The first question I ask inside a portfolio company

The first thing I ask in a portfolio company isn't about revenue. It's this: what's the thing everybody here knows is broken that nobody has said out loud in a meeting?

Why the answer never matches the board's

I've asked it in warehouses, on sales floors, in finance departments, in a kitchen. It has never once failed to produce an answer, and the answer has almost never matched what the board told me on the way in.

People know. They've known for years. Nobody asked them, or somebody asked them once and nothing happened, so they stopped saying it.

What are the numbers for, then?

Then I go to the numbers. Not to find the problem. To find out which of the four problems they just described is the one costing the most money.

That's the whole method. Talk to people first. Use the data to rank what they said, not to discover it.

Any operator who leads with the data is going to spend two months proving something the receptionist could have told them in a morning.