Do you swing from too much client work to an empty pipeline and back again? I asked Ali Abdaal what he’d tell an independent professional stuck in that cycle.
His answer is the LASER method: Lifestyle, Area of constraint, the five S’s, Experiment and Review. It’s a simple way to find the one thing that’s actually stopping you from getting clients. Ali also shares a quick test. If you’re getting three to five sales calls a week, your problem is conversion. If you’re not, your problem is attraction.
The lesson is simple. Stop trying to do seven things at once. Pick your weakest link, give it most of your time for a month, then review.
Timestamps:
0:00 — Intro: doing seven things at once
0:30 — Ali's LASER method
1:18 — L: Lifestyle first
2:01 — A: Find your area of constraint
2:57 — The 3-to-5 sales calls test
3:13 — S: The five S's
4:56 — E and R: Experiment and review
5:34 — Priorities and the 80/20 split
5:50 — The mistake: trying to do everything at once
6:19 — Ash's takeaway
6:58 — Full conversation and the free one-page guide
Ash Roy and Ali Abdaal's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ali Abdaal: When you're trying to do seven things at once, all of them will totally suck.
Ash Roy: Do you go from too much client work to an empty pipeline and back again? I asked Ali Abdaal what he'd tell an independent professional stuck in that cycle. I'm Ash Roy. I'm a CPA with an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management, and I've hosted over 280 podcast episodes on this channel, and I recently asked Ali how he would go about building a business and a channel that is highly successful in 2026 and beyond.
And here's what Ali told me.
Ali Abdaal: That's a very big question because it's like how do you grow a business? There's a method that we teach to our students, or that we're about to teach to our students, um, in my, like, online business school. It's called the LASER method, L-A-S-E-R. And so it's sort of like these are five things that you ask yourself to figure out where you should focus on.
'Cause the problem when you're growing a business and your time is scattered in all these different directions, like how should you be focusing on client delivery? What about, like, lead generation? What about taking sales calls? What about attending a networking event? What about, like, whatever, building a YouTube channel, posting on LinkedIn?
There's all these things you could be doing. You don't have all the time in the world. Even when you're a full-time entrepreneur, you don't have all the time in the world. So the key to growing a business is figuring out what is the current thing you need to focus on. And so this LASER method, L-A-S-E-R, helps you figure that out.
So L stands for lifestyle. I'm a, I'm a big believer that, like, your business should serve your life, not the other way around. Mm-hmm. And so we do a lifestyle check-in, being like, how you currently feel about your lifestyle. Is it, like, reasonable? Um, you might be in a season where you're sort of grinding, hustling to get your business off the ground, but are you, like, miserable there?
Or are you like, "You know what? This is a short-term sacrifice for a long-term outcome"? If there are issues with the lifestyle where you're burning out, you're not spending time with friends and family, your health sucks, your relationship sucks, or anything like that, that, of course, is gonna bleed into the business.
And so we kinda need to start with the lifestyle question. You know, like, how do you feel about your life?
Ash Roy: Mm-hmm.
Ali Abdaal: If it's all right, then we're like, "Okay, cool. Let's not think about the business." If the lifestyle is not all right, we fix the life first before we try and fix the business, 'cause usually that's the order of operations, in my opinion.
Then it comes to A. So A is what area of the business is the constraint? So area of constraint. Um, there are really only three areas in business. There is ... I think of them as attract, convert, and delight. Attract is am I getting people's attention, lead generation. Convert is am I converting them to sales at a reasonable enough conversion rate?
And delight is am I giving my clients a good time so that they give me the four Rs, which is results, reviews, referrals, and renewals. Um, so that's what we're trying to get at. So we figure out, like, where is the constraint right now? Do we need more sales, or can we not handle new sales if we got them already?
That tells us which area we focus on. Is it attract, is it convert, or delight? 95% of the time, service-based providers just need more sales, 'cause more sales solves a lot of problems. In most other people's cases, the constraint in the business is we just need more sales.
Ash Roy: Yeah.
Ali Abdaal: And so you figure out is it attract or is it convert?
If you are getting three to five sales calls a week, you don't have an attract problem, you have a convert problem. If you're not even getting three to five sales calls per week, which is where most people are at, you have an attract problem, and we need to focus on lead generation.
So that's A. We've got lifestyle, we've got area of constraint, then we have S. S is the five S scan. So there are five S's, um, in any particular area. So let's say, uh, we are constrained because we need more leads. Yes. Um, that's our ... We're constrained in the attract area. We figure out, okay, firstly, what components do I currently use for lead generation?
It might be for this kind of audience, LinkedIn might be the primary method, and maybe there's a secondary method of doing networking events. But, like, let's focus on LinkedIn because that's, like, the primary thing. You know, if 80% of your clients are coming from LinkedIn, LinkedIn is your primary attract mechanism.
Here, within that, you're asking about the five S's. The five S's are strategy, skills, self, systems, and scale. So strategy is do I know what to do? Skills is do I know how to actually do it? Like, how are my skills at doing the thing? Self is have I got emotional blockers that are getting in my way? Systems is have I got some kind of system to do this sustainably?
And scale becomes relevant once you're at six figures in revenue, which is can I get someone else to do this for me? And what we get our students to do is to traffic light each of these areas, red, yellow, green. Um, so it might be LinkedIn strategy. Do I actually know what I'm doing on LinkedIn? Red, yellow, green.
Skills. How do I feel about my ability to create decent content on LinkedIn? Red, yellow, green. Self. Do I feel like anything is currently limiting me in terms of mindset, emotional blockers, anything like that as regards to getting clients through LinkedIn? Red, yellow, green. Systems. How are my systems around posting on LinkedIn?
Am I just doing it one at a time, typing on linkedin.com, or do I have some kind of production system to make this more sustainable? Red, yellow, green. And then we don't need to worry about scale because mostly I suspect your audience is under 100K in annual revenue from business. And now you've figured out, like, all right, where is the constraint?
So which one is red? Let's fix the red one and try and take it to yellow. That takes us to E and R, which stands for experiment and review. So let's say I've decided that, like, okay, my LinkedIn strategy is okay. My skills are okay. Self, it's like, eh, I mean, I still feel weird about posting on LinkedIn, but, like, that's fine.
Systems. Systems is red. I don't have these systems around posting on LinkedIn. Great. At that point, we think what is the experiment that I can run in the next month, so a monthly experiment cycle, that would take my systems on LinkedIn from red to yellow or from yellow to green? We figure out an experiment.
We run the experiment for a month, and then R, we review after a month to see, like, okay, did I improve my LinkedIn systems that month? Now, this helps you identify what is the primary thing to focus on, and then it goes into, like, a priority system. Like, priority number one is always helping your clients get results.
So, like, you know, X number of hours every week are gonna be servicing your clients. In the remainder of the time that you have, 80% of it should be focused on the constraint that we've just identified, and 20% of it on everything else. The mistake people make is when they try to do everything at once.
They're like, "Oh, I've gotta post on LinkedIn, and I've also gotta go to the networking event, and I've gotta do all this cold outreach on Sales Navigator. Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna do cold email as well. Oh, shit, and I've got these clients to deliver for. Oh, and by the way, I wanna build an online course on the side and start a podcast production agency 'cause I've heard that's a good business model."
When you're trying to do seven things at once, all of them will totally suck, which is why the key to business growth is figuring out what is the constraint and, like, laser-focusing on that constraint, hence the LASER method.
Ash Roy: So Ali's point is simple. Find the one thing that's stopping you from getting clients and put most of your time there.
And it came from a book called Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt. So if you're not getting three to five sales conversations a week, then the constraint is that you're not attracting the right people, so you need to work on that and get rid of that constraint. If you are getting three to five people that are interested in your offer, but you're not converting them into paying clients, then the constraint is conversion.
So pick one constraint that's the weakest link in the chain, fix it, and check back after a month. The full conversation with Ali is linked in the description below. There's a one-page version of this approach that I use to work out where a practice of one of my clients is actually breaking. If you'd like access to that resource, email team@productiveinsights.com with the words "Episode 286 resource" in the subject, and someone from my team will get back to you.