Andy, our sales manager, called me one afternoon and asked if we could do the impossible. I didn’t know all the details of what he was asking about, but I knew we needed the work (and cash), so I said yes. Not long after that, he walked into my office and handed me the deposit check for a large custom kitchen. The 50% deposit was almost $20,000, and at that moment it was cash I was very happy to see. Payroll was coming the following week. Rent was coming too. When you are running a business and watching cash flow closely, a nearly $20,000 check sitting on your desk has a funny way of making a project look attractive.
The next day, I started learning what I had actually said yes to.
This wasn’t just another kitchen. It was probably the most complicated design and installation our company had ever attempted. There were tons of appliances, several of which were new to us, and most were panel-ready appliances that had to integrate precisely into the cabinetry. There were custom end panels, finished back panels, constrained spaces and a homeowner with very particular needs and expectations. The electrical package was complicated by itself: toe-kick lighting, under-countertop lighting, valance cabinet lighting, floating shelves lighting and behind the crown lighting. The cabinetry incorporated three different materials and finishes: brown paint, walnut accents and a laminate product being used for a large backsplash as well as the backsides of some finished interior cabinetry.
Then add the schedule.
It was compressed enough that even if we executed perfectly, the project was going to be tight.
At some point during all of this, I remember asking Andy, “What did you sell them?”
His answer was essentially, “What they wanted to buy.”
Looking back now.. I ask Why didn’t we sell them what we wanted to build?
There is an important distinction there. I don’t mean that Sales should ignore what customers want or that businesses should refuse anything outside their standard offering. Custom work was part of what we did. Andy was also doing his job: talking to customers, finding opportunities and bringing revenue into the company. The job had been sold at what, on paper, was an appropriate GPM, and there was enough margin built into the quote that this should have been a profitable project.
By the time it was over, our actual GPM was 18%…ouch…
Thousands of dollars that should have been profit disappeared through additional labor, rework, extra trips, adjustments and all the little costs that accumulate when a difficult project stops flowing correctly. And even that 18% doesn’t tell the whole story.
There were thousands more in revenue we never had the opportunity to earn because employees were spending time reworking or fixing this project instead of producing the next one. There was the effect on company culture and morale as people became frustrated with the job and with each other. There was management time involved in coordinating problems, answering questions and trying to restore confidence. There was my own stress as General Manager as I tried to keep the customer, general contractor, Sales, Production and Installation moving in roughly the same direction.
None of those costs showed up on the estimate or the job-costing report with a nice line labeled “Cost of Inconsistency.” But they were very real.
As you have probably figured out by now, the project became a mess. Delivery was chaotic. Installation was difficult. Scheduling was difficult. Communication became difficult, because we didn’t want to deal with it. The quality of the product was generally excellent—except for the times when it wasn’t—and because we had not executed at a high level from day one, every issue began receiving additional scrutiny.
At one point, the paint finish was being inspected with a flashlight from approximately three inches away. Our agreed quality standard was evaluation from roughly two feet without supplemental lighting for the premium line they had purchased. Door handles were being evaluated for alignment differences approaching 1/64 of an inch. In the postmortem afterward, even the general contractor acknowledged that some of the inspections had become overly nitpicky.
But I don’t really blame them; we had taught them to look.
That’s one of the lessons learned, when a customer believes things are going well, a tiny imperfection is often exactly that: a tiny imperfection. When you have lost their confidence, that same imperfection becomes evidence that something else might be wrong.
Once trust begins breaking down, people naturally start checking.
A customer who normally looks at the finished kitchen from across the room starts looking at the cabinet door from millimeters away. The contractor starts checking dimensions they normally wouldn’t check. Emails become more detailed. Questions become more frequent. Everyone begins protecting themselves, and practically lawyering up.
The individual defect hasn’t necessarily become more serious. The context around the defect has changed.
Consistency builds trust, but inconsistency works in the opposite direction.
When I work with businesses today, one of the things I look for is where information, responsibility or work moves from one person to another. Those handoffs are often where otherwise good businesses become inconsistent.
Most businesses aren’t broken. Sales might be pretty good. Operations might be pretty good. The employees may know their individual jobs. The owner may work incredibly hard. The problem is often what happens in space between all of the people.
Sales sells a job that Operations doesn’t completely understand. Operations changes a schedule, but nobody communicates the change back to Sales. A customer asks for something unusual, but nobody clearly owns the follow-up. Purchasing assumes Production knows. Production assumes Installation knows. Installation discovers the problem standing in the customer’s house trying to do their install.
And the owner assumes somebody has it handled.
Our kitchen project was an extreme example, but the breakdown actually started with something incredibly ordinary: a sales-to-operations handoff.
Andy knew what the customer wanted. I knew we wanted the order. But we didn’t have a strong enough system forcing us to stop and ask the operational questions before making the commitment.
What is unusual about this project? What are the technical risks and which appliances require something different? Who owns those details? Does the schedule actually have enough room? Does Production understand what Sales promised? Does Installation understand what Design intended? Are we charging enough for the uncertainty? And most importantly, is this something we can reliably deliver?
Instead, Andy called me and asked if we could do it.
And I said yes.
That’s why I don’t tell this story as an example of a salesperson making a bad decision. I was the General Manager. The system ultimately belonged to me. If our process allowed an extraordinarily complicated project to move from a customer conversation to a commitment without the right operational review, then the problem wasn’t Andy.
Scheduling is another place where I see consistency break down quickly. Business owners will frequently tell me, “We have a scheduling problem,” and sometimes they’re right. They don’t have enough capacity, the schedule isn’t realistic or jobs aren’t being planned correctly.
But sometimes the actual schedule isn’t the problem at all. The problem is that nobody has the same schedule.
Sales thinks the job will be ready Tuesday. Production thinks Thursday. Installation has Friday written down. The customer remembers being told Wednesday. The owner changed something verbally on Monday afternoon, but the person actually doing the work wasn’t standing there when the conversation happened.
The company doesn’t have four scheduling problems. It has a communication system problem. A schedule only becomes useful when the people who depend on it are looking at the same information and know what they’re responsible for doing when it changes. Whether that schedule lives in sophisticated ERP software, a shared spreadsheet or a whiteboard almost matters less than whether the organization consistently uses it.
You need a single version of the truth.
Another place inconsistency tends to hide is ownership. One of my favorite questions when evaluating a business is incredibly simple:
Who owns this?
Then I listen carefully to the answer.
“We all kind of do.”
“Usually Sara does it.”
“It depends.”
Those answers don’t necessarily mean the company is dysfunctional. But they almost always tell me where I should ask another question. Clear ownership doesn’t mean one person has to physically perform every step of a process. It means somebody is accountable for making sure the outcome happens. Other people can participate. Tasks can be delegated. But at the end of the day, somebody knows the ball is in their court.
Without that ownership, businesses start relying on assumptions. And assumptions are remarkably inconsistent. This thinking is part of what I mean when I talk about doing a Business Audit of a business. You don’t necessarily need six months of coaching, dozens of spreadsheets or a giant process-mapping exercise to start seeing where a business has problems.
You can often identify a surprising amount simply by asking the same basic questions to different people.
Ask Sales, “What happens after you sell a job?”
Then ask Operations.
Ask three employees, “Where do I find the current schedule?”
Ask, “Who communicates with the customer when the date changes?”
You’re not necessarily looking for the “correct” answer. You’re looking for whether the answers are consistent.
If five people give you five different descriptions of how an important process works, you’ve probably found something worth investigating. If everyone points to a different person when you ask who owns something, you’ve found another one. If Sales believes Operations owns customer communication and Operations believes Sales owns it, you’ve probably just discovered a future unhappy customer. The purpose isn’t to catch employees doing things wrong. The goal is to find the places where the company is relying on individual assumptions rather than shared systems.
Eventually, the project and relationships reached a point where I needed to go to the jobsite myself. As General Manager, I met with the general contractor and the homeowner, listened to their concerns and assured them that we weren’t going anywhere. We would address the problems, finish the project and stand behind our work.
And we did. The homeowner ultimately ended up very pleased with the finished kitchen. In fact, one of the things they commented on positively was that we didn’t give up. The general contractor continued to use us, and not long afterward we won a roughly $100,000 whole-house project through them.
That project went much better.
We didn’t suddenly become better cabinetmakers between those two jobs. We had many of the same people, equipment and capabilities. What changed was that we had learned. Expectations were clearer. Communication was better. We understood the risks. We had experience with some of the products that had previously been new to us. Most importantly, we had a very fresh example of what happened when the handoffs didn’t work.
That’s continuous improvement, that’s Kaizen. The goal isn’t to create a company where nothing ever goes wrong. I’ve never seen that business, and I doubt it exists.
The goal is to create a company that learns when something goes wrong, identifies why it happened and makes the system a little better before the next project comes through.
That first kitchen cost us thousands of dollars directly. It cost us thousands more in lost capacity and revenue opportunities. It affected morale. It created stress. It consumed management attention that should have been going somewhere else.
But it also became an expensive education in how much the spaces between departments matter.
If you have an organizational chart, it’s natural to look at each box and ask whether that person is doing their job. Sometimes that’s exactly where the problem is.
But if your business feels inconsistent, I would encourage you to spend just as much time looking at the lines connecting the boxes.
Sales → Operation/Production.
Production → Installation.
Leadership → Everyone.
What information needs to move across each one of those lines? Who is responsible for moving it? What happens when something changes? Where is that information documented? Would both people on either side of the handoff describe the process the same way?
Because some of the most expensive problems in a business aren’t sitting neatly inside Sales, Operations or Production.
They’re hiding in the gaps between them.
And once you know where to look, you can usually spot them pretty fast.