The Silent Business Killer You Don’t See Coming
Every day you’re heads-down: shipping work, paying people, keeping customers happy.
That focus is your superpower—but it’s also your blind spot.
Small misses in pricing, job-costing, or sales pipeline build up quietly. By the time you notice, the fix is expensive.
The trick isn’t to stop focusing. It’s to design your focus so you see the whole playing field—not just the next thing in front of your nose.
Here’s how.
The Three Cones Owners Wear
1) The Skinny Cone (Tunnel Vision)
You’re cranking—cash flow, deliverables, customer fires. Feels productive. But your cone is so narrow you miss the stuff sneaking up on you—market shifts, slow leaks in profit, quality slipping. You don’t notice until the bill comes due. And it’s big.
2) The Bloated Cone (Everything, Everywhere)
You’re wearing all the hats. Payroll, sales, ops, product, customer calls—because “it’s faster if I just do it.” Problem is, focus turns to mush. Priorities blur. You’re busy all day and somehow nothing moves forward. Being decent at everything is the fastest way to be great at nothing.
3) The Designed Cone (Right-Sized + Peripheral Vision)
This is where you want to be. You stick to the high-value stuff only you can do. Around you is a crew and a system watching the edges—so you don’t get blindsided.
How to Build Your Peripheral Vision System
Step 1: Guard Your Sweet Spot
Do a two-week time audit. Mark the tasks that actually grow revenue, margin, or enterprise value—and that you don’t secretly hate doing. That’s your “sweet spot.” Protect 60–70% of your time for it. Everything else? Delegate, automate, or straight-up delete.
Step 2: Put Names on the Edges
Owners drift because nobody’s officially watching the danger zones. Assign clear roles with narrow focus and visible numbers. Think:
- Finance: daily cash runway, job-costing variance, AR aging.
- Ops: on-time delivery, work-in-progress stages, rework rate.
- Sales/Marketing: pipeline health, win rate, customer acquisition payback.
- People: capacity forecast, hiring queue, regrettable turnover.
One person owns each number. No “committee ownership” where everyone sort of owns it, which means nobody does.
Step 3: Create a Cheap Early-Warning System
Five to seven leading indicators on one page. Green means relax. Yellow means discuss. Red means act—today. Think smoke alarms, not museum art.
Step 4: Run a Quick “Cone Check”
- Weekly (30 min): Review only the leading indicators. Pick one thing to fix.
- Monthly (90 min): Look at actual vs. plan. The goal is learning, not finger-pointing.
- Quarterly (half-day): Reset priorities, dump distractions.
Step 5: Set Tripwires So Drift Can’t Hide
Write down thresholds that automatically trigger action:
- “Any job projected under 35% gross margin pauses for re-pricing.”
- “AR over 45 days? Stop-work order.”
- “Pipeline under 60 days of cover? Prospecting sprint.”
Tell your team so they’re pulling the cord—not you micromanaging.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
You’re in your sweet spot—big relationships, strategy, high-impact calls.
Your controller catches margin slip Friday—not two months later.
Ops warns you about capacity before sales overpromises.
Marketing’s pipeline math keeps the lights on in 90 days.
Your “cone check” meeting feels boring—which is good. It means the fires are out before they even start.
3 Moves You Can Make This Week
- Block 10 hours for your sweet-spot work. Put it in your calendar and guard it like it’s your kid’s birthday.
- Assign 5–7 key metrics. Write a name next to each. If no name? You’re not actually tracking it.
- Pick two tripwires. Put them in writing. Share them. When the wire trips, you act—no debate.
Your cone of focus isn’t going away—and you wouldn’t want it to. But if you design it right, you can keep your business moving fast without slowly drifting into a ditch you never saw coming.