Article:
The Flow

The Flow Before the Fix
Why Smart Businesses Stall — and What to Do Before You Optimize

Imagine your business as a hydroelectric dam. To work properly, it needs water (i.e., customers) and a way to process that water into energy (i.e., transactions). 

Most business experts focus on the dam itself — fine-tuning the controls, reducing breakdowns, and getting more power from the same flow — and assume the quantity of water can be increased with basic marketing or ad campaigns.

But what if there’s no water? Or it can’t reach?
My approach starts by analyzing and optimizing water pressure feeding into the system. 

Before someone ever gets to your business, you have to make a product they want, they have to know it exists, they have to register in their mind that this is the right solution, they have to figure out how to buy it, then they have to physically take the steps to buy it. In other words, you not only create the product, you create the path for your customers to reach you. And you make that path something they can naturally flow down like water. 

Unlike your employees who are paid to be there, customers must work voluntarily. In fact, they pay for the privilege of doing business with you. The smoother, more fun, and more reassuring the process is, the more people will make that journey willingly at their own cost to get your products or services. If you try to force more people towards you via ad spend without addressing their path first, it just causes more people to experience the same friction with the same drop off rates. Except now your margins are smaller, too.

Issues with the customer journey have a far greater impact on EBITDA than issues with your business itself. And if you’re holding portfolio companies well past their exit horizon,  it's time to question the assumptions that built it. 

That’s where I come in. 

I don’t just analyze, I diagnose. I speak the language of consumers and front-line employees alike, and I can get information faster, cheaper, and more accurately than conventional methods. From there I innovate, refine, and stay in the system building what is needed until it works. That’s when we can finally turn to the inner workings of your company to refine and optimize. And that’s when true magic happens. 

If you’ve hired smart people and still aren’t seeing lift, chances are the problem is elsewhere. Don’t give up. Give me a shot — and watch what happens.