The accountant who worked harder than anyone (and made everything worse)
Her solution was sacrifice
Hello Again!
In 1999 I was working in Dublin, helping a telecoms company upgrade its accounting software. One morning their senior accountant, Sheila, asked me to run an urgent report, then came and sat at my desk to wait for it.
I can still see her face. Dark rings under her eyes. She’d been in the office since 5am, she said. She looked worn down and worn out - this wasn’t an overnight thing, she’d been like this for months.
While the report chugged along, she told me what was going on.
Her team of accountants paid the supplier invoices, and they were drowning. The company was building a fibre-optic network across Ireland, the invoices had exploded, and no matter how hard her team worked, they couldn’t keep up. Suppliers weren’t getting paid. Two days earlier, the biggest contractor had threatened to walk off the project.
Life, basically, sucked for everyone involved.
That would have been bad enough. But there was more going on.
The founder was quietly selling the company, and the sale price, she said, depended on that fibre-optic project succeeding. So far, the project looked good, but if word leaked that the vendors were walking off the project, the CEO would lose millions of pounds.
And her solution to all this?
Sacrifice.
She sacrificed her health - the 5am starts, the missed sleep.
She sacrificed her team - they spent their days getting yelled at by angry suppliers, and the good ones kept quitting.
She sacrificed the company’s money - recruiting more and more accountants for a department nobody wanted to join.
Sacrifice felt responsible. It looked like leadership. It looked like the only way. But it was making everything worse.
So, as we sat there waiting for the report to print off, I quietly asked her to walk me through how invoices got paid. She held up her hand and counted off five steps, one per finger. Then I asked roughly how many invoices each step could handle in a day.
Step 1 - 200.
Step 2 - 80.
Step 3 - 50.
Step 4 - 20.
Step 5 - 10,000 (it was the automated batch run).
She saw it before I said a word. Her jaw nearly hit the floor.
Step 4 was the approvals step.
And only one person in the whole team was senior enough to do them.
Sheila.
Her.
She was the bottleneck - though I’m not sure if I used that word.
Her entire team was capped at 20 invoices a day.
And she was the “cap”.
She was spending most of her day consoling angry suppliers and interviewing replacements for the accounting staff who’d quit, instead of approving invoices.
The fix wasn’t a restructure. It wasn’t more headcount. It wasn’t a transformation programme. She locked herself in a meeting room and approved invoices - starting with the angriest, and most strategically important suppliers first, of course.
Three days later, every outstanding invoice was paid. The angry calls stopped. The contractors stayed. A week after that, she cancelled the recruitment - she realised that she didn’t need more people after all.
Our conversation took about fifteen minutes.
Though, to be honest with you: it wasn’t really fifteen minutes.
By then I’d been working alongside her team for two months. Quietly watching. Untangling the mess in my head. And - most importantly - earning enough trust that she’d sit down and actually talk to me.
The untangling looked kinda instant. It wasn’t.
I’ve spent the thirty years since then having versions of that conversation - with software teams, manufacturers, banks, and government departments - over and over again.
The details change, of course.
The pattern doesn’t:
An overwhelmed team.
A leader whose solution is sacrifice - their health, their evenings, their team’s goodwill, their budget.
And a mess nobody inside can see clearly, because everyone’s so busy, stuck inside it.
Sacrifice seems virtuous, but it never works, long term.
Sacrifice is not a strategy.
Sacrifice is the villain of the story.
I spent years telling Sheila’s story in talks and workshops, then wrote it into my bestselling book, The Bottleneck Rules (though I disguised her name and called her Sinead).
I wrote it so people could have that fifteen-minute moment for themselves, and thousands have - they email me :).
But plenty of readers tell me they love the ideas - and still can’t find their bottleneck.
It’s not because they’re not smart. It’s because their mess is too tangled up. They’re standing inside it, the way Sheila was.
So here are two ways I can help. One free, one not.
The free one. I’ve turned the questions I asked Sheila (and hundreds of others) into something I call the Bottleneck Detective Prompt - a prompt that interviews you, the way I’d interview you, until your bottleneck shows itself.
You can grab it here: https://clarkeching.kit.com/bottleneck-detective-prompt.
For a lot of messes, that’s all you’ll need.
It’s disturbingly good.
The other one is for when the mess is bigger than a prompt - tangled across teams, costing real money, the thing you’ve stopped sleeping over.
It looks like this:
Six weeks, working directly with me, a few hours each week (like a personal trainer, where we share the heavy lifting). We untangle your mess, get clarity, identify the villain, and start cleaning it up in small, practical steps. There’s no huge transformation programme. No army of analysts. No forty-slide diagnosis PowerPoint deck.
Think of it as getting to base camp - you might still have a mountain to climb afterwards, but plenty of my clients discover that base camp was all they needed.
If that’s you, hit reply and tell me about your mess. (Yes, I’m in New Zealand. No, that’s not a problem - most of my clients aren’t.) I’ll tell you straight up whether six weeks with me would help. And if it wouldn’t, I’ll say so and point you at the free stuff instead.
Clarke
PS - When I sent my mum a draft of The Bottleneck Rules, her only comment was that I shouldn’t have written that Sinead looked tired, because it wasn’t a nice thing to say.
Sorry, Sheila. You did look tired.
You deserved better.