The invoice that changed how I diagnose
The leak is never
where the pain is.
Years ago I sat with a salesman who was working harder than anyone on his team and earning less than most of them. More calls, more visits, more hours. His manager's diagnosis was effort. His own diagnosis was the market. Both were wrong.
I asked him to show me his last ten invoices. And there it was, on almost every one, in the same quiet little line: a discount. Not because the client demanded it. He was offering it before anyone asked, because somewhere along the way he had stopped believing the price. Nobody saw it, because nobody was looking at the behaviour. Everyone was looking at the effort.
“One line on an invoice was costing him a fifth of his income. The fix took a month. Finding it took ten minutes, once we looked in the right place.”
I have spent 37 years looking in the right places, from selling door to door in 1989 to installing sales systems inside some of the region's most demanding companies. The pattern never changes: the pain shows up in the revenue, but the leak lives in the behaviour. And there are only twelve places it hides.
You cannot fix a leak you have not found. So let us find yours.