I said “nearly working” to someone recently and watched them flinch.
It’s a fair reaction. It sounds like a euphemism, the sort of thing you say when you’re being polite about something that’s actually broken, in the same family as nearly ready or nearly finished.
But that’s not what I mean by it, and I’ve come to think the difference is the whole point.
A broken business looks nothing like this
If something is genuinely broken, everyone knows. Work goes out late, clients complain, people leave, the money runs out. Nobody needs a diagnosis for that. You can feel it in the building.
What I actually walk into is the opposite. The work is good, often much better than the person doing it thinks. Clients stay. The team is capable and mostly happy. Last year was better than the year before. On every measure anyone is looking at, it’s fine.
And there’s still something not quite right, and you can feel it, and you cannot point at it.
That’s nearly working. Not a business that’s failing. A business that’s succeeding, in a way that stopped being the best version of itself available some time ago and never announced it.
The gap is upside, not damage
Here’s the bit I get wrong when I explain it badly. The comparison I’m making is with the business that’s already inside the one you have, not with some ideal that runs perfectly.
The difference between where you are and where you could be is a set of things that are already available to you and currently aren’t visible, so you can’t take them. There’s no list of failures in there anywhere. A kind of work that’s consistently underpriced, and you’ve felt it for two years. A client everyone dreads who turns out to be the profitable one. A whole service line you’d stop doing tomorrow if you could see what it actually costs to deliver.
None of those are problems in the ordinary sense. Nothing is on fire. They’re just decisions you can’t make yet, because the thing you’d need to see in order to make them isn’t anywhere you can look.
That’s why I don’t lead with fixing. Most work that gets sold into businesses like yours promises relief: fewer fires, less admin, a tidier process, a bit of your week back. Relief is real, and it’s a small prize. What’s actually on the table is something you didn’t know you could have.
Why it’s so hard to see from where you are
Because you built it, and it worked.
Everything in the business is there for a reason. Every workaround solved a real problem on a real day. Every spreadsheet exists because someone needed an answer and made one. Nothing in there is stupid, which is exactly why it’s so hard to see: you can’t spot the thing that’s out of date when you remember precisely why it was the right call at the time.
And it’s cumulative. You changed what you sell, or who you sell it to, or how you deliver it. Not dramatically, just gradually, the way anyone does when they’re paying attention to what customers actually want. But nobody stopped to write down what that changed underneath, so the way you measure the business is still answering questions about how it used to work.
That’s not neglect. There’s no point in the week where that job appears on anyone’s list.
What I’m actually saying when I say it
I’m saying: you’re right. The instinct that’s been nagging at you is accurate, and it isn’t imposter syndrome, and you’re not being ungrateful about a business that’s doing well.
There is something there. You can feel it because you know this business better than anyone, and you can’t prove it because knowing and seeing are two different things, and nothing you own is currently showing it to you.
So when I say it, I’m not being polite about something broken. I’m saying there’s more in there, and I think we can get at it.