My High School Lacrosse Team Lost to the Same Thing That Costs Companies Millions

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 becomes very real.

And the strangest part? Sitting in the corner taking notes, I wasn't thinking about business at all. I was thinking about my high school lacrosse team.

We had talent. We had experienced players and a real shot at a strong season. What we had underneath that was quieter: guys who wouldn't hold each other accountable, frustrations that never got said out loud, effort that went unrecognized until people stopped giving it. Nobody could point to any of it on a stat sheet, so nobody fixed it. We underperformed, and to this day most of us would struggle to explain exactly why.

That lacrosse team had a leak. It just didn't have a number.

The thirty-second version of what SKOR does

SKOR is a Profit Leak Diagnostic. It measures how a team actually behaves across the seven drivers of performance we call the 7 Muscles: Accountability, Transparency, Healthy Conflict, Growth Mindset, Adaptability, Recognition, and Goals and Rewards. Then it compares how leaders believe the team is performing against how the team says it is performing, surfaces the blind spots between the two, and converts the gap into a dollar figure. Not a feeling. Not a score you file away. A number you act on.

I spent my summer on the growth and operations side: building partner onboarding, writing the newsletter, producing videos, and sitting in on client meetings. My responsibilities changed almost weekly. What never changed was the pattern I kept seeing, in clients and in my own work.

The dysfunction is the same. Only the jerseys change.

Here is what surprised me most in those client meetings. The companies varied in industry, size, tenure, and success. The dysfunction didn't. The same accountability gaps, the same conversations nobody was having, the same effort going unrecognized. The exact patterns that held back a high school lacrosse team in New Jersey show up inside established, profitable companies run by serious professionals.

Being successful, it turns out, doesn't mean you're not leaking profit. It usually just means you can afford not to notice.

There was no moment where it clicked. That was the lesson.

The hardest stretch of my summer was a month spent on video production. I put weeks of work into one audio generation tool after another, one editing workflow after another, and got nowhere. Every time we found something we thought was the one, it wasn't good enough, and we changed strategy again. I kept waiting for the moment it would all click. It never came. What came instead was a version that finally matched what we had envisioned, built out of every attempt that didn't.

That is what a growth mindset actually looks like up close. Not a breakthrough. A tolerance for being uncomfortable long enough to earn the result. SKOR practices this constantly: we are always testing new tools and rebuilding workflows as capabilities improve, and staying ahead of the curve means regularly abandoning things that still feel familiar.

At a small company, honesty is the quality control

Here is something a classroom can't teach you. At a small company, there aren't many sets of eyes between your draft and the finished product. That makes transparency and healthy conflict operational necessities, not culture-deck words. The feedback I got all summer was direct, because the priority was always the quality of the work, never the comfort of a safe response. It stung sometimes. It also made everything I produced better, faster. I now understand why those two muscles sit in SKOR's framework: teams that can't be honest with each other are quietly paying for it.

The finance major's take

I'm a finance major, so I'll end with the thing that convinced me most. A line item is powerful because it's inarguable. It's black and white in a way that most conversations about teams and culture never are. That is exactly what the Profit Leak Number does for team dysfunction: it takes the most persistent, hardest-to-see drag on performance and gives it the one format every business owner takes seriously. I watched that number land on real leaders this summer, and the reaction was never a shrug. It was a plan.

My lacrosse team never got a number. Most teams don't. If yours hasn't, the question worth sitting with is the one I watched land in that client meeting: what is the gap between how you think your team is performing and what your team would say?

There's a dollar figure attached to the answer. Find out what your's looks like. Try the Profit Leak Calculator.