TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE: EIGHT COMMON BUSINESS FAULTS
PROCESS IMPROVEMENTOPERATIONAL EFFECTIVENESSCONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
10/17/2026
FAULT 01 — Revenue is up, profit is down
01
Check pricing against current input costs. If prices haven't moved in 2+ years while costs have, you've found it — you're buying revenue with margin. A 1% price improvement moves operating profit roughly 11%.
02
Check customer mix. Growth often arrives through discount-hungry, high-maintenance accounts. Rank customers by profit after true cost-to-serve before concluding growth is good.
03
Check unbilled work. More volume multiplies scope creep. Compare quoted hours to actual hours on your last twenty jobs.
04
Check overtime and rework. Growth absorbed by an at-capacity team shows up as premium-rate hours and errors, not as a line item called "growing too fast."
Most frequent root cause: stale pricing. Least checked: cost-to-serve by customer.
FAULT 02 — Profitable on paper, no money in the bank
01
Check when you invoice. Month-end batching donates up to four weeks before terms even start. Invoice on completion.
02
Check actual days-to-pay, not your terms. The average small business waits 29.3 days — around nine past due. Pull the aging report; the gap is usually larger than assumed.
03
Check follow-up discipline. Firms following up on 90%+ of invoices are typically paid within a week of due date; those chasing 70% or fewer drift to 31–45 days late.
04
Check inventory and work-in-progress. Cash converted into objects looks like an asset and bills like a liability — carrying costs run 20–30% of value annually.
If all four check out, the fault is growth itself: expansion consumes cash before it produces it. That needs a forecast, not a fix.
FAULT 03 — Everyone is busy, nothing gets finished
01
Count concurrent priorities. More than three to five at once and you've found the fault. Assigning people to multiple simultaneous projects is a documented, large-scale productivity destroyer.
02
Check for protected focus time. Chronic task-switching consumes up to 40% of productive time; recovery from an interruption runs ~23 minutes.
03
Check ownership. Anything owned by "the team" is owned by nobody. Every active priority needs one name and one date.
04
Check the meeting load. If more time is spent communicating about work than doing it, the calendar is the fault.
Do not treat this fault with motivation. It is structural every time.
FAULT 04 — Good people keep leaving
01
Check recognition before pay. 79% of people who quit cite lack of appreciation; well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to leave within two years. If you raised wages and they still left, this is your fault code.
02
Check the manager, not the company. Managers account for ~70% of the variance in team engagement, and fewer than half have ever been trained.
03
Check workload sustainability. Chronic overtime is a resignation generator; output per hour declines sharply past ~50 hours a week.
04
Check the first 90 days. If new hires leave early, the fault is onboarding, not selection.
Exit interviews under-report cause. Weight what people do over what they say on the way out.
FAULT 05 — Plenty of enquiries, few sales
01
Check response time first. Leads contacted within five minutes are dramatically more likely to qualify than those reached after thirty; 35–50% of sales go to whoever responds first, and the average company takes ~42 hours.
02
Check follow-up count. Most sales need five or more touches; nearly half of sellers never make a second attempt.
03
Check differentiation. If every conversation becomes a price conversation, buyers have been given nothing else to compare.
04
Check the enquiry path itself. Page speed and long forms quietly destroy conversion before anyone speaks: a one-second delay costs ~7% of conversions, and ~81% of people who start a form abandon it.
"Bad leads" is the most common misdiagnosis in this fault family.
FAULT 06 — The owner can't take a week off
01
Check what's undocumented. Roughly 42% of what any role requires is known only by its occupant — and for owners it's usually higher. Start writing.
02
Check decision rights. If approvals under $2,000 still come to you, the constraint is authority, not competence.
03
Check relationship concentration. If key customers only trust you personally, begin joint handovers now — ownership transfers in a signature, authority only in public, over time.
04
Check your calendar against your priorities. Leaders average 68% of their time inside daily operations; the gap between stated priorities and actual hours is the diagnosis.
This fault is also the largest single discount buyers apply when valuing a business.
FAULT 07 — The same mistake keeps happening
01
Check whether anyone owns it. Recurring problems almost always live in the seam between two roles, where both parties believe the other has it.
02
Check whether the fix was a fix. If the last response was "we talked to them about it," nothing structural changed.
03
Check whether it's written down. Verbal standards decay within weeks. A one-page process beats a long conversation.
04
Check whether failures get logged at all. You cannot find a pattern in incidents nobody recorded.
Prevention economics: $1 spent preventing beats ~$10 fixing internally and ~$100 once the customer finds it.
FAULT 08 — The new system isn't being used
01
Check who it benefits. If it costs the user time and only helps management reporting, non-adoption is rational. Reconfigure for the daily user first.
02
Check whether the old system still exists. Parallel running with no cutover date guarantees reversion to the familiar.
03
Check for a named owner. Not the vendor and not "IT" — a person whose job includes adoption succeeding.
04
Check data quality. Partial data makes reports wrong, wrong reports destroy trust, and distrusted systems get abandoned.
Implementation research: 55–75% of major system projects miss their objectives, with 60%+ of failures people-related and only ~6–10% attributable to the software.
General note on diagnosis. Two rules hold across every fault above. First, check the boring thing first — stale prices, batch invoicing, slow replies, no named owner — because the unglamorous cause is the usual cause, and it's the one nobody inspects precisely because it's been true for years. Second, a symptom that recurs after treatment was never diagnosed; it was silenced. If you've fixed the same fault three times, the entry you need isn't in the list above — it's the one about ownership.
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