The Hidden Cost Your P&L Will Never Show You
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's most recent Small Business Index, 53% of small business owners say inflation is their top concern, and it has been the number one challenge for over four consecutive years. Revenue unpredictability is right behind it. Margins are tighter. Hiring is harder. The environment is genuinely more difficult than it was two years ago.
I'm not going to tell you otherwise.
But after more than twenty years of working in and alongside business owners in seasons exactly like this one, here's what I keep coming back to.
Some of what you're carrying right now isn't coming from the economy. It's coming from inside your own building. And that part, unlike inflation, is something you can actually do something about.
The cost that never shows up on a report
Pull up your P&L and you'll see the obvious things. Payroll. Rent. Cost of goods. The numbers that keep you up at night.
What you won't see is:
The decision that should have taken a day and took three weeks because the wrong people were in the room—or the right ones weren't.
The project that got 80% done and quietly died because the person with the grit to finish it was spending all their time in ideation meetings that drain them.
The good employee who disengaged six months ago and is now halfway out the door and the cost to replace them is somewhere between one and two times their annual salary.
The hours you spent last week doing work that should have been handled by someone else because there's no one else set up to handle it.
None of that shows up as a line item. But it's costing real money every single week. And for most of the business owners I work with, it's costing more than whatever they're spending on the things they actually worry about.
Why this is hard to see when things are hard
When you're in survival mode—watching cash flow, managing margins, trying to hold the team together—you don't have the bandwidth to look at the systemic stuff. You're triaging. And triage is necessary.
But triage is not a strategy.
The leaders I've watched come out of hard seasons stronger—not just intact, but genuinely better—weren't the ones who worked the hardest during them. They were the ones who used the pressure as a reason to look honestly at how their business actually worked. And they made one or two structural changes that paid dividends long after the hard season passed.
Hard seasons have a way of making the invisible visible. The dysfunction that was manageable when revenue was up becomes unsustainable when margins tighten. The bottlenecks you'd been working around suddenly become the thing you can't afford to ignore.
That's not bad news. That's actually useful information… if you're willing to look at it.
The question worth sitting with this week
If your team was operating at full capacity where every person is doing the work they're actually wired to do, in the right seat, at the right phase of the work, what would change in your business?
Not hypothetically. Specifically.
Would decisions move faster? Would projects actually get finished? Would you stop being the person every question runs through before anything moves?
That's not a fantasy. That's a solvable problem. And it's worth solving now—especially now—because the cost of not solving it compounds quietly while you're focused on everything else.
The external environment is hard. You can't control that. But what's happening inside your business—how your team is structured, how decisions get made, how work actually moves— that's yours to change.
Next week we're going to turn the lens on the leader—specifically, how your own genius might be shaping what's possible for your team in ways you haven't noticed yet.
— LB
If you've been reading this series on Working Genius, this is a good companion to what we covered a fews ago about how work actually moves through a team. If you're just finding this, start here.
