Operations don't break. They lurch.

In early 2015, the CMO of a Thousand Oaks, CA based Series E SaaS and hardware company I worked for asked me to fly out to visit our UK Sales and Marketing office in Reading, England to help understand why the six sales reps there weren't producing revenue. The obvious thought was poor leadership. The Sales Manager was let go about two weeks prior to me showing up.

I landed at Heathrow on a muggy Sunday afternoon and took the Elizabeth Line out to Reading, replaying in my thoughts what the Silicon Valley executives had told me about the team.

At 8am Monday morning, I was picked up by our VP of EMEA heading towards the office roughly 15 minutes away. He privately shared what he believed could be the problem. He thinks it's the young staff and their abilities. By 10am that morning, after talking to the six sales reps and the one marketing person, both as a group and individually, I understood quickly where the failure points were.

It wasn't the quality of the staff. It wasn't that they were young reps. It was that nobody in Reading was properly trained. They didn't have a process and didn't understand the product either. The Sales Manager who'd been fired had been too busy chasing her own targets. The reps had been chasing theirs. Marketing had been chasing whatever made the most noise. Each person was working hard. None of them were working in the same direction.

That moment wasn't unusual at all. In fact, it was the third time I've seen this happen in two years. It kept happening over and over again before I started to understand that this was the root cause of problems in nearly every company.

The reason I see operations failing across companies isn't that the team "wasn't working hard enough." There's usually no lack of effort. The reality is the lack of understanding of the measurable company goals and how it's tied to their individual contribution.

People want to be led. It was 2018, I was brought on to a SaaS company co-founded by a serial tech entrepreneur. It was a small team of 14 people and most came from much larger well-known companies. I thought, with all of the experiences combined, we could build processes as a team collectively because of our small size. The mature Engineering team seemed to have a defined process in place. The young Product team was led by a seasoned veteran, so I felt like they had a proper process. My focus was Sales with a touch of Marketing as they go hand in hand.

Since it was an early-stage company, it was hard to define any metrics since there weren't any baselines. I named $1M a year in recurring revenue as the target. From having a $1M to $3M quota in other companies prior as an individual contributor, that target wasn't far-fetched for me.

While laying out the groundwork towards the target, I found that the Leadership team didn't always have clearly defined goals. They were operating from instinct and personal mental notes. The Leadership team wanted to chase partnerships with big brands like Salesforce, Fujitsu, and Deloitte. Foundation work doesn't seem as glamorous as partnerships with big names and this created misalignments. They didn't view process building as cash deposited.

I had to take a strong initiative and regularly meet to align the Executive team on the processes I was building. Explaining my perspective gave them clarity. In every meeting, I'd reiterate the importance of the groundwork. Once the "machine" worked, we were able to bring in $3M in ARR during COVID. A time when many businesses were struggling.

A different company taught me the silos problem in a way I hadn't seen before. This one was bigger. A public company. I was sitting in a quarterly review where the Chief Marketing Officer reported that the team had delivered 257 "marketing qualified leads" for the quarter. The VP of Sales reported that he'd only received 80. The CFO didn't look up from his laptop. Nobody in the room thought this was strange.

After the meeting, I asked the VP of Sales how the gap was possible. He said Marketing's definition of 'qualified' included anyone who downloaded a whitepaper. The Sales team only counted leads who had a budget and a buying timeline. The CFO had a third definition that didn't match either of theirs. For him, nothing was a lead until it became a closed PO.

Three departments. One word. Three different meanings. And every quarter, executives sat in a room and reported numbers that couldn't be reconciled. Customer experience suffered. AR aged. Deals stalled at handoffs nobody owned. All of it traceable to three people using one word to mean three different things.

Operations don't break gradually. They lurch. The signs are visible months in advance. Usually in spreadsheets nobody owns, processes nobody documents, and people who hold critical knowledge in their heads. But nobody acts on the signs until something visible breaks: a board meeting goes sideways, a customer leaves, a key employee quits. By then, the cost of fixing it is five to ten times what it would have been if someone had done the diagnostic work earlier. The cost can be recovered. Time can't.

That pattern, from what I saw across eleven companies over twenty years, is what Steady Flow is built around. We diagnose practices the way physicians diagnose patients: by listening, observing, measuring, and only then prescribing. If you're seeing the signs in your own operation, we'd be glad to talk.