September 27, 2026
Picture it: The monthly report comes in, and it says, “We’re still making money.”
The president of the company and the chairman of the board say, “Ahh,” lean back, and congratulate themselves on another job well done. But they may be fooling themselves.
There’s more to having a successful business than being in the black.
If you’re only looking at the bottom line, you may be missing opportunities to tighten controls and make better spending choices.
In other words, you may think you’re making money, but you may have individual departments that are costing you money; not just through over-spending, but because of bad work policies.
Who is fielding customer complaints? Who is calling the customers that left in disgust? Is that person trying to fix the reason(s) that the customers left, or are they just counting figures for the monthly report? Do you even have a policy of reporting on customers who are unhappy or who have left, so that someone can make sure that customer satisfaction is all that it should be?
Who is fielding the requests for better inter-departmental cooperation, so that people aren’t doing more work than they need to because of a lack of responses or teamwork?
Who is collecting empirical evidence on workloads and work habits, not just taking people’s word for it that they’re overworked, or are “just fine” as the pile of undone work continues to grow? Unpaid bills and unfilled orders are both bad for business.
Just because your bottom line looks good doesn’t mean that your business is in good shape. Start looking at more than the money.
