Why Your $20M Company Is Quietly Burning $3M a Year (And Calling It "Overhead")

The Expensive Illusion of Being Fine

Your company is probably leaking 15-20% of its revenue. Not to fraud or laziness. To something more insidious: the belief that chaos with good intentions is the same as operation.

Walk into a typical $10-25M company and everything looks productive. People are busy. Slack is active. Revenue is growing. Leadership talks about "scaling" and "the next phase."

Then look at the bank account. Cash is always tight. Hiring takes forever. The same crises repeat quarterly. Sales closes deals that operations can't profitably deliver. Nobody can explain why last quarter's margin was 22% and this quarter's is 11%.

This isn't a personnel problem. It's not a market problem. It's an operating system problem and most owners don't realize their company doesn't actually have one.

They have motion disguised as method.

The Real Cost of "We'll Figure It Out"

Let's be specific about what leakage actually looks like.

Scenario: A $15M professional services firm that "doesn't need process."

• New employees get different onboarding experiences. Some are productive in 30 days. Others take 120. Nobody measures the difference, so nobody sees that the company is paying $180,000 per year in lost productivity from inconsistent ramp-up.
• Sales negotiates 60-day payment terms because "the client asked." But vendor invoices are on 30-day terms. The company is unknowingly financing $750,000 in working capital—essentially giving clients an interest-free loan while paying interest on their own line of credit.
• HR uses three different insurance brokers because "that's how it evolved." Nobody has done a consolidated review in four years. Annual overspend: $85,000 compared to properly managed coverage.
• Proposals are built on salary costs, not loaded costs. A $100K employee actually costs $165K when you include benefits, taxes, equipment, overhead allocation, and ramp time. Every proposal is underpriced by 25-30%, which means the company works harder to make less.
  

Add it up: $180K + $750K + $85K + phantom margin loss on every project. That's over $1M in visible leakage, and we haven't even touched procurement waste, scope creep, emergency overtime, rework, or delayed collections.

In a $15M company, that $1M isn't overhead. It's profit you already earned, already paid tax on, and then quietly burned.

For a $20M company, the number is closer to $3M.

And you're calling it "the cost of doing business."

Why This Happens: The IT Ghetto and the Service Blindness

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies already run on services. They just refuse to acknowledge it.

Your business has:

• An HR function that delivers hiring, onboarding, payroll, and compliance
• A sales process that delivers pipeline, proposals, and customer handoffs
• An operations team that delivers projects, support, and outcomes
• A finance function that delivers invoicing, collections, and reporting
  

Every one of these is a service. They have inputs, outputs, customers, failure modes, and cost structures.

But because ITIL- the most mature framework for managing services-has been ghettoized as "an IT thing," business leaders treat it like it's about help desk tickets and server maintenance.

This is absurd.

ITIL isn't about IT. It's about repeatability, accountability, and visibility in how work gets done. The fact that it was first codified in IT departments doesn't make it irrelevant to HR, sales, finance, or operations. That's like saying "accounting is just for finance departments" and then wondering why operations can't explain its costs.

Here's what ITIL actually means in plain language:

• Service: A repeatable way your company creates value
• Incident: Something broke and value stopped flowing
• Problem: The pattern behind why things keep breaking
• Change: Any modification that introduces risk and needs control
• Continual Service Improvement: The discipline of never accepting recurring pain as normal
  

Look at that list. Now tell me which department in your company doesn't need those concepts.

You already live in this world. You just refuse to name it or manage it.

What Unmanaged Services Actually Look Like

Let's remove the theory and show what this means in practice.

Example 1: HR as an Invisible Service

The Surface Story: "We have HR. Sarah handles it. We're hiring when we need to."

The Real Story:

• Onboarding is reinvented every time someone joins
• Role definitions overlap or have gaps—nobody truly owns critical handoffs
• New hires sit idle their first week because equipment, access, and context aren't ready
• Some people are productive in 30 days; others need 90, and leadership has no idea which is which or why
• The same hiring mistakes repeat because nobody tracks patterns
  

The ThinkQSi Lens View: HR is a high-leverage service being run as improvised admin work. Every wobbly handoff, every delayed start, every extended ramp costs real money. A company with 30 employees turning over 5-7 people per year at an average salary of $80K is losing $120K-$200K annually just from inconsistent onboarding.

The ITIL-Informed Fix:

• Define the HR service catalog (recruiting, onboarding, role transitions, policy support, offboarding)
• Separate incidents (payroll error, access failure) from requests (change benefits, need letter of employment)
• Set basic expectations: time-to-productivity targets, onboarding checklist completion, error resolution standards
• Track problems: if three new hires in a row struggle with the same gap, that's not coincidence—it's a fixable pattern
  

Outcome: Faster productivity, fewer errors, cleaner accountability, better retention. Not because you hired better people. Because you built a service that works.

Example 2: Projects as an Unmanaged Service (And Why Cash Is Always Tight)

The Surface Story: "Revenue is up 20% year-over-year. We're doing great."

The Real Story:

• Every project runs differently depending on the PM in charge
• Sales agrees to 60-day payment terms; vendors require 30-day terms
• Invoicing happens at month-end, regardless of when value was delivered
• Scope expands quietly—"the client needed it"—with no change process
• True project margin is unknown until weeks after the project closes (if ever)
  

The Financial Reality: A $20M services firm with 60-day client terms and 30-day vendor terms is carrying $1.5M-$2M in working capital at any given moment. That's cash the company earned but can't touch. Meanwhile, emergency expenses hit the credit line.

The ThinkQSi Lens View: This isn't a "sales problem" or a "client problem." It's a service design failure. Projects are treated as one-off events instead of instances of defined service delivery.

The ITIL-Informed Fix:

• Standardize project types as services with known patterns, cost structures, and margin expectations
• Treat project breakdowns as incidents; recurring project failures as problems to root-cause and fix
• Use change controls for scope, staffing shifts, and payment term modifications—so "yes" requires a decision, not just a conversation
• Align invoicing to value delivery milestones, not calendar convenience
  

Outcome: Leadership can finally see where money is made and where it vanishes. Proposals are priced with actual costs. Payment terms are negotiated with cash flow in mind. Margin stops being a surprise.

The Compound Effect: Why Small Leaks Become Existential Threats

Here's what makes this dangerous: leakage compounds.

A company losing $500K per year to operational sloppiness doesn't just lose $500K. It loses:

• The ability to invest that capital in growth
• The confidence to make bold moves because cash is always uncertain
• The trust of teams who see preventable chaos as "how it is here"
• The margin for error when markets shift
  

Over three years, that's $1.5M gone. Over five years, $2.5M. That's not just profit. That's the difference between thriving and merely surviving.

And the really painful part? Most of it is preventable.

Not by working harder. By working like a business that knows what it's doing.

Strategy Without an Operating System Is Just Expensive Daydreaming

Most founders and owners can articulate goals:

• "Grow to $30M"
• "Expand into two new markets"
• "Improve margins by 5 points"
  

Fewer can show a clear, written strategy on one or two pages that says:

• Here's where we're going
• Here's what we will and won't do
• Here's how we'll know if we're on track
  

And almost none have an operating system capable of executing that strategy without heroics.

Here's the reality: A strategy without an operating system is like a GPS without a car. You know the destination. You can't get there.

This is where the ThinkQSi Lens meets ITIL-style service thinking.

Not as theory. As a practical operating upgrade for companies that are too busy firefighting to realize they're the ones lighting the fires.

The ThinkQSi Approach: Clarity, Structure, Execution (In That Order)

When ThinkQSi enters a company, the sequence is non-negotiable:

1. Clarify the Destination

Vision, mission, and strategy in one to two pages. Not a binder. Not a deck. A document that forces tradeoffs and says clearly: "This is where we're going, and these are the things we will not do to get there."

Until this exists, everything else is just activity.

2. Make Reality Visible Through the ThinkQSi Lens

Map how work actually moves. Listen for where handoffs break, where accountability blurs, where data is late or missing, where teams are improvising under pressure.

This is not a survey. It's forensic observation. We're looking for the gap between what leadership believes is happening and what's actually happening.

3. Recast Critical Functions as Services

Identify the services that matter most—usually HR, PMO, sales operations, finance operations, customer success.

For each:

• Who is the customer (internal or external)?
• What does "good" look like?
• What are the failure modes?
• Who owns it end-to-end?
• How is success measured?
  

4. Borrow Selectively from ITIL and Proven Practices

Use concepts like incidents, problems, changes, service catalogs, and continual improvement where they solve real pain. Ignore them where they add noise.

This isn't about certification or compliance. It's about installing enough discipline to stop the bleeding without turning the company into a bureaucracy.

5. Start Where Impact and Urgency Intersect

Most companies aren't ready for enterprise-wide transformation. The first move is usually a focused proof-of-concept in one department—HR, PMO, or customer operations—where pain is acute and wins will be visible fast.

6. Execute with the People You Already Have

If the solution requires heroic talent you don't have, it's not a solution. It's a fantasy. Real transformation works with real people in real conditions.

Who This Is For (And Whether You're Ready)

This approach is for companies that:

• Are doing $5M-$50M in revenue
• Have cash flow problems that don't match revenue growth
• See the same crises repeat every quarter
• Rely on "heroes" to keep things from breaking
• Make decisions with incomplete or delayed data
• Are tired of firefighting and want structural stability
  

But here's the harder question: Are you ready?

Because this work requires something uncomfortable: honesty about what's actually broken.

If leadership is still saying "we just need better people" or "we're growing too fast to slow down," this isn't the right time.

But if you're willing to look directly at how work really happens, where money actually goes, and why the same problems keep recurring—then there's a path forward.

What Happens Next

The first ThinkQSi engagement is a focused discovery—a short, intensive period where we map:

• Your critical services
• Your biggest leaks
• Your real operating state (not the story in the slides)
• The few high-leverage fixes that change everything

From there, you get a clear set of options: where to start, what to fix first, and how service thinking supports the next stage of growth.

Because pouring more effort into a leaky system isn't growth.

Fixing the leaks is.

If you want to explore whether this is the right move, schedule a brief conversation. We'll figure out quickly whether you're dealing with a "need more leads" problem or an "operating system" problem.

One of those is easy to fix.

The other one is expensive to ignore.

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Insights from Anwer Qureishi, Thought Leader & Entrepreneur
Ready to accelerate growth? Schedule a Consultation with Anwer Qureishi, Founder, Q&S International (ThinkQSi).