Eric Siu walks through the constraints mind map, a planning framework that starts with one central goal like reaching $100K MRR, maps the problems blocking it, then builds concrete tasks to solve them. He used it to fix Single Grain's referral losses and boost conversions by shifting from outsourcing to building internal teams.
In this video, I'm going to give you a roadmap for how you can plan your business or even your life. My name is Eric Siu. I am the host of the weekly entrepreneurial podcast, Growth Everywhere, and the daily marketing podcast, Marketing School, which I do with my buddy Neil Patel. And I create all this content to help you individually and to help you level up your business. So let's take a look at my screen. This is what we call the constraints mind map. For example, a couple years ago I was like, well, you know, uh, how do we get Single Grain to $100K a month in monthly recurring revenue? And your goal could be maybe a constraint in your life is maybe you want to buy a car or maybe you want to buy a house. For example, you can just do that. Just put the main constraint in the middle. And for our constraint for the business was how do you get to $100K or so? You can see the sections that say that are in white. These are the core issues. So it's not specializing. Not having a well-optimized marketing funnel. It's customer retention issues, not having a unique blog, not maximizing the use of YouTube channel, referral partners losing deals. All this different stuff we put in here, right? And then from there, you can see that after the problem, we talk about the vision. Like, what does this look like after it's fixed? Okay, so we put referral partners are operating like a machine and bringing us in recurring revenue that stacks. So we want revenue that continues to stack over time. Just going on this example over here, you can build on it from there. It's like, okay, if we want to achieve this vision in terms of referral revenue kind of stacking on each other, it's operating like a machine, what do we need to do? Okay, we need our referral partners to send us all the contracts, we need to keep track of all their conversion rates, we need to help audit their sales process, we need to help them be more successful. Then afterwards, after you have these tasks, basically you just continue to expand on this mind map. Then you start to have this big web of stuff to do. And what was amazing was, I started looking at this, I didn't look at this for a while, but after we did all this stuff, all these things magically happened, okay? And then I built one for a software business. Uh, that I'm involved with. And we did this for one of the other blogs that I'm involved with as well. And we have hit our goals, right? For the other blog, we hit our goals for another mind map that I did. And hopefully we do it also for the software company too. Doing something like this allows you to kind of plan out what you need to be doing next. Like, it's like, okay, these are the issues, this is my vision, and then this is what I need to do. Just taking a look at this makes things a lot easier for you. I can tell you our core issue here of referral partners, Losing deals. This was a big deal for us. At that point, we decided to pivot and say, okay, we're no longer going to just refer everything out. We're going to take the work internally. We're going to do a better job. We're going to hire better people. And then the clients are going to stay a lot longer. We're going to be able to upsell them. We're going to be able to do an amazing job and people are going to know us more. We're going to get more clients that way. I didn't intend to kind of build that up again, but we did. And now things are better than ever. We're hitting record numbers over and over and over. Couldn't be more happier with the team. I'm so excited to just come into work every day. Um, and that's because we made a conscious decision to define this and then figure out what we needed to do next. So you can do this again for your business, for your life, whatever it is exactly. Hopefully this helps. Let us know what you plan to do with this constraints mind map to help you with your life to level up. And don't forget to hit subscribe or else I'm going to find you. I'm going to come get you. See you tomorrow. Bye.
