Your dashboard says all is well. These six ghosts might disagree.
It’s late. The dashboard is green, revenue is up and the forecast looks healthy. And yet something feels off, like a cold spot in an otherwise warm room.
It’s Halloween week, so let’s talk about the scariest things in business. They rarely jump out at you. They sit quietly in your numbers, looking perfectly alive. Here are six of the most common, plus a ten-minute way to find each one.
1. Ghost customersAccounts still marked “active” that haven’t bought anything in months. They flatter your customer count and hide churn you could still do something about.
Deals that have sat at the same stage for months. They never close, but they quietly inflate every forecast.
Subscriptions, tools and small overheads that drain margin a little at a time. Each one is too
small to question, but together they add up.
Metrics reported every month that nobody acts on. Follower counts, page views, headline “pipeline value”. They keep shuffling along long after they stopped meaning anything.
Small, informal price concessions agreed on the fly by different people. Each seems harmless, but together they shift your margins around without anyone noticing.
The one critical file that only one person understands. When they’re ill, on holiday or moving on, something nobody can explain stops working.
Give yourself one point for each ghost you recognised.
Finding a ghost isn’t a failure. It’s the first useful step. If you only fix one, start with whichever is costing you most.
Want a second pair of eyes?At Velox Consilium, we help founders, MDs and commercial leaders cut through the noise in their numbers and turn it into clear, practical next steps. That might mean commercial growth advisory, sharper performance insight, or building your team’s sales and commercial capability.
If you scored three or more, or you’d simply like help deciding which ghost to tackle first, we’d be glad to talk it through. No jargon, just a straightforward conversation about what’s going on in your business.
