The Profit Leak Blog

Guest Post by Michael Perrino, SKOR's summer intern and junior at Lehigh University What a summer inside SKOR taught one intern about the most expensive problem in business: it's the same one that costs teams championships. A few weeks into my internship, I sat in on a client meeting and watched a business owner see his Profit Leak Number for the first time. It was in the millions. The room went quiet in that specific way rooms go quiet when something abstract suddenly become

I started 7 companies. 3 of them failed. It all led me to this. Last week SKOR turned 3. The honest story of why it exists starts long before that.

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

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 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.