BLOG SERIES: THREADS
The Tangled Business Series
STAGE
Diagnosing
READ TIME
2 mins
Running a business makes us acutely aware of problems.
It’s literally part of our job — understanding how what we do solves problems for our clients, and fixing things for them when they go wrong. So when something breaks in our own business, jumping straight into action mode is completely natural.
We’re also short on time. The quicker it’s dealt with, the better.
But the obvious, visible problem isn’t always where the thread broke.
The fix appears to work. For a while. But the real issue is still there, quietly causing trouble underneath.
And if we’re fixing several things quickly at once — which, let’s be honest, is how business problems tend to arrive, in multiples — then that’s a lot of work and effort that isn’t actually resolving the real issues. It’s just creating bigger ones.
Because changing things at speed is also one of the quickest ways to tangle the threads of a business.
Which means the business ends up taking even more effort to run. When really what we want is to get back to the actual work we started all of this for in the first place.
Deep breath.
Because that’s a lot.
But ironically, a breath is exactly what I’d suggest first.
Pause. And then trace the thread back to where it actually broke.
What this looks like in practice
Let’s look at a real example. Someone is worried because enquiries have slowed down. The instinct — the completely understandable instinct — is to do something promotional. Advertising, a discount, and a strong sales email campaign. Or all three at once.
But before any of that, what if we traced the thread back first?
- Enquiries have slowed down; that’s a comparison. Which means the first question is whether we’re comparing like for like. The most natural place to start is the same month the previous year. So we look at where those enquiries came from this time last year. Were they DMs on social media? Website enquiries? Word of mouth?
- In this example, it was website enquiries that were down. So again — compare like for like. Are the number of visitors similar? Are they staying a similar amount of time on the pages? Are they coming from a similar source? (This is where your data becomes genuinely useful — more on that in the Hidden Assets Series.)
- And this is where it gets interesting. It came to light that the previous year the business had been mentioned on a prominent industry website — with a link back to their own site. The visitors arriving through that link were already warm. They arrived knowing a little about the business, and, crucially, trusting the person who had recommended it.
The journey from visitor to enquiry was a short one. The visitors arriving now were coming in cold.
Mostly from search. And the website wasn’t doing enough to warm them up. That’s where the thread broke. Not in the number of enquiries. Not in the marketing. In the source of the traffic — and what those visitors needed when they arrived.
So the real question isn’t: “How do I get more enquiries?”
It’s: “How do I get warmer leads to the website — or create something that does a similar job?” And that’s a completely different problem to solve. A much more specific one.
The additional gift of this approach
Tracing the thread back doesn’t just find the real problem. It shows you things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
In this example, it became very clear that the website was struggling to warm up cold visitors. That insight opens up a whole range of possible next steps.
So now it’s simply a matter of deciding which option makes the most sense for this business, right now.
The real work begins when we stop asking “how do I fix this?” and start asking “where did this actually break?”
The Tangled Business Series
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