There’s a well-known lesson from the Second World War that shows this perfectly. Engineers studied the damage on aircraft returning from combat and planned to reinforce the areas covered in bullet holes. The statistician Abraham Wald pointed out the flaw: those planes had survived being hit there. The real weakness was in the areas with no damage, because the planes hit there never came back.
The numbers you can see aren’t the whole story
Business decisions often suffer from the same bias. Owners focus on the measures they can see, such as profit and turnover, while the real risk or opportunity sits underneath, in:
- capacity: space, stock and people
- cashflow timing
- pricing and margin assumptions
- execution risk, once the plan meets real life
In a multi-site business, the same thing happens site by site. A healthy group total can hide the one site that’s quietly losing money.
A recent example
A client came to me with a significant growth opportunity: a large supply deal that looked strong on paper. But it needed more upfront capital than they had access to, and they didn’t have enough storage space. They were on the verge of turning it down.
We broke the opportunity down into its individual parts, and modelled the scenarios and operational constraints before committing to each one. That showed the true limits at each stage, and we built a plan to get past them, including a working capital cashflow model, a stock flow model to find the bottlenecks and a costing model for the logistics.
The client went ahead with confidence and control. The result wasn’t just growth but profitability, with net profit more than doubling part-way through the deal.
Seeing the business differently
The most valuable advice often isn’t about working harder or expanding faster. It’s about seeing the business differently before decisions become expensive.
That’s what I bring to owner-managed businesses: the structured, commercial thinking I learned at a Big 4 firm and in commercial finance at a 1,100-site group, without the corporate complexity. It’s the heart of my part-time finance director work.