The Profit Leak Blog

Most leaders treat profit leak with a six-month wellness program. The top 10% treat it like surgery — targeted, recovered from, followed up on a precise schedule. When a doctor identifies a serious medical problem, they don't open with a generalized lifestyle overhaul. They identify the precise issue, schedule a focused intervention, manage the recovery on a defined timeline, and confirm the fix with a follow-up. That's exactly what the top 10% of teams do with their Profit L

Accountability isn't consequences. It's the muscle nobody trains — and these are the three reps that build it fastest, in the order to install them. Of the seven muscles SKOR measures — Accountability, Transparency, Healthy Conflict, Growth Mindset, Adaptability, Recognition, and Goals & Rewards — Accountability shows up as the lowest score across 73% of teams in the dataset. That number surprises most leaders. They expect Healthy Conflict or Recognition. Accountability seems

Walk into any 250-person company in the country. Pull the P&L. The largest line items will be people: payroll, benefits, payroll taxes. Roughly $25M at average compensation. Now ask the CFO: "What's our second-largest people cost?" They'll cite recruiting, retention, training, technology. They will not cite the answer that matters most: $7.5M leaking out of how teams work together. "If you don't have a crisis, make one. You get people excited, motivated, and drive the necessa

Every leader has had the conversation. The high performer walks into the office, hands over the resignation, and the leader's first thought is: "I didn't see this coming." They didn't see it coming because they were watching the wrong indicator. The resignation is the lagging indicator. By the time it lands, the top performer has been mentally gone for an average of six months — talking to recruiters, updating their LinkedIn, taking calls during lunch. The decision was made l

Every leader believes they’re doing a good job. Most of them are right — partially. But there’s a gap between what leaders think is happening on their teams and what their teams actually experience. And that gap has a cost. At SKOR, we measure this gap directly. Leaders and Individual Contributors answer matched questions about the same team dynamics — recognition, goals, feedback quality, communication, accountability. When we compare the answers, the pattern is remarkably c

How a 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchise found — and fixed — the blind spot engagement surveys missed. Drew Trautman is the kind of leader who pays attention. As president of Lions Environmental Services, a 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchise based in Northern New Jersey, he’d invested in his team, built a strong culture, and ran engagement surveys twice a year through the franchisor. But something wasn’t adding up. "We realized we were trying to solve the problem by doing more of the same stuff.

Every company has a line item for compensation. For benefits. For office leases, software licenses, travel budgets, and coffee subscriptions. But there’s a cost that dwarfs most of those line items and appears nowhere on the P&L: The profit leaking from how teams work together.

The pattern is predictable: January resets, February grinds, March accelerates — and every friction point that got managed around for three months is now loud. Missed handoffs. Accountability that existed in theory. The feedback nobody gave in Q1 because there was always something more urgent.

This weekend, everyone loses an hour of sleep and spends the next week complaining about it. Nobody talks about the other hours. The ones leaking out of your teams every single week — quietly, invisibly, without ever showing up on a report.