You’re Not Running One Business. You’re Refereeing Three

If you are leading a print company today, you already know this in your bones, even if you haven’t given it a name: you’re not running a business. You’re really managing the tension between three businesses within your four walls. Sale, ops, and finance are each an important function of the business. Together they form a triangle – a triangle with corners that pull against each other every day.

This is a structural problem, not a non-compliance to procedures. And until you see it for what it is, you’ll continue to treat the symptoms.

Ok, this probably isn’t happening in your business, but you know of those where it is.

The Three Corners

Sales approached every day thinking about their pipeline, win rates, retentions and their commissions. Ops wakes up thinking about the capacity they need to fill, throughput, on-time delivery and their SLAs. Your friends in finance wake up thinking about cash, contribution margin, working capital and the bank covenants that no one else has read.

None of them are wrong in their assumptions as it’s what you hired them to do. The problem is that doing their job well, in isolation, can break the other two corners.

Don’t Eliminate the Tension

Don’t try to flatten the triangle to eliminate the tension. That’s where I see folks go wrong and it doesn’t work. The tension is the design – it’s what keeps everyone honest. A sales team that begins to think like ops stops selling. An ops team that thinks like sales overpromises. And a finance team that thinks like either one stops protecting cash.

The opportunity is to manage tension on purpose. Know which corner gets the call on which decision and why. Make the tradeoffs visible instead of letting them happen in the dark. This minimizes margin erosion, missed deliveries or quiet attrition.

Another part of the solution is alignment. Making sure that each corner understands and can play nice in the sandbox with the others in order to achieve a common goal. You’ll see this as you try to fix one or more of the corners only to have the other one flare up. The corner you’re trying to fix isn’t broken; it’s just compensating for one of the other two.

What’s Next

I’m putting together a playbook for owners on this issue: how to read the triangle in your own business, where the leverage really sits, and how to make the necessary tradeoffs intentional instead of accidental. More to come in the following blogs.

Mike Philie helps owners and CEOs in the Graphic communications industry validate what’s working, identify what needs to change, and create a practical path forward.

PhilieGroup | mphilie@philiegroup.com | Linkedin

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