A client once came to me because they wanted online bookings.
On the surface, it seemed straightforward. Customers would visit the website, choose a service, pick a time, pay online and everybody would save time.
Except that wasn’t what was happening.
When I started looking at the business more closely, I discovered that customers were calling before they booked. They were emailing questions. They were booking one service and then arriving wanting something completely different. Staff were spending hours each week explaining options, rearranging appointments and trying to work out what customers actually needed.
The booking system wasn’t the problem.
The problem was happening long before the booking.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that this pattern repeats itself again and again. Businesses come looking for a solution to one problem, but when you start following the process from beginning to end, you often discover the real issue is somewhere else entirely.
That’s why one of my favourite questions is:
“And then what happens?”
A customer submits a form.
And then what happens?
A salesperson receives an enquiry.
And then what happens?
A payment comes through.
And then what happens?
Most of the useful information sits in the answer to that question.
People usually understand their own part of a process extremely well, but they rarely see the entire journey. A salesperson knows what happens during the sales call. The administrator knows what happens when paperwork arrives. The founder knows what they want the business to achieve. What often gets lost is everything in between.
I’ve worked with organisations where a single spreadsheet updated every Friday was holding an entire process together. I’ve seen businesses delayed by a manual task that nobody had questioned for years because “that’s just how we’ve always done it.” I’ve watched teams invest thousands into new systems without realising the bottleneck was a decision that only one person in the company was allowed to make.
From the outside, these problems can look incredibly complicated. From the inside, they’re often surprisingly simple once you can see the whole picture.
The client who wanted online bookings didn’t end up with a dramatically better booking system. What they ended up with was a clearer customer journey. We helped customers understand their options before they reached the booking stage, which reduced confusion, reduced support requests and dramatically improved the quality of bookings coming through.
The technology mattered, but it wasn’t the thing that solved the problem.
What solved the problem was understanding where the problem actually began.
What I’ve found over the years is that businesses rarely struggle because they lack tools.
They struggle because nobody has ever followed the process all the way through.
The founder knows their part. The salesperson knows theirs. The administrator knows theirs. The accountant knows theirs. Everybody understands their own piece of the puzzle, but very few people ever sit down and look at the whole picture from beginning to end.
That’s why projects often uncover surprises.
The founder thinks they’ve given me a complete brief. Six weeks later, a casual comment in a meeting suddenly explains half the business. A manual process performed by one person every Friday afternoon turns out to be holding an entire workflow together. An edge case that “hardly ever happens” turns out to be driving most of the complexity in the system.
What’s fascinating is that people aren’t hiding this information.
They genuinely don’t realise it’s important.
They’re so close to the business that they’ve stopped seeing it.
The more projects I work on, the less I think my job is to build things and the more I think my job is to uncover assumptions. Most of the difficult projects I’ve seen weren’t difficult because the technology was complicated. They were difficult because nobody had fully mapped how the business actually worked.
The businesses that move fastest aren’t necessarily the ones with the best systems. They’re the ones with the clearest understanding of themselves. They know who their best customers are. They know how those customers buy. They know which parts of the process create value and which parts create friction.
Everything else becomes easier once those things are clear.
That’s why I keep asking, “And then what happens?”
Not because I’m necessarily interested in the day to day runnings of the business.
Because somewhere in the answer is usually the piece of information nobody realised mattered.
