Last week I had one of those tiny moments that shouldn’t matter… but did.
I was stood on the stairs putting batteries into the smoke alarm. It had been chirping at 3am for about a week, which is a special kind of torture. You know the one – it only seems to do it when you’ve just drifted off to sleep and you think “I’ll do it in the morning”, but then forget and it never seems to beep to remind you when you’re awake.
And, for those of you who remember the “great scallops fire of 2017”, you’ll know I’m a man who does need a working smoke alarm in my house. Anyway, I finally swapped them over. It took two minutes. And I felt joy like I’d just scored a winner in front of the Kop.
That’s when it hit me. The job wasn’t hard. The pain wasn’t the work. The pain was the delay. And that’s exactly what happens in business. Not with smoke alarms, obviously, but with the small decisions and small improvements we keep putting off because we’re “busy”.
We tell ourselves:
• “We’ll sort it after this busy period.”
• “We’ll look at the numbers at year-end.”
• “We’ll fix the pricing when things calm down.”
• “We’ll deal with the debtors next week.”
• “We’ll tidy the processes when we hire someone.”
But here’s the uncomfortable truth…the busiest businesses are often the ones bleeding the most cash. Because “later” has a cost.
The hidden bill for delay
When you delay a small fix, it doesn’t stay small. It compounds. A tiny pricing problem becomes a margin problem. A few sloppy processes become a time problem. A bit of slow invoicing becomes a cashflow problem.
And, before you know it, you’re working harder, feeling more stressed, and wondering why the bank balance doesn’t match the effort you’re putting in.
I see this all the time in owner-managed businesses. Especially the ones doing decent turnover, with a team, and a proper operation.
They’re not failing – far from it. They’re just carrying a list of “we’ll deal with it later” decisions… and paying for them every single day.
The business version of a chirping smoke alarm
Here are a few classic “chirpers” I see in businesses:
1. Pricing that hasn’t moved in ages
If your costs have gone up but your prices haven’t, you’re effectively choosing a pay cut. And you’re often doing it quietly, without realising.
2. Debtors creeping up
An extra 10 days for customers to pay doesn’t feel dramatic… until you do the maths and realise it’s tens of thousands sat in someone else’s bank account.
3. Too many “little” overheads
Subscriptions, tools, small monthly costs. They’re like weeds. Left unchecked, they take over the garden.
4. A process everyone moans about, but nobody fixes
The weekly admin faff. The constant rework. The “we always do it this way” job that takes twice as long as it should. None of these are exciting. None of them feel urgent. Until they are.
A simple rule that changes everything
Here’s a rule I’ve pinched from the best operators I know: If it annoys you twice, systemise it. If it’s annoying you twice, it’s probably
annoying your team too. And if it’s annoying your team, it’s costing you money.
You don’t need a 40-page operations manual – you just need to pick one irritant at a time and fix it properly. Because the opposite of “later” isn’t “now”. The opposite of “later” is momentum.
Your 15-minute “later” audit
If you fancy a quick exercise, grab a coffee (or a Tetleys tea for Louise) and answer these:
1. What’s the business equivalent of a chirping smoke alarm right now?
2. What would it be worth if that problem disappeared by this time next week?
3. What’s the first tiny step you could take in the next 48 hours? That’s it.
Not a grand plan. Not a reinvention. Just one fix that creates momentum.
Because momentum is where profit hides.
And if you’d like a hand identifying the biggest “later” costs in your business, that’s exactly the sort of thing we help our clients do.
We’re not just here to file things with HMRC. We’re here to make the business work better.
And ideally… with fewer 3am chirps.