The $1,000-a-Month Problem

A fire that stops production and threatens your entire business is going to raise a very loud alarm. A $1,000-a-month problem that slowly robs your business of time, resources, attention and opportunity may go quietly unnoticed for weeks, months or even years.

Your business is going to collect a lot of problems... the kind that seem trivial at first but gradually pile up in your path and get in the way of your daily activities. Left unresolved long enough, they can have a profound impact on your big-picture vision as well.

For example, I recently set about doing a thorough email deliverability review for a new client... a small business whose customer base was built on trust and communication. Their business is growing but had not yet had a real assessment of its most visible communication channel. Our objective: confirm that every email sent to their customers was verifiably coming from them and properly using the email encryption tools they were already paying for.

Here was a small but potentially real problem that was never going to sound an alarm on failure. The only visibility available would be a motivated customer reporting a suspicious message, or mentioning that they hadn't heard from the business lately. A few emails landing in someone's spam folder may not sound like a big deal to most people, but for a small business it can mean significant lost opportunity.

Does this feel familiar? It is, unfortunately, quite possible that this or any number of other problems you've yet to notice are happening in your business right now. Don't feel too bad about it; that likely means you're running your business and are focused on bigger issues. Nevertheless, small problems are going to accumulate and, quite possibly, go unnoticed.

The Challenge

Some problems come in hot and loud... they're rare, they demand attention, and they likely get it right away. But there is a larger, more common and much quieter category of problems.

Problems like this don't typically show up in feature requests or viral tweets, and you're unlikely to hear about them in the big keynote speech at your annual industry convention. Where they show up is in friction that reduces efficiency, completed work that has to get re-done, frequent re-trainings and process reviews, and in quiet embarrassments or missed chances that former customers never bother to mention.

This class of problem also shows up in neglected maintenance of machines or human relationships, institutional workarounds that everyone just accepts as "how things get done," and skills and experience that silently disappear as tools, techniques and people go under (or over) utilized, fail, or simply move on.

Here's the thing that can be hard to accept: those problems piling up... you probably couldn't solve them all even if you could see them. Some of them you're just going to have to live with. And that is the real challenge: how do you know which ones need solving and which are just receipts you can file away and forget?

The Cost

These kinds of problems already have budgets... even if they don't appear as line items in your accounting. The money they represent is spent on increased headcount, employee turnover, layers of manual review, ineffective reorganizations, time spent documenting problems, re-writing SOPs and re-training team members, after-the-fact risk mitigation and, to my mind the worst of all, lost opportunities.

For my new client, the first step was simply to turn on DMARC reporting, so that the mail providers receiving their email would start telling us what they were seeing. Within nine days I had 30 reports covering 84 messages, and those reports showed a marketing tool sending mail on the client's behalf without ever having completed its verification step. Seventeen of those messages (just over 20%) were one policy change away from a potential new customer's spam folder.

For a huge company, 17 emails going into customer spam folders is a rounding error. For a small business, even one mis-delivered email can be a missed opportunity with profound implications for its future. If landing a single new customer is worth a few thousand dollars a year to a business this size, and one inquiry a month was quietly getting lost, that's the $1,000-a-month problem right there... and nobody would ever have known to miss it.

Curiously enough, discovering the problem and tracking down the cause was the hard part. Fixing it turned out to be almost trivial. A simple domain verification step that had gone overlooked during onboarding was completed, and with that single button click the sender was properly verified and the problem was resolved.

A less thorough analysis might have started and ended with "let's set the policy to reject invalid senders" and left it at that. Rejecting any sender that failed, however, would have shut off a slightly misconfigured but perfectly legitimate marketing tool and created a new, louder problem in place of the quiet one. Until the reporting lived in a reliable system instead of in luck, the failure would have continued: quietly, and at a cost nobody was measuring.

That's just one of the many silent problems we're working on making audible for this and our other clients. The question we start with is "Where is correctness currently enforced by people instead of systems?" If finding out your emails are being lost depends on a would-be customer calling to tell you, it's likely you'd likely never find out.

Want a quick test for your own email deliverability? Ask whoever runs your email whether DMARC reporting is turned on. If the answer is a blank look, you've just found a quiet problem.

The Opportunity

If this sounds like something you've experienced or are currently experiencing in your business, I empathize with you. I've experienced it too, and so has every business I've ever worked with. The good news is that you are uniquely calibrated to see these kinds of problems and their impact on your work, because you experience them every day. The only question is whether you can and will commit the time and effort to look for them.

The answer isn't to work harder to solve all the problems... it's to look for the right problems to solve, the place to put your lever in order to effectively apply your energy so that you can produce, observe and measure change, and make space for opportunity and growth... and, by doing so, open yourself and your business up to a better class of problems.

Finding problems is not hard... finding the right problem to solve is. But once you can start doing that consistently, things get easier, quieter, smoother... space opens up for new ideas and new growth and, because of it, you can focus your attention on the part you love and your work can become fun again.

An Invitation

If you suspect you have one of these quiet problems, I'll spend thirty minutes helping you see it and name it. You'll leave with the problem stated clearly whether or not we ever work together.

Email me at alex@authtechnic.com