Your most profitable asset isn’t a product. It’s your team.

"The best investment a business can make isn’t in what it sells, but in who’s selling it."— James McPartland

When we talk about business losses, we usually focus on the obvious culprits: market downturns, rising competition, operational costs. But there’s a silent profit drain happening in offices everywhere—one that rarely gets mentioned in boardrooms or quarterly reports.

It’s the cost of misalignment and miscommunication.

Let's put this in perspective. Imagine you're running a high-end restaurant, and every day, your chefs and servers are working from slightly different menus.  The kitchen prepares dishes one way, while the servers describe them differently to guests. Small discrepancies, maybe—but multiplied across hundreds of interactions, you end up with wasted food, frustrated customers, and lost revenue.

This same kind of misalignment plays out in businesses every single day. But instead of mixed-up menu items, it’s mixed-up priorities, unclear messaging, and misunderstood expectations.

The numbers tell an even more sobering story. For your mid-level managers - those key players earning around $85,000 annually - each person can generate approximately $16,000 in losses due to miscommunication. Scale that up to your executive team, where salaries hover around $200,000, and you're looking at potential losses of $30,000 per person. These aren't theoretical figures - they represent real money slipping through the cracks of misaligned objectives and unclear communication.

For a $10 million company, these losses can quickly accumulate to become a significant drag on profitability.

Think about the last big project your team tackled. How many hours were spent clarifying things that should’ve been obvious from the start? How many deliverables had to be redone because people were working from different assumptions?

Each of those moments isn’t just a time sink—it’s a financial loss. And in today’s business environment, neither time nor money can be wasted.

What’s most frustrating is that this type of loss is completely preventable. Unlike market trends or industry shifts, misalignment is something you can control.

It’s not about working harder or investing in expensive systems. It’s about making sure everyone knows exactly what they’re working toward, and how their individual role fits into the larger mission.

Consider this: when a Formula One racing team loses a race by seconds, they don't just tune up the engine - they examine every aspect of performance, from tire pressure to driver communication with the pit crew. Your business deserves the same level of precision. Every misaligned objective, every miscommunicated priority, and every unclear directive is essentially friction slowing down your organizational engine.

The solution isn't complex, but it requires commitment. It means:

• Investing time in creating clear communication channels

• Establishing shared understanding of goals and priorities

• Regularly checking to ensure that alignment is maintained at all levels of the organization

Think of it as doing regular maintenance on a high-performance machine. It keeps everything running smoothly—and it protects the investment you’ve already made in your people and your growth.

With miscommunication costing tens of thousands of dollars per person each year, the real risk isn’t in over-correcting—it’s in ignoring the issue.

In an era of tight margins and fierce competition, can any business afford to let profits slip away due to preventable misalignment?

Your bottom line depends on more than revenue and cost control. It depends on how well your team functions—together.

And that starts with addressing the silent, solvable costs that are hiding in plain sight.

Mac 😎