Amy

Amy had started her commercial cleaning business six years earlier. eleven people servicing office buildings, medical centres, and retail facilities across adelaide. on paper the business was doing well. Amy was not.

she was quoting every new job personally, managing every partner complaint, doing the rostering for all eleven team members every week, and covering shifts when someone called in sick. she had a team leader who had been with her for three years and ran her own shift well. that was the full extent of the team leader's authority.

three of Amy's largest contracts - accounts she had held for years - were priced at rates she had set when she started the business. the market rate had moved materially. her margin on those three contracts was under 8%. the rest of the business averaged 22%. she knew this. she hadn't repriced because she was afraid of losing the partners.

there was a personnel problem she had been working around. one team member - there since the beginning - had declining performance for eighteen months. late arrivals, two partner complaints, inconsistency the team leader had flagged three times. Amy had managed around it each time. the team leader had stopped flagging it because nothing changed when she did. Amy keeping the underperformer was telling the rest of the team what the standard actually was.

within ten weeks Amy was working thirty hours per week instead of fifty-five. in month six the business won its largest contract - a multi-site medical centre group - because Amy had the time to pursue the relationship and prepare the proposal properly. revenue grew from $1.1m to $1.6m in twelve months. Amy took her first holiday in six years.

the business couldn't grow because Amy was too busy running it to develop it. the underpriced contracts were real money left on the table for six years. the personnel decision she had been avoiding was setting the standard for the entire team whether she intended it to or not. all three problems had the same root cause: Amy had never had the structure or the clarity to address them. once she did, she addressed all three.