The Problem Was Never What They Hired Me to Fix

I’ve never walked into a struggling company where the owner accurately identified the biggest problem.

That might sound harsh.

It’s not meant to be.

It’s simply an observation gathered from years of walking into businesses that were underperforming, losing money, frustrating customers, bleeding employees, or otherwise trying to figure out why things weren’t working the way they used to.

By the time someone calls for help, they’ve usually already diagnosed the issue.

The problem is that they’re almost always diagnosing symptoms.

Not causes.

“We need more sales.”

“Our employees don’t care.”

“Our marketing isn’t working.”

“Our competitors are killing us.”

“Nobody wants to work anymore.”

I’ve heard every version imaginable.

The funny thing is that the issue they hired me to solve was rarely the issue that actually needed solving.

In fact, if I had simply accepted the original diagnosis and focused exclusively on the stated problem, I probably would have made things worse.

Business owners are not unique in this regard.

Human beings are terrible at identifying the real source of their problems.

We do it in our personal lives.

We do it in politics.

We do it in relationships.

And we certainly do it in business.

We focus on what hurts.

Not necessarily on what’s causing the pain.

A person feels chest pain and assumes the problem is their chest.

A company loses customers and assumes the problem is sales.

The symptom gets all the attention.

The disease quietly continues doing its work.

One of the first things I learned in operations is that businesses tell on themselves.

Not immediately.

Not intentionally.

But if you pay attention long enough, they eventually reveal exactly what’s wrong.

The clues are everywhere.

Employees reveal it.

Customers reveal it.

Financial statements reveal it.

Processes reveal it.

Sometimes the owner reveals it within the first five minutes of the conversation without realizing they’ve done so.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat across from an owner who spent thirty minutes explaining why sales were the problem only to discover that sales were the one thing working reasonably well.

The company wasn’t losing business because it couldn’t generate leads.

The company was losing business because customers were having terrible experiences after they bought.

That’s not a sales problem.

That’s a customer experience problem.

The distinction matters.

A lot.

Imagine pouring gasoline onto a fire.

That’s what increasing sales looks like when operational issues are unresolved.

More customers simply create more opportunities to disappoint people.

The owner sees revenue growing.

The customer reviews get worse.

Employees become overwhelmed.

The business develops a reputation problem.

Then everyone wonders what happened.

What happened is simple.

The problem was never sales.

Sales just made the existing problems easier to see.

One company hired me because they believed employee morale was collapsing.

They were convinced the workforce lacked motivation.

According to management, nobody cared anymore.

The employees weren’t engaged.

Productivity was down.

Turnover was increasing.

Management blamed the workforce.

The workforce blamed management.

This is a story as old as business itself.

What we eventually discovered was that neither side was completely wrong.

But neither side was completely right either.

The real problem was uncertainty.

Leadership had stopped communicating.

Priorities changed weekly.

Goals shifted constantly.

Employees didn’t know what success looked like because management couldn’t define it.

People weren’t disengaged because they were lazy.

They were disengaged because they were confused.

There’s a difference.

People can tolerate hard work.

What they struggle with is chaos.

Especially chaos disguised as strategy.

I’ve noticed that many organizations mistake motion for progress.

Everyone is busy.

Meetings are happening.

Reports are being generated.

Emails are flying.

Dashboards are being updated.

The organization looks active.

It feels productive.

Yet nothing actually improves.

It’s corporate theater.

A performance designed to create the appearance of progress.

The audience is usually leadership.

The actors are usually exhausted.

One of the most dangerous phrases in business is, “We’ve always done it this way.”

I’ve heard it from billion-dollar companies.

I’ve heard it from ten-person shops.

I’ve heard it from organizations that were thriving and organizations that were actively driving themselves into a ditch.

The phrase usually signals one thing.

Nobody remembers why the process exists anymore.

At some point, a procedure was created for a reason.

The reason disappeared.

The procedure remained.

Years later, everyone continues following the process because nobody wants to be responsible for questioning it.

This creates organizational archaeology.

Layers of old decisions buried beneath newer decisions.

Eventually nobody understands the system, but everyone is afraid to touch it.

The business becomes a museum of outdated assumptions.

The owner doesn’t see it because they’ve lived inside the system too long.

That’s another pattern I’ve noticed.

Owners often become trapped inside their own businesses.

Not physically.

Mentally.

They know too much.

That sounds backwards, but hear me out.

The owner remembers every decision.

Every exception.

Every crisis.

Every customer complaint.

Every employee issue.

Every workaround.

Every shortcut.

Their understanding of the business becomes so detailed that they lose the ability to see it objectively.

They stop seeing reality.

They start seeing history.

Meanwhile, customers and employees only experience what’s happening today.

The owner explains why something is broken.

The customer simply notices that it’s broken.

Those are very different perspectives.

One of the biggest surprises in my career was discovering how often operational problems are actually leadership problems.

That statement tends to make people uncomfortable.

Especially leaders.

The reason is simple.

Most leaders believe leadership happens in meetings.

It doesn’t.

Leadership happens in systems.

If employees consistently fail, eventually you have to ask whether the system itself is failing.

If communication constantly breaks down, eventually you have to ask whether communication expectations are clear.

If accountability never sticks, eventually you have to ask whether accountability actually exists.

The easiest thing in the world is blaming people.

The harder task is examining the environment those people operate within.

I once worked with a company that believed they had a training problem.

Employees were making mistakes.

Quality was suffering.

Management concluded that additional training was needed.

The company spent money on training.

The mistakes continued.

More training followed.

The mistakes continued.

Finally, someone asked a simple question.

“What if they already know how to do the job?”

As it turned out, they did.

The real problem was that employees were being measured on speed while management simultaneously demanded perfection.

The incentives conflicted.

Workers responded rationally.

They prioritized the metric that affected them most.

Training wasn’t the problem.

The system was.

Businesses often create exactly the behaviors they claim to hate.

Then they act surprised when those behaviors appear.

Humans are remarkably predictable.

We respond to incentives.

We respond to expectations.

We respond to consequences.

Change those things and behavior usually follows.

Ignore them and no amount of motivational posters will save you.

The older I get, the more I believe most business problems originate from a handful of root causes.

Poor communication.

Unclear expectations.

Lack of accountability.

Broken incentives.

Weak leadership.

Everything else is usually a variation of those themes.

The symptoms change.

The disease remains surprisingly consistent.

That’s why consultants, advisors, and turnaround specialists often frustrate people.

We ask annoying questions.

Questions nobody wants to answer.

Questions that seem unrelated to the original problem.

Questions that force people to examine assumptions they’ve carried for years.

When someone says they have a sales problem, I want to understand operations.

When someone says they have an operations problem, I want to understand leadership.

When someone says they have an employee problem, I want to understand culture.

When someone says they have a marketing problem, I want to understand customer experience.

The answer is usually hiding somewhere nearby.

Just not where everyone is looking.

Business owners often assume successful companies have fewer problems.

That’s not true.

Successful companies simply identify problems faster.

They address root causes sooner.

They spend less time arguing about symptoms.

The goal isn’t perfection.

The goal is awareness.

Every business has issues.

Every leader has blind spots.

Every organization develops dysfunctions over time.

The difference between healthy companies and struggling companies is not the absence of problems.

It’s the willingness to acknowledge reality.

That sounds obvious.

It isn’t.

Reality is expensive.

Reality requires change.

Reality often points directly at decisions made by leadership.

And that can be uncomfortable.

The longer I work with organizations, the less interested I become in the problem people think they have.

I’m much more interested in the problem nobody is discussing.

The conversation happening in hallways instead of conference rooms.

The frustration employees mention when management isn’t around.

The customer complaint that appears repeatedly.

The process everyone quietly works around.

The report nobody trusts.

The meeting everyone dreads.

Those things matter.

Those things reveal the truth.

Because in my experience, the problem was almost never what they hired me to fix.

That was merely the symptom that finally became impossible to ignore.

The real issue had usually been there all along, quietly growing stronger while everyone focused on the wrong thing.

And like most diseases, the longer it goes untreated, the harder it becomes to cure.

~Ryan Gartrell has spent years helping companies solve problems. Unfortunately, the problem they ask him to fix is rarely the one that's actually broken.