LINX Business Check-in

Letter from James

The problem an owner describes at the door is almost never the problem we end up fixing.

For about 25 years I have walked into other people’s businesses. More than 2,000 of them by now. It is genuinely hard to see your own business clearly when you are inside it every day, doing the work and being the person everyone comes to. I know it from the other chair. For a long stretch I was the bottleneck in my own company and could not see it.

So read this next part carefully: this is not a test. There is no score at the bottom and no one is grading you. It is a mirror. The pages ahead name the things that quietly go wrong in a business, in plain language, so you can look at them all at once and mark the ones that are true for you today.

Two things will tempt you. The first is to check only the big, dramatic problems. The second is to go easy on yourself. Do neither. Check the small, recurring things too: the invoice that always goes out late, the job that always runs over, the report nobody reads. The small stuff that happens every week is usually what caps a business.

You are going to check a lot of boxes. Everyone does. I would check plenty in my own business right now. That is not the point. The point is the three you land on at the end: the three that would free up the most cash, capacity, and room to grow if you fixed them.