This Half A Million Dollar Mistake Was Right Under Their Nose—Is Yours?

He raised it with love. It killed him anyway..

A kind, adventurous man was mauled to death by the very animal he raised from infant to adult. I hope he rests in peace.

What kind of animal do you think it was? (and what the hell does this have to do with the profit killer in your business?)

Your first thought might be that it was Steve Irwin and a sting ray..

Or maybe you thought of a shark, crocodile, tiger or lion.

Here’s a hint: He brushed it’s teeth and rode it’s back in the water..

Hippos kill more than twice (well over) the humans that lions do.

Not by accident either. It submerged him into the water and mauled him.

But why didn’t you suspect a hippo first?

Lion attacks, though less frequent, take up way more mental real estate due to the vast amount of media we’re exposed to all throughout our lives. 

Meanwhile, hippo attacks, despite their high fatality rates, receive less media attention, so people don't perceive them as dangerous as they truly are. It’s also not a readily available answer.

I’ve seen this same story play out in business more times than I can count. 

Hundreds of businesses, thousands of ad accounts—over and over, teams think they’ve identified the problem holding them back, only to discover too late that the real constraint was right under their nose the whole time.

This phenomenon is called the availability heuristic.

A mental shortcut where people judge the likelihood of events based on how easily examples come to mind.

These mental shortcuts are more deadly than any of the creatures I’ve mentioned.

Just because a solution or strategy is more mentally convenient doesn’t mean it will solve your problems.

In my experience, most answers to “how to scale” or “how to solve an issue” are programmed responses curated from various influences, content, and irrelevant experiences of others.

This means that you, your vendors, your team, and your advisors are a big soup of your data inputs.

Reels, masterminds, courses, podcasts, bias, experiences—if they're not filtered and utilized correctly(if even useful at all), they make scaling a business incredibly more difficult than necessary. Don’t forget to sprinkle in a little bureaucracy if you have more than five people in your company.

If you’re investing in solutions but the trend isn’t inching it’s way in the right direction, you’re solving the wrong problems—things that aren’t even real constraints to doubling your profit next month or next quarter—the lions and tigers of business.

And that’s how the hippo gets you.

Here’s a real example.. 

The half a million dollar mistake sitting right under your nose (How many of these are you missing?)

Recently a media buyer says cost per call is sky-high.

Roas is 1.89 compared to around a 3+ a few months ago.

To solve this, the company wants to implement running traffic to another platform.

The theory is that they’ll get better lead quality and that will help them solve the roas issue.

This is a platform that they have no experience on. Most people in the marketplace have very little experience on this platform because it’s worked for an incredibly small amount of businesses in comparison to who has failed with it.

Sounds pretty complicated and far less probable than just optimizing a funnel and spending more on a platform profitable already.

In my audit, I can see that email is booking fewer calls and has less rev attributed to it than previous months. I can see that it dropped off a few months ago.. even though they doubled their efforts by not only beefing up the sequence and sending more email blasts.

A deeper look shows that someone on their team made some edits to the sequence emails and messed up the links that were supposed to be booking calls.

So instead of going to the booking page, the leads who already opted in and went through several pages of a long sales letter plus sat through an hour long vsl are having to go all the way back through the funnel to grab a spot on the calendar.

While all this is happening, competitors are in their faces thousands of times daily.

We went from multiple six figures monthly attributed to email to just one sale last month.

Their real problem is a lack of quality control and project management. People edit and implement things but do not use a checklist or check their work.

Ideas and decisions being entertained before having all the data to identify the actual constraint to profit and growth.

This issue can be solved by fixing the links, spending more on ads, writing more emails, implementing a quality control checklist, and using basic project management tools or concepts.

Doing this is worth nearly half a million dollars if you factor in what was lost in the email link fiasco and what they’d likely lose in labor, fees, and ad spend screwing with an ad platform nobody has figured out yet.

This doesn’t even factor in the loss month over month for the rest of the year and all of the costly moves made as a reaction to solve this “phantom” problem.

One more example:

My client’s CMO reaches out and says lead cost and call cost has doubled.

“We need help”

I request data, trackers, and a loom covering a timeline of everything that’s been done.

Well, the media buyer changed conversion events, thinking it would help them scale.

It cut the conversions to Facebook, which makes optimization harder in that scenario because after years of using the lead event, they switched to call event.

This tactic could help with lead quality IF that were the constraint, but it wasn’t

It wasn’t an issue at all.

The issue they were facing was a light calendar after adding sales reps so they can scale.

This might have been something he did in the past, saw in a group or forum somewhere– who knows, but he’s not alone in this type of response and this behavior isn’t isolated to one role in a business.

What’s in the way of your growth?

The real problem to solve is: What’s stopping us from doubling the budget? What are the constraints, and why?

If you want to solve real constraints, just imagine your goal is 3X what you’re doing now..

Imagine you have to spend 3 times what you are now on traffic, and you want to get 3x sales..

What problems can you quickly think of that will arise with doing that?

Maybe one of them is last time you upped spend your cac went up

Maybe another is your lead quality went down

Then maybe you couldn’t get sales reps fast enough

Your creatives fatigued faster.

Then, when you look deeper into these possibilities with the imaginary scenario of doing 3x your current goal, you can quickly populate a list of things that need to be solved.

The big “but” is..

If you don’t have “clean” data you may still fall into what is most mentally available for the scenario you’re facing, so you have to watch for that.

Sometimes it’s a state you can get into, and other times it’s having another person look at the business with a fresh pair of eyes in real time.

You mustn’t ask a hammer or a screwdriver because they’ll treat every problem like a nail or a screw.

What common sense obstructions land in the road from point A to point B?

It’s almost always simple things.

What problems pop up for you?

The companies that thrive and scale ask:

Is this really the constraint—or is this just a waste of time and money?

They invest in finding and solving the true roadblocks to scale.

Every business has hidden constraints and misjudgments that compound and manifest as profit loss. It’s an invisible money drain.

What’s the hippo lurking in your business—and how much is it costing you?

Keep shining your light—just remember, it’s not always the lions you need to fear.

—Lance C. Greenberg

P.S. Rest in peace Marius Els. A man who had a heart too big for this life.