“You made it halfway through the year. You should have your numbers by now. How did it go?” I asked.

Max grimaced. “You know we have done pretty well in the past, so we wanted to see if we could scale this thing up. We had a firm target, and we were firing on most cyclinders. But we only made 75 percent of goal. I can’t put my finger on one specific thing, seems like a bunch of little things.”

“Let’s start with sales,” I said.

“Sales were good, contracts in hand, but a good portion of the projects sit in backlog. We just couldn’t get the work finished so we could bill it.”

“So, let’s look at project management,” I nodded.

“That’s where some of the problems began. There were mistakes in the handoff meeting between estimating and project management. We didn’t discover the mistakes until we were in the field. We were short some materials. Man hours were estimated too tight, so we had crews that got stuck on one job, when they were supposed to start another job. Once the schedule started piling up, we got further behind. Then a permit didn’t come through. None of this is dramatic, but it all adds up, and so here we are.”

“One of the biggest problems in a company trying to scale is handoffs,” I nodded. “You can have one or two core systems that do great, but you have to get ALL your systems in sync. Work moves sideways through the organization. First place to inspect is the handoffs, where work moves from one function to the next.”