What the spreadsheets were hiding

A manufacturing business I worked with had a problem that looked, on paper, like a strategy execution problem. Margins were falling. Overtime was climbing. Customer delivery was getting worse. All of this despite a growth strategy the leadership team was genuinely confident in.

The early conversation focused on accountability. People weren’t executing well enough. Someone needed to hold the line harder, chase harder, follow up more.

So instead of starting with the strategy, I worked backwards from some of their recent decisions. For each one, I asked a simple question: what information was available when this decision got made?

That changed the picture completely. Their margin reporting was built on standard costs that hadn’t kept pace with reality for a while. Their sales pipeline overstated genuine opportunities, sometimes by a lot. Operational KPIs rewarded output, not profitable output, so people were hitting their numbers by making the wrong things faster. And because nobody quite trusted the central reporting, Sales, Operations, and Finance each kept their own spreadsheets, quietly, just in case.

Four departments, four slightly different versions of the same business, and a managing director trying to make growth decisions somewhere in the middle of all of them.

What struck me most was this. Almost none of the decisions people had made were irrational. Given the information sitting in front of them, most made perfect sense. The information itself was the problem: wrong, or telling a different story depending on which spreadsheet you opened.

A strategy day feels like leadership. Rewriting the plan, running a workshop, aligning the room around new priorities, all of it visible, all of it something you can point to afterwards. Checking whether the Tuesday morning numbers are true doesn’t have the same energy, even though it usually matters more.

So we didn’t start by rewriting the strategy. We simplified the management information instead. We agreed on a definition of the measures that mattered commercially. A much clearer view of profitability, by customer, by product, and by what was happening on the shop floor rather than what the output numbers implied.

That changed the conversation almost immediately. People stopped asking why others weren’t following the strategy and started asking what was happening in the business, and what evidence they should use to decide anything.

That’s what led them to change their pricing and redirect capacity away from revenue that looked attractive on paper but wasn’t creating value.

I see some version of this in nearly every discovery process now. A leadership team convinced they have a strategy problem, when what they have is a group of smart people making perfectly reasonable decisions on bad information. The numbers people were relying on to run the business weren’t good enough to run a business on.

If your own numbers feel less reliable than they should, before you reach for a new strategy or a harder conversation about execution, it might be worth asking a plainer question. What’s feeding the decisions being made in your business this week, and how many versions of the truth are currently sitting in different spreadsheets?

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

Need a speaker who’ll bring a fresh perspective? Reach me at info@fuelledfitandfiredup.com.

For 30 years, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders who are stuck on the wrong question. My job is to find the right one.

That usually means sitting with the messy “what if” long enough to turn it into clearer thinking and harder questions.