Do you find yourself solving the wrong problems in your business? Or maybe solving the right problems, but in the wrong order?
In this episode of “The Business You Really Want,” hosts Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo discuss the importance of identifying and solving the right problems in the right order. This episode dives into the common pitfalls business owners face when trying to fix issues, the difference between symptoms and root causes, and how solving problems in the wrong order can lead to wasted time, resources, and frustration.
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Solving The Right Problems In The Right Order
Right Order
Tonya Kubo here with operations expert extraordinaire, or at least my favorite operations expert, and Everyday Effectiveness CEO, Gwen Bortner. Gwen, I have a tricky little topic to discuss with you. I want to talk about solving the right problems in the right order, because I feel like, oftentimes, what I hear, at least on the marketing front, is what are we solving for? Are we solving for the right problem?
Let’s dig deeper and make sure that we’re solving the right problem, because solving the wrong problem just takes you down a path that nobody wants to go on. Something that you have taught me is, it’s not just about solving the right problem, but it’s also solving the problems in the correct order. Maybe just open us up by explaining why that’s so important.
The biggest reason that the order we solve the problems in is important is because it helps minimize rework so that we aren’t actually solving a thing, then coming over here and saying, that fix over here wasn’t really quite the fix that we needed, we needed to do something else. Whereas if we would have done this other thing first, we would have just done the one fix over here, instead of fixing this other thing maybe 2, 3, or 4 times. A great example that we see a lot in the entrepreneurial world is buying a piece of software and saying, something’s not working, so I’m going to buy a new piece of software that’s going to fix it.
It’s like, is that really the problem? We work through things, we get down to some other cause. It’s like, this is the problem. It’s like, that software isn’t the right software. We’re going to have to make another fix, and it doesn’t happen a lot, but sometimes it’s like, and we’re going to go back to where we started. And so now, all of the process of changing over to new software and then changing back to the original site, that’s a lot of wasted time and effort and rework. I’m not saying this happens 85% or 90% of the time with this specific example. It’s not uncommon to see, we made decisions and did things, and we have to make new decisions and do the same things again. We’re duplicating time and effort. Time, quite honestly, is our most precious resource.
Time is anyone’s most precious resource. Share on XThat’s actually a really good example, because it reminds me of the recent rebrand that we worked on together. I feel the need to tell everybody about my very optimistic view here. I had an optimistic vision. We had a logo, we had colors, we had fonts, we had a whole brand thing. It just wasn’t quite right. The solution to it not being quite right is to hire a designer who specializes in taking a brand that you love, that’s not quite right, and making it right. I don’t even think it took a full session with her for you to recognize, Gwen, that it wasn’t that the brand wasn’t quite right, you didn’t love it at all. And then we had to stop.
There was this part of me that was like, I have the wheels in motion. I’ve set my dates, I’ve set my timelines, let’s keep going. You had to go, if we keep going, we are going to end up with something we hate. Right now, we just don’t quite love it. Let’s stop here. Let’s figure out what it is that we’ll love, and then let’s pick the project back up. It did take time. It did push probably the timeline back maybe a month, but I think we would both agree that we let two months find two months. My memory, it gets things, are so much beautifuller and easier when I think about them than they are in reality sometimes, but we landed in a better place, because we solved it. It wasn’t just solving the right problem, because we knew we had a brand problem, but having to solve it in the right order.
Finding Solutions
This really is a great example that we’ve been living with. In a very real and active way, I’ve gone through this process several times. Part of the reason, from my perspective, is one of the root cause issues has been not having someone owning all of the aspects of the brand marketing piece that really owned it in the same way I should own it, like I was able to truly delegate it to you. You’re making decisions very closely to the same way I would make decisions, because you’ve been with me long enough, you’ve taken long enough that you really understand my point of view, instead of it just being someone who said, this really is a good answer. This is a right answer, not saying it’s a right answer for me.
The root cause wasn’t that I didn’t hire good people, and that it wasn’t any of those individual things. The root cause was not having the central hub that was paying attention to all of the pieces going on. To me, that’s why the difference is so important. If I would have just hired our brand extension person in the way that I have done in the past, we would have had the typical issue at some point to be like, it’s fine, doesn’t make me really happy. I don’t think it’s quite right, and doesn’t necessarily resonate, doesn’t necessarily say all the things that it’s supposed to say. It’s not like I’ve used bad people, but I’ve missed the root cause in this case, and the root cause being not having a true unified message view of the whole picture of what we’re trying to do.
Root Cause
That’s a good example. I think that’s a really good marketing example. I think marketing is an area where we oftentimes solve symptoms versus looking for a root cause, but I think one area, which I bet touches the lives of every single person listening, is cash flow issues. With cash flow, am I the only person who sees this? I feel like people oftentimes are just looking at the surface income and expenses. Oftentimes, what drives a cash flow issue is something deeper. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?
You know I love numbers, and I love cash flow. I agree with you. I do think it’s something that affects businesses at some point in time, not always and not forever. A lot of businesses have it. We’ve talked about it before in the podcast, because it is a bit ubiquitous within the industry that we’re having to deal with it at some point in time. The common thought that I see is if we’re having a problem with cash flow, we need to sell more, because we think of that cash flow is we need more money. When I say need more money, the first place anybody’s brain goes, including my own, is sell more.
Create more income. We need more money, create more income. That’s a very logical place to go, but that is potentially a symptom, not necessarily what’s causing the cash flow problem. This is where going into the looking at where there’s actually the root cause can make a huge difference, because sometimes selling more isn’t actually going to be the problem. For example, this is an extreme example. If it costs you $10, and your widget that you’re selling costs $10, you’re selling it for $9. Selling a hundred more is not going to help. You’re not going to make it up in volume. You’re going to lose $100.
That’s an example of what seems like a cash flow issue, but really, it’s a pricing issue in that case.
In this case, it’s a price issue or a cost-of-production issue. Because maybe you’re able to change a production behavior, a supplier, or some other element and actually get it down to a cost where now selling 100 versus one actually is making you more money. That’s one example of the cash flow problem. The other is sometimes the term I like to use is leaking money. I like to think of it as a bucket. There’s money coming in at the top, like water. If your bucket is solid, then you’re taking money out with very specific choices, it comes out here and it comes out there. But sometimes you’ve got some little holes in the bottom of your bucket.
Pinholes are the worst because they don’t seem like very much, they’re little tiny holes, and it’s just going drip. It doesn’t seem like it’s a big deal. But the problem with pinholes is that pinholes can become real holes, and real holes can become bigger. Where are potentially the leaks in your overall business model? It could be leaks in effectiveness and people, it could be leaks in apps that you’re paying for but no longer using. There are all sorts of places that could be leaks. The other cash flow issue is what I call the Peter-Paul issue, which is you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. It feels like we are surviving, but really, we’re paying for yesterday’s product with today’s money, and we don’t actually have today’s money to pay for today’s product. We’re always running behind and getting further behind over time.
We keep trying to sell more, hoping that will allow us to catch up, but we’re always behind the fall. We’re never actually catching up. All of those are cash flow issues, and they are very different cash flow issues. Pretty much, for the most part, putting more money in doesn’t solve any of them.
Wrong Order
I think that’s a really good illustration in terms of showcasing the difference between solving a symptom versus digging deeper to solve the root cause. I’m going to put you on the spot here. Could you give us an example or maybe walk me through the process of how addressing a problem in the wrong order would impact a business?
Yeah. Let’s say that where we think the issue is that we have hired the wrong people.
I’ve been there.
Our cash flow issue is, we think, a people issue. We believe the people we’ve hired are not the right ones and aren’t working effectively. We let those people go, and then we hire new people, and then we have this problem again, and then we let those people go, and we hire new people, and we have the same problem again.
If you keep bumping to the same problems over and over again even if you let people go, something else is wrong within your business. Share on XAt what point do I let the hiring manager go because I blame them for hiring the wrong people?
Often that’s us, and so we think it’s a people issue because they’re not performing at the level that we expect them to perform, but in this case, where often it’s a process issue or it’s a communications issue. There are all sorts of other things that could be driving that particular cash flow issue, because it is still a cash flow issue where we’re paying for eight hours of work a day, and we feel like we’re only getting 3 or 4, but it’s not actually because of the people that we hired. It’s because our systems aren’t working in the way that we think they really should be.
For instance, they have to hand off tasks, and then it comes back. They hand it off again, and it comes back. Every time there’s a handoff, we’re losing productivity. Maybe the right answer is you actually only need this person halftime, and you need this person halftime, but this person works halftime in the morning, and this person works halftime in the afternoon. They don’t both work full time all day going back and forth. Not a perfect example, but that’s a process issue, not a people issue. If you got it fixed, you would have found that your first set of people were also the right people. But now we’ve spent a lot of money in the onboarding, offboarding, hiring, unhiring, rehiring process because it wasn’t actually a people issue, it was a process issue.
Prioritizing Problems
What can I do as a business owner? Are there questions that I could ask myself? Is there maybe a five-point checklist I could go through that would help me to know whether I’m prioritizing my business problems effectively or accurately?
This is going to sound like a really self-serving answer, but it’s not. It’s a real, true thing, it’s really hard to do this by yourself. Because we use the phrase around here a lot, you can’t read the label inside the jar, and that’s true. A lot of times, you can’t see that there would be a different way than going back and forth between these people. You can’t even conceive of it, and so you’re never going to find that problem. This is where having someone who comes in from the outside and says, “So why does this get passed back and forth at a time? Couldn’t this person just spend the morning doing this, and this person do the afternoon? Then, by the end of the day, we would deliver this product, whatever it happens to be.”
When we started the business, we wanted to make sure that we delivered within five minutes. But the question becomes, does anyone actually need it delivered in five minutes? Or, if it’s delivered in 24 hours, is that more than enough time? The owner, who really loved the fact that they were delivering in five minutes, probably is never going to ask themselves that question. They can’t conceive of asking that question. But when someone on the outside says, “Why is five minutes better than 24 hours? they often can’t actually answer that. Or they can, but when you say, But at this price, does that actually make sense?” it’s like, maybe not. So then there’d be other questions. I don’t feel like there’s an absolute piece.
I will say the best way to do it is to work with someone either outside the organization or brand new to the organization. Because new people, if they’re really encouraged to ask the questions, might say, “Why do we go back and forth?” You hire these new people that we’re talking about. They start asking questions like, “Wouldn’t it be easier if I worked on this for a morning, and then they worked on it for an afternoon?” When the question comes up, then all of a sudden, it’s like, maybe that actually is the right answer. The outside perspective is so important. It doesn’t have to come from a paid consultant, but it does need to be someone who’s not so ingrained. If you’ve got a big enough organization, it can come from another department where they’re not as familiar with the nuances and the details. But rarely, it’s really hard because we work together. I can’t do it for my own business either, even though I do this.
The best way to review and improve your business operations is to work with someone either outside your team or someone new to it. Share on XI do think if you’re listening to this and you’re going, okay, because part of it is you have to even know, like if I was to work on this with a peer, what questions should my peer ask me in order to help me come to the right conclusion? I think the first thing, what I’m hearing you say, is the first thing we have to do is we have to name the problem, and we have to get clear and succinct about it. The second thing we would need to do then is we need to detail the impact of the problem. The problem is we keep hiring folks, and nobody is working out. What’s the impact of that?
Once you determine the problem and get clear on what to do with it, start detailing its impact. Share on XThere’s the training time, all this lost productivity, and training time takes a boatload of time to reevaluate the job description, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Also, they’re not working out. What does that mean? What does that look like? What’s the impact of whatever they’re doing that’s not working out? From there, I think it’s a matter of going, what drives that? Is that necessary? I think the question that I don’t think business owners ask themselves enough, we ask ourselves a lot of what questions, we ask ourselves a lot of why questions, but I don’t know that we ever ask ourselves, but does it have to be that way?
Mindset Shift
We were just having a conversation as part of the small business book club about A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business. One of the pieces that came out of that is, instead of saying, “What’s stopping us?” it is the phrase, we could if, we can if, or a version of we can if. I really think the way you’re talking about there is that same mindset shift of saying, “How these people can be more effective if, we can if, they can if,” and saying, “They can if we extend the delivery time, They can if.” I think that really is the place where you start looking for the root cause too. Because in the process of this can if, all of a sudden it’s like, by changing this element, whatever it is, often way down the line in this process, we say, “That changes all of these other things.”
We can start in our mind saying, “We can look through that. That’s worth a try. Let’s do that,” and then we can start seeing that change in evaluation of what’s happening. I do think your point is you’ve got to have someone asking a question that you wouldn’t typically ask, and you also need to be thinking not always about why it wouldn’t work, but how it could work. Because that gets us into a more creative place. I’ve talked about it often, that part of my success is I have seen so many things that work. I can come up with a list of alternatives really fast that often the person I’m working with has never even seen or heard of. It just doesn’t occur to them. But you could get there with this kind of can if process.
I think also what you made me realize is sometimes we default to asking for perspective from people who do our exact same thing, and we’re better off getting perspective from somebody who actually has no idea what we do. Because then they won’t carry the same default assumptions we carry.
You and I have both seen that in our group quarterly program that we’ve had, where there have been folks that are in similar industries, and then there are folks that don’t know a thing about that industry. Often, in the small group conversations, people come back and it’s like, “I didn’t think I could be of any value, but they loved my question because they came at it from a complete novice perspective.” They asked a question that no one in their industry would have ever asked.
Outside The Vertical Path
That is something we do here a lot. What I would like for you to do, Gwen, because I feel like we’ve really covered this topic really well, I feel like this is a good place to end, but if somebody were to pick up, what would be the 2 to 3 things that you think would be best for them to jot down, to not forget?
Thing number one is, rarely the way the problem is presenting, the symptom, is rarely the actual cause. There’s almost always something deeper. Sometimes it’s in what I would call a direct line. That this thing, it’s because of this, here’s the root cause. It’s fairly straightforward. But more often than not, because operations is such an integrated activity, the actual root cause is somewhere way off in what we would call another department or another source. Don’t get too stuck on staying in the vertical path of the problem. If you’re seeing the symptom, realize, one, it’s probably not the root cause. It can be, but usually not.
The second thing would be, don’t just look in that obvious line of process, but look outside and say, “Are there other places?” The third thing I would say is, try to get perspective from someone that you trust but who isn’t necessarily deeply embedded in your business. It can be a new employee. It can be an outside consultant. It can be a peer from a networking group that has a different perspective. There’s lots of places that you can get it, but be prepared to ask and answer hard questions. Be asking the positive, “What if this wasn’t true? What can we do if? What can we do if? What can we do if?” I really think those are the three babies.
Those sound great. Thank you for walking us through that. What I would ask is, anybody listening to the show, I would love for you to email me specifically, Tonya@everydayeffectiveness.com. I would love to know, who do you get this kind of perspective from? If there’s an example that you have from your own business where you discovered, after the fact, you were solving either the wrong problem entirely, or you were solving the right problem, but you were solving it in the wrong order, we’d love to hear those examples from you and use those maybe in a future show or to even build out resources for future listeners. Thank you, Gwen. Thank you for being here. Thank you for walking us through this process. It’s a little high-level for me, but I feel like you helped me understand.
Mentioned in the Episode
- Read A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business
- Find all resources mentioned in the episode at The Business You Really Want
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
