Advisors and Consultants are like Doctors for Business. When was your last checkup?
- ERIC BOROMISA
- Dec 9, 2025
- 7 min read
When to Seek Outside Help for Your Mid-Sized Business
When did you do your last check up with a doctor?
And when did you do the equivalent for the business that you run or the business unit that you lead?
Running a business can be extraordinarily rewarding, but also incredibly demanding. Like scheduling regular check-ups with a doctor, bringing in specialized advisors early can help you identify problems before they become critical (and expensive).
At one of my former clients, we were called in to take a look at an underperforming journal and a 3D project management simulation that wasn't going anywhere.
After talking with both internal and external stakeholders, we realized they could use their existing partners in a new way, and virtualize and distribute their body of knowledge, to extend their footprint without unnecessary travel or software development costs.
Now they have franchise chapters in over 123 countries Below are some early warning signs and actionable steps to keep your business healthy and thriving.
1. Sales or Launch Targets Aren’t Being Met
Most product launches, even with a robust start, falter after 6-9 months if external factors and internal misalignments aren’t proactively managed.
Early Indicators
Slowed Growth or Stagnation: Your once-rapid sales trajectory plateaus or starts dipping.
Reduced Customer Spend: Even reliable, long-term clients begin scaling back budgets.
Emerging Competitors: New players are nipping at your heels, capturing market share.
Action Items
Revisit Your P&L: Pinpoint which 20% of your customers drive 80% of revenue and focus on strengthening those relationships.
Evaluate Product Viability: Identify underperforming products for potential sunsetting. Redeploy resources to newer, more profitable initiatives.
Customer Feedback Loop: Conduct quick pulse surveys or customer interviews to uncover reasons for slower adoption. Use the insights to fine-tune your product offering.
Adjust KPIs: If you’re targeting top-line revenue, consider focusing on metrics like average contract value, customer retention, or net promoter score.
2. Disconnect Between Strategy and Product Development
A misalignment between strategic goals and what’s actually being built can sabotage even the most promising business plan.
Early Indicators
Low Adoption of New Features: Product additions or feature sets aren’t resonating with users. Engineering teams are under constant pressure to increase functionality, but there isn’t a discussion on whether the need is truly there or whether additional functionality will alienate users that don’t need it and didn’t ask for it. (Look at microwaves for instance… Or iPhones…)
Prolonged Development Cycles: Your product teams struggle with scope creep or shifting priorities. Story points per epic grow. Management shifts strategic alignment with little hard evidence or notice.
I’ve literally seen a CEO up-end months of focus because of receiving one piece of constructive feedback at a dinner - worthy of discussing, but probably not betting the farm without more investigation.
Limited Market Validation: You haven’t tested features thoroughly with real customers before scaling. Passing in-house tests does not equate to user acceptance or beta tests or soft rollouts. Observe and measure real usage as much as you can. That feedback, especially if fully incorporated into every release cycle, can make or break a launch.
Action Items
Rebuild Your Customer Listening Framework: Designate a cross-functional team to gather unfiltered customer input (through interviews, surveys, or user testing) without pushing sales. We’ve had several clients call us up to do precisely this because we are all victims of our own Ego Veil and biases in our businesses.
Map Product Goals to Strategic Objectives: For every new feature, ask how it supports the broader mission. If there’s no clear link, consider deprioritizing it.
Create Rapid Feedback Loops: Implement short development sprints with frequent check-ins, ensuring product direction remains aligned with key goals. Monitor new and old features and rigorously deprecate them if people are not using them. They may even be getting in the way and causing customers to churn.
Align Incentives: Adjust team KPIs so that product, marketing, and strategy teams share common success metrics. These can vary based on the maturity of the business and product line — specifically whether growth, long term value (LTV) or retention/reduced churn is the most appropriate.
3. Frequent Conflict Within Management or Between Teams
Internal strife can erode morale and lead to churn, stalling progress on critical initiatives.
Early Indicators
Misaligned KPIs: Different departments push conflicting objectives, creating friction.
Gaming Targets at the expense of Creating Customer Value: Humans are goal-seeking optimizers, so if you’re rewarding people for optimizing for the wrong target, you’re going to get garbage-in-garbage-out.
High Turnover in Management: Leaders leave due to unclear roles or constant clashes.
Excessive Meeting Overload: Too many meetings with no clear outcomes or repeated topics.
Action Items
Process Mapping: Have each department map out all of the activities in its workflow. We call it “Who does What, When” - but the more boring term is business process mapping. Visualizing the process helps spot duplication, bottlenecks, and areas of overlap and usually identifies many opportunities to streamline and reduce complexity in handoffs and dependencies.
Reevaluate the Org Chart: Revisit roles and responsibilities, ensuring they align with current business goals. Ask staff what they love doing, are good at doing and what they would prefer to avoid doing - consider looking for partners that can automate or specialize in the less glamorous tasks.
Institute Clear Decision-Making Protocols: Define who has final say for various decisions to reduce confusion and power struggles. While it’s important to identify and include stakeholders in any big one-way door decision, you are paying executives more to make and be accountable for those big decisions. It is part of the job.
Facilitate Cross-Functional Workshops: Organize sessions where teams align on shared objectives and discuss interdependencies. Just getting people out of their regular routines and teams and establishing relationships with other teams across the organization can help tremendously reduce time to resolve when complications arise and empower teams to problem solve on their own without everything having to go through higher ups.
4. Exploring a New Market or Product
Diversifying can be vital for growth, but chasing every new trend can dilute your focus and resources.
Early Indicators
Sudden Interest in Hype Trends: You (or more likely a very vocal employee or team) is drawn to emerging buzzwords or “game-changing” tech without verifying relevance to the core business. “What are we doing about crypto!?” “We have to have an AI strategy!”
Overextension of Resources: Core teams are spread thin across too many initiatives. Keeping tabs on the number of special projects and having clear criteria on project briefs and a clear expectation on duration and budget to get to a Go/No-Go decision helps teams manage their resources better and makes it clear to anyone with an idea what other parameters and research they have to do for the company to commit more resources. Use prior successes as blueprints and communicate those wins to junior staff.
Undefined Go-to-Market Plan: You lack success metrics for the products or features. Rapidly deploying features, while exciting for product teams, can often overwhelm or turn off existing customers. Be sure to remember that ample communication of new features or launches and being explicit about the “we listened to you and therefore built this” story is critical to get customer, affiliate and partner buy-in. Don’t get locked into a quarterly or annual release cycle if the market isn’t demanding bleeding edge upgrades. Slow down to speed up.
Action Items
Values Check: Rigorously evaluate how the new product or market aligns with your core mission and your existing customer needs.
Do Your Demographic Research: Really dig into understanding the populations you’re serving. Government databases like the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Small Business Association can help you triangulate how many people or businesses actually fall into scope with a new offering. Industry Associations also collect incredibly valuable data about the size and resources of businesses in their space.
Conduct a Small-Scale Pilot: Test the concept on a limited group of target customers before committing major resources. Be sure that this group is representative and not just the ones within driving distance of your HQ (”We call this the Silicon Valley Effect”) and be especially wary of group think - we prefer individual interviews and user tests over a focus group setting.
Partner Strategically: If the space is rapidly maturing, not core to your business or highly competitive, consider partnering with established players to reduce risk.
Assess Opportunity Cost: Ensure pursuing a new venture won’t starve essential projects or hamper your main revenue streams. Be clear about what will be getting less attention as a result of a new initiative. Be especially aware if service quality or customer satisfaction scores or complaints go in the wrong direction.
Why Smaller Consultancies Often Deliver Better Outcomes
Even if you’ve recognized these red flags, you might be wary of calling in help. Large consulting firms quickly cost $250k+ and are impersonal. By contrast, smaller advisory teams like Numbers & Letters:
Offer Personalized Attention: You become one of our top priorities, not just another account.
Leverage Operator Experience: We’ve walked in your shoes and understand the real-world struggles of driving growth.
Maintain Lean Operations: Fewer layers of overhead mean more focus on practical solutions—and less cost passed on to you.
Refer to Specialists: We don’t pretend to do everything in-house. We connect you with vetted experts when needed.
Ready for a Business “Check-Up”?
Don’t wait until you’re in crisis mode. Book an exploratory call with Numbers & Letters and let’s diagnose and resolve your toughest challenges together. Our goal is simple: help you optimize for sustainable growth while navigating the complexities of health, mobility, and technology.
Disclaimer/Full Disclosure (You made it!): This blog post was generated with the assistance of AI, with N&L human oversight ensuring accuracy and insight. The thoughts and opinions expressed are our own.
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