Related reading
- When revenue growth stalls, you’re probably fixing the wrong thing — the diagnostic behind finding your actual constraint before you spend on anything else.
- Is it a sales problem or a marketing problem? — how to tell which side of the house actually owns the stall before you add headcount to either one.
- Signal before scale: know what works before you do more — why hiring or spending more before you’ve proven what works just moves the bottleneck, it doesn’t remove it.