10 Points of Profit They Didn’t Have to Leak

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."

The engagement surveys gave him data — but not the right data. They told him how people felt. They didn’t tell him where the team dynamics were breaking down, what the gap was between leadership’s perception and the team’s reality, or what any of it was costing the business.

So Drew tried something different. He ran SKOR’s Profit Leak Diagnostic.

What the Diagnostic Found

Drew’s SKOR came back at 70 out of 100 — 10 points above the industry average in transportation and logistics. By most measures, a strong result. But the diagnostic revealed something beneath the surface that engagement surveys had never surfaced.

The biggest blind spot was accountability.

Leaders believed expectations were clear, performance conversations were happening, and the team understood what was expected. The team’s data told a different story. There was a meaningful perception gap between what leadership thought was happening and what people were actually experiencing.

Why Engagement Surveys Missed It

Drew had been running engagement surveys for years. They were useful — but limited.

"We’d done employee engagement surveys twice a year through our franchisor for quite some time. Sometimes we’d get it right and sometimes we’d get it wrong."

Engagement surveys measure sentiment — how people feel at a point in time. They don’t measure the behavioral dynamics that drive performance. They don’t score leaders and teams separately. And they don’t put a dollar figure on the gaps.

SKOR does all three. Drew noticed the difference immediately:

"What I liked was it directly tied to the data, actionable and that spoke to me from a simplicity standpoint and something that my team would embrace. It wasn’t an overwhelming amount of information and they nailed it. It’s been awesome."

What They Did About It

The Diagnostic Report came with a prioritized roadmap. Two immediate actions stood out:

1. More one-on-one feedback. Regular, structured conversations between leaders and team members about performance, goals, and expectations. Not annual reviews — consistent, ongoing dialogue.

2. Daily After-Action Reviews (AARs). A brief daily debrief on what worked, what didn’t, and what to adjust. This created a rhythm of accountability that didn’t feel like micromanagement — it felt like learning.

"Those two things immediately had an impact to move the performance of our business."

But the changes went deeper than process improvements.

The SKOR data made it clear who was committed and who wasn’t:

"Once we really looked at SKOR and how the teams were functioning and the lack of accountability between teams, it started to become clear and apparent who really wanted to be a part of this team to make it grow and who didn’t. Because of SKOR we made some changes and we have been in a much better place since."

The Results

The impact showed up where it matters most: the bottom line.

"To calculate the benefit of SKOR, we’ve improved our bottom line in the last year, about 10 points, significant money. 10 points is a huge amount of leaking profit that we didn’t have to leak for all those years."

Think about that last line. "All those years." Drew didn’t have a broken team. He had invisible gaps that had been leaking profit for years — gaps that engagement surveys couldn’t surface because they weren’t designed to look for them.

Drew’s Advice

"Any leader considering SKOR, I tell them to do it now. I wish I had done it years ago."

That sentence captures what makes a Profit Leak Diagnostic different from an engagement survey. Engagement surveys tell you what already happened. SKOR tells you what’s been happening all along — the profit that’s been leaking while you were looking at the wrong data.

What This Means for You

Drew’s franchise wasn’t failing. It was above average. But “above average” doesn’t mean “no blind spots.” The accountability gap was real, measurable, and expensive — and it was invisible until SKOR surfaced it.

The average organization is losing $30K per employee per year. The question isn’t whether your teams have blind spots. They do. The question is how big they are, what they’re costing you, and how long you’ve been leaking profit without knowing it.

Learn more about Drew's story here.

Not a feeling. Not a score you file away. A Profit Leak Number you act on.