The first five places I look when a company is leaking money

When a business is leaking money, the leak is almost never where the reporting says it is. Reporting is built to describe the business someone designed. The leak lives in the business as it is actually run.

So I start with usage. Not the funnel, not the deck — the product, used the way a customer uses it, on the device they use, at the hour they use it. Most of what is wrong is visible in ten minutes there.

Then the people closest to the work, before anyone prepares them. Then the two or three numbers that genuinely move, rather than the forty that are reported. Then the question of who actually controls a decision, which is rarely who owns it on paper.

And last, the gaps: every version of the story compared against the others. Not because people lie, but because each of them can only see their own part of it.