Does your business feel harder than it should be, even when things are “technically” working? You’re working hard, hiring the right people, and keeping a pulse on market trends—yet the same frustrating problems, from sluggish sales to recurring cash flow issues, keep bubbling up like a recurring infection.
If you’ve ever found yourself asking, “I’ve already tried fixing this, why is it still happening?”—it’s time to stop blaming your strategy and start questioning your diagnosis.
Today, we explore why smart, capable founders often stay stuck in a cycle of “fixing” symptoms while the true root cause remains untouched. If you are tired of spinning in circles, it’s time to discover how to identify the hidden friction points in your operations, finances, and strategic direction that are actually holding you back.
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Your Business Isn’t Broken. It’s Misdiagnosed.
The Reality Of Misdiagnosed Business Problems
Most business problems unfortunately, do not start where they show up. They show up in your marketing often. They definitely will show up in your sales. They likely will show up in your team. That’s where you try to fix them. Hire somebody new. Sell more. Switch to Substack. Ride that train as long as I can. That is where you try to fix them. What if the real issue isn’t in any of those places? What if the reason things still feel harder than they should is because you’re solving the entirely wrong problem?
If you’re reading and you have ever thought, “I’ve already tried fixing this. Why is it still happening?” This episode is going to change how you look at your business. Gwen and I are going to be talking about misdiagnosis and why it’s the reason that smart capable founders stay stuck way longer than they need to. Gwen, let’s start here. Most of the time, when something isn’t working in the business, it looks so obvious. We’ve experienced this ourselves. Leads are down. It must be marketing. Sales are sluggish. It must be messaging. Why is that not where you start to solve the problem?
I won’t say it’s not where you start. It’s probably not where the problem is at where the problem is starting.
Keep going.
Probably, you first want to see is where are the obvious places that you’re having a problem. I’m not saying it’s not where you start because you are going to start there. You have to look at bigger pictures because sometimes where the problem is, is where the problem is. A lot of times, it’s not where the problem is. The problem is being generated from another piece of the business. Often, that to the business is so fundamentally disconnected with this very specific symptom.
You have to look at the bigger picture—sometimes where the problem appears to be is exactly where it is, but often it’s not. Share on XWe don’t realize that’s part of the problem. When we solve this, what I like to call a root cause problem, then it won’t necessarily take care of all the symptoms. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just takes care of those symptoms. Other times, it will make those symptoms get clear about what we’re trying to solve in those symptoms and where it comes become easier. A simple example that came to me quite honestly. A lot of times, we’re trying to solve a systems problem when we have is a people problem.
Let’s pause there for a second because what I want to make sure we clarify early on for our readers, because it’s distracting if they don’t get this part. If you could clarify symptoms versus source, or as you said, root cause. Clarify those for us, and I want you to expand on this example because it is a good one.
Distinguishing Between Business Symptoms And Root Causes
Symptom is always the issue that’s manifesting that is most prevalent. Cash flow is a great symptom like I can’t pay my bills. We almost always assumed that because I can’t pay my bills is because I don’t have enough in sales. I’m not bringing in enough money because if I had more money than I had more money in my bank account. I might be able to pay my bills. Now, that could be true. I’m not saying that’s not ever true because that positively could be true. We may not be realizing is cash flow is not about how much money we’re bringing in but maybe the timing that the cash is arriving.
It’s when the money comes in compared to when it needs to go out.
It could be a timing issue, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sales. At night, maybe what we realized it’s like, “It’s a timing issue.” It’s not that we need to sell more. We need to change our terms so we get paid sooner.” What we thought was, “If we sell $10,000 more, then we’re going to be fine.” All that means is that $10,000 is still coming in too late if it’s a timing issue. More in that case doesn’t fix the issue. It may be our cash flow issue is because we’re paying our subcontractors more than what we can afford. What’s being left over isn’t enough for us to pay all of the rest of the bills. What we have is a pricing issue or not understanding the cost of goods sold.
It’s still a pricing issue but the pricing issue comes from not understanding the cost of goods sold in that case.
Selling more means that we’re going to be more in the hole. It may be that we’re leaking in our expenses that will continue to leak and often, when we get bigger, those leaks just become bigger holes. More money doesn’t fix that either but maybe it does fix it temporarily so we think we’ve solved it.
If your cash flow issue is timing and you increase sales $10,000. That $10,000 all comes in on one day, it may fix that issue without solving the timing problem.
Without solving the problem because it will rear its head again and again. The cash flow issue could be your pain people who aren’t doing work effectively or efficiently or are no longer capable of the role that you need because you’ve done the business and things have changed and all of those places. It may be a people issue. Which we don’t ever think of cash flow being a people issue. There’s a lot of places that this could possibly land. The symptoms is, I can’t pay my bills. The root cause could be any of these other things.
I want to get back to the people issue big time. Would you say that problems present downstream but they originated upstream. Is that accurate?
Recognizing Repetitive Problems As A Sign Of Misdiagnosis
Most of the time that’s true. You know you’re missing the root cause if a similar issue keeps reappearing. We think we fix it and it comes back up again. We do something and we fix it and it comes back up again. That’s typically where we’re fixing symptoms and we’re not addressing the root cause. If it keeps rearing its head and I’m not saying instantly. It doesn’t have to be instant. At the beginning of the quarter, we had a cash flow issue but at the end of the quarter, we were nailing it. As soon as we got to the next quarter, we seem to be having cash flow issues again. By the end of the quarter, we had it fixed. That’s saying you’re fixing a symptom but you’re not figuring out what that route causes.
What I’m hearing is that the visible problem feels real. It’s tangible.
Not that it feels real. It is. It’s freaking real.
You’ve a visible problem. It’s a real problem. It’s tangible but it’s often just the output of something happening elsewhere.
It is. Using an example that people will use a lot, it’s like, “You’ve got this scar on your arm and it’s festering.” Do the thing that we need to do and it clears up. We’re like, “Everything’s good.” All of a sudden, it starts reactivating again. In our world, we would immediately say, “It’s infected deeper than we think it is.” That’s what this is. It’s that same thing. Most people, if they kept having something reappear on their body that was dangerous, wouldn’t say, “I’ll just keep putting a Band-Aid over it and put some Neosporin on it. It’ll be fine.”
It’s like, “It came back.” In another two months, “It came back.” At some point, you’d be like, “I’ve got a bigger problem here.” That’s what we’re talking about. Are we dealing with issues that are the same or very similar again and again? As I said, not necessarily right. Not necessarily super fast on top of each other. It may only come up once a year but it does seem to come up almost every year that we have to start readdressing that issue again.
This is the part that is so frustrating., I’ll put myself squarely here. I’m smart, Gwen. I’ll just say that. I have intelligence. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’m smart. I work hard and I don’t ignore problems. I don’t think most people who read this show, most women ignore problems. We are action takers. We are women of action. We’re hiring. We’re shifting our strategy when we need to. We’re changing our tactics. We’re paying attention to the trends and what’s current in the market.
We’re reading our reports and the problem keeps coming back over and over again. We then start to feel dumb because even though we’re smart, we’re like, “Are we smart?” What does it mean when the problem keeps repeating? What you’ve said is it means that we’re not looking in the right place but what do we do? What’s the next step?
Usually, the reason you’re not finding it is, often, it’s so far disconnected. It doesn’t make sense like that could be the problem. I’m working on a new framework. That’s going to be a diagnostic to help people win because this is what I do naturally.
What you just said is ringing in my head. When I keep trying to solve this problem and it keeps bubbling up. I have struggled with cash flow because of the type of clients I have. I have that timing problem. You feel dumb but what you’re saying is when the problem keeps coming up again and again. It’s not that I’m dumb. It’s not that I’m missing something that I’m not working hard enough or any of that or even that my strategies off. It’s that I’ve misdiagnosed my problem.
It’s the idea that you are stuck and not looking. Typically, this is because that aren’t necessarily obvious. I’m currently working with POND. We’ve got patterns that are so ingrained that we’re not seeing them. We have operations that we were just talking about in the previous episode that we have been conditioned to believe that we should understand operations because every business has them. Therefore, it must be intuitive. Whatever I’m doing is operations and that must be adequate. Which isn’t necessarily true.
We all have patterns so ingrained in us that we don’t even see them. Share on XThere’s a lot of things that go into that. Very few people will look at your operations as a whole. You’ll bring in an HR person and a finance person. They’re each looking at pieces of your operations, but they aren’t looking at how all of those pieces interact with one another. When I’m talking about operations, I’m talking about how all of those elements played with one another on any given day. There’s the numbers piece. Depending on who you are as a business person, you may or may not like your numbers. I don’t mean like, they aren’t as good as I want them to be. You’ve talked about that.
I didn’t used to. That’s for sure, but now I love them.
Analyzing Operations, Numbers, And Strategic Direction
Now, you have someone who’s working with you in a great way. I’ll say the former you is way more common than the current you. It’s like, “I get them. I understand them. It makes sense to me.” We look at the numbers and we pay attention to them, but we don’t necessarily dig into them or understand what it might be telling us.
When I hear numbers, I’m always thinking analytics because that’s the space I live in. When you’re saying numbers, you’re meaning finance.
I’m saying all the numbers. Where the analytic is saying, as well as the finances and the turn and the churn. That’s the thing. Most of us don’t like looking at all of the numbers.
Fair.
The last piece is what we’re using the term direction. Which is more about the strategic direction. Does it actually aligned with what you’re trying to do or what you want to do? A lot of times, we call it alignment. That’s a place where we’ll often get some very weird friction that we don’t realize that it’s creating for us. We’re talking about this in the last episode. I was told I wanted to grow and the best way to do that was to build an agency, but I didn’t want to manage people.
That isn’t what you said but that would be an example of it. That’s a place where you’re getting some directional friction in the diagnostic. Things are not aligning and it’s because they’re not aligning, that strategic direction isn’t fully aligned. You may know where you’re going to strategically, but it’s not aligned with who you are and what you wanting. That can also be part of the diagnostic, but that’s look at. A lot of those, if you are looking at them yourself, you’re still stuck in your own knowledge and your own assumptions. That’s where it becomes a problem. Let me give you an example. We have client who is super successful and could sell ice to Eskimos at a premium.
For $5 a cube.
This person’s sales was not this person’s issue but there was a cash flow issue. The cash flow issue was related to how payments were coming in from clients. One of the things I started asking way early but it took literally years before she was able to hear and process was, you can’t be working this way because cash flow is going to become a problem over time. It did several different times. Cash flow was a problem.
Part of the thing that I kept trying to push back on, but this was a strong pattern was, we don’t do that in this industry. There is only one way to do that in this industry. Over time, she started trying different things and realized like it doesn’t always have to be that way. This is the thing. If someone like myself hadn’t come in, I’m not sure if she would have ever tried any of the other options because the assumptions and the patterns were so well established.
One of the other advisors who is an amazing advisor also came out of the same industry. Since she came out of the same industry, she would never question that either because that’s the way it’s always been done. That’s part of what this diagnostic is. You usually need someone to help diagnose. As I said, I don’t necessarily lay it out of like, “We’re first going to do this and we’re going to do this, then we’re going to do this.”
This is what I’m doing in my early on conversation. It’s asking enough questions to say, Where are the patterns? Where are their potential operations issues? Why are the numbers not lining up the way they need to? Where is the strategic direction in conflict with the internal alignment that they’re trying to create?
That brings you to a place where you can accurately diagnose a problem. What changes when you identify the right problem to solve?
The Order Of Operations For Solving Root Causes
It allows us to change our focus. Sometimes, what we realize is, “Before we can fix the root cause we do have to fix these two other things first.” It’s because they’re on the way to the root cause. If we try to fix the root cause without fixing them, it’s just going to break again.
That clarity unlocks the order of operations to use old school math terms here.
Exactly. What means to be done first? I had another client who fundamentally was struggling with her own motivation in her business. That would be probably how she would have described it. It’s like, “I’ve done well. I like what I do but I feel like I’m not doing what I need to do. I want to make this business succeed. What do we do on it?” Early on in the conversation, part of what I identified was she was assuming that her business model was different than it actually was.
She was in a partnership with someone else, which was perfectly appropriate. There was nothing wrong with that but it wasn’t functioning like a partnership. It was functioning as two individuals that happen to share some expenses sometimes. I’m making this way more over simplified. Functionally, that was generally what was happening. I was able to identify that’s a real problem because we’re doing things that are in conflict. We’re running it one way but we’re behaving in another. Those two things are hitting and creating conflict.
Going back to our recent business model episodes. Your marketing like you’re a creator but your business model is a service provider.
Things were happening that we’re creating conflict. That identified to me very quickly. Part of this, I don’t have energy around this, is that being successful is creating ongoing conflicts.
Addressing Unresolved Friction And Seeking Clarity
It dawned on me who you’re talking about, is that why things can feel so heavy even when the business is technically working? Is that heaviness or that burden that you feel, Albatross hanging around your neck? Is that a sign that there’s some unresolved friction?
Usually. As I said, it’s usually not necessarily at all where you’re looking. The hardest business to run is when it’s running successfully but it feels wrong. You look around and nothing is broken. There’s no water leaks. No giant cracks. You keep looking around and saying, “There’s nothing wrong here,” but yet it feels heavy and hard. I don’t have energy. That’s the hardest thing to diagnose because there’s not a lot of symptoms that are running around. In that case, that needed to be fixed. There also were 2 or 3 other things before that. Part of it was she needed some confidence to say, “I need to be doing this. I have the ability to do this work with my partner.”
We didn’t jump on that first thing. Quite honestly, I had forgotten I had identified it. When I was talking to her quite some time later, she said, “You identify that within the first two conversations we had.” We didn’t start addressing it to almost a year later because there was pre-work that needed to be done for it. When we addressed it, it went super fast and super smooth. The result was, their business did better that year than it likely ever done since they’ve been working together. It had huge impact.
They weren’t doing more. What they had done if I had recall the situation correctly is just removed a bunch of complexity that wasn’t necessary.
They started functioning their business model and the way that they worked and what they thought they had always in alignment. In this case, it was a directional issue. There’s strategic direction and their functional direction all got into alignment. Once it was all in alignment, as you said, they weren’t working Harder. They didn’t bring on 1,000 employees or anything of that nature. Their fundamental business did not change it all. Their income and profitability were drastically different because we got to the root cause.
This has been a good episode. I didn’t know about POND. That threw me for a loop for a moment.
I’m just working on that not long ago.
First of all, if the same problem keeps happening over and over again, drop the mic. Stop what you’re doing. Pull over on the side of the road and make a note to yourself, “I’m solving the wrong problem. Hands down. I’ve misdiagnosed my problem and I need a better diagnosis.” Also, what you have made me realize is how often it’s not just we diagnose where the symptom arises. We diagnose based on assumption. I love the cash flow issue because the assumption is, if cash flow is a problem, more money will solve it. There’s a whole bunch of other reasons. I won’t rehash all the reasons but that’s a deeply held assumption. Quite honestly, it’s a very logical assumption. It makes sense.
Sometimes, it’s true.
It’s true probably often enough to reinforce that assumption. When the same problem keeps coming up time and time again, what you need to do is not just go, “I’m obviously misdiagnosing it.” You need to go one of two ways, Gwen. You either need to have some quiet time and journal, like, “What’s the problem that keeps emerging? How have I tried to solve it?” Asking yourself some deep reflective questions or you just need to phone a friend and get some help.
If deeper reflection is your jam, if you don’t already need to be subscribing to Gwen’s One Really Good Question. It is a moment of reflection. It’s a CEO brain retreat, as it were, that drops in your inbox every single Friday. Spend five minutes or probably no more than fifteen minutes thinking on that you can journal to yourself or you could hit reply and send your reflection to Gwen. She’ll respond back to you.
If enough is enough, if you are tired of spinning in circles, tired of the same problem coming up time and time again. It’s time to phone a friend and make Gwen your friend. Go to www.tonyakubo.com/Clarity, and you can get a 30-minute call with Gwen. Not a sales call. It is a diagnostic. You come and share what the problem is. Gwen will ask you a few questions. By the end of that call, you’ll probably have better clarity than you have had in at least a year, but I bet it’s like five if you’ve been in business that long. We’re going to see you next time where we dig a little bit deeper into some of these problems that we are seeing coming up for founders time and time again. We’ll catch you then.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
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