I watched a founder take a client from furious to buying more in thirty minutes. Everyone called it magic, I felt like it was a warning sign.
This was the first agency I worked for after leaving corporate. They’d just landed a major investor - not a small one, the kind that had backed names I’d actually heard of.
I thought, this must be a serious operation. Three founders. Big backing. Ambitious plans. This is going to be exciting.
Then I got inside.
Don’t get me wrong it was an incredible operation but they were running with no real visibility into what was happening across the business. Not the kind I would have expected anyway. I’d been hired to look at performance data, in retrospect, there wasn’t any.
No way you’d see if from the outside, or even from the inside without the lens I didn’t realised I carried.
This founder WAS extraordinary. Client could be furious and he’d get on the phone, turn the whole thing around, and half an hour later they’d be ready to spend more. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen anything like it.
And the other two were just as impressive - solving problems in their own areas just as elegantly. Between the three of them, nothing ever hit the ground.
And that was the problem. The business didn’t run on systems. It ran on them. Catching things, solving things, keeping it all together through sheer force of being brilliant.
It worked. I really worked. Until it couldn’t.
That was the first time I realised that a business looking good on the outside and a business actually having visibility on the inside are two different things. Two completely different things.