Imagine dragging a garden hose around the house and across your yard. You are trying to water a spot you know it reached last year. But this time, it won’t reach. You pull on the hose, the pressure drops, you knock a gutter off the house, the hose won’t stretch. This story exemplifies how to double your profits.

It’s instinct for most leaders to tug on the hose or try to adjust the nozzle—push harder, sell more, hire faster.

But the big gains come from walking back and unsnarling your business.

How to Double Your Profits

The Hidden Opportunity: Doubling Profits Without Growing Sales
Many businesses can double profits without increasing revenue. All they need to do is recover what they already earn but lose to friction.

Below, I’ll use construction and medical examples because I’ve worked closely with both. Also, they are industries that resist process improvements. But whether you’re paving roads, running a clinic, or managing five kitchens, operational friction and tangles cost you.

Case A: Big Bob’s Builders – $40M Construction Company
Imagine Big Bob’s Builders, a $40M heavy civil construction company. Like their peers, many of their contracts are with government clients. And like their peers, they believe that a typical target net profit should be around 4% to 6%.

What they don’t know is just down the street is a competitor (probably my client) who consistently achieves at least 10% and sometimes more.

For a $40M company, that’s a difference of at least $2.4 million. With no extra projects. No new staff. No more capital outlays.

This profit gap is entirely due to common inefficiencies, which I’ll elaborate on below.

Sources: CFMA 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker, McKinsey Global Institute, 2017

Case B: Happy Heart Medical – A $10M Medical Clinic
Or imagine a medical family practice clinic. Like most providers, they believe there should be the typical Net Profit Margin of 3%–5%.

They don’t really think about it because it allows a comfortable lifestyle. Until they need to move or they want to expand. Then there isn’t as much left over as they thought there might be.

What they don’t know is that they are bleeding two-thirds of their potential profit. All of which could be recouped without adding a single new patient.

An optimized clinic, just across the street (probably also a client of mine) could experience a net increase to 9%–12%. To put that in absolute numbers, for a $10M clinic, they could be profiting an additional $600,000–$900,000 per year.

That clinic just runs a little more smoothly, in a way that patients and staff notice and appreciate.

There is literally no downside.

Sources: MGMA: Medical practice operating costs are still rising in 2025, AMGA: Operations—Beyond the Bottom Line (PDF), HALMJ: Finding the Financial Margin Expansion Leverage in the Medical Practice

These are not theoretical gains. They’re documented, achievable, and mostly the result of fixing operational kinks—unsnarling the hose.

Industry Norms vs. Optimized Performance
Industry norms represent the average performance of the industry. Many leaders are satisfied if they hit the norms. What they overlook is that these norms are shaped by all of the low performers.

At a minimum, you should hit the norms. But norms are easy to surpass. For quick reference:

Why We Miss the Simple Wins
Three reasons:

1. Firefighting feels productive and gets noticed.

2. Strategic work feels like delay, not progress.

3. Doers get rewarded. Optimizers don’t.

When it comes to safety on job sites or your patient’s health, you know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

But when it comes to how we run our businesses, chasing the urgency of the moment is visible and rewarded. Prevention is invisible, doesn’t produce adrenaline and endorphins, and requires focused intent.

But for leaders who do step back, the hose can be freed up, and everything works better. Not only does your business become more profitable, but it’s easier to run.

My clients routinely double their company’s revenue and margins – and slice their actual workload when they focus on these basics.

Why wouldn’t you want that?

Four High-Leverage Fixes (The Hose Unsnarlers)
Here are examples of simple changes that feel like relief—not effort—and produce outsize returns. The ones I chose below are common. But by no means are they the only ones.

1. Tighten Internal Handoffs
   Don’t let communication or expectations get lost when work changes hands. Examples:

   • Construction: Estimator-to-project manager transitions are a high-friction zone. Client communication gets dropped, expectations are confused, and trust declines. Improve the handoffs. Ensure clarity. Assume no relationship exists until it’s built (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017).

   • Healthcare: Admin-to-provider or referral transitions often break down. Messages don’t get relayed. Follow-ups don’t happen. Referrals lack context. Clarify ownership and close the loop (JAMA).

2. Pre-Plan Rigorously
   Too many “plans” start too late if they happen at all. As a result, avoidable issues are created. Examples:

   • Construction: Planning often begins on the official start date. This means procurement, logistics and staff planning have not yet been thought through. This triggers delay cascades. (CFMA 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker).

   • Healthcare: Poor clinic layout and under-planned workflows reduce throughput and increase frustration. Time is wasted walking and looking for things, not treating. (HALMJ).

3. Improve Communication
   Clear. Consistent. Complete. Concise.

   • Construction: Misaligned expectations between clients and crews lead to rework and callbacks (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017).

   • Healthcare: Poor bedside manner drives complaints, patient churn, and legal exposure (JAMA).

4. Simplify Administration
   Simple, written and consistently applied processes.

   • Construction: Fragmented job costing, delayed invoicing, and unclear accountability bleed profit (CFMA 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker).

   • Healthcare: Excessive admin eats into margin and clinician time. Simplify to free capacity (JAMA).

Maybe your business isn’t in either construction or medical.

Here’s how this looks in a completely different business – coffee shops. (My first business was Bonhoeffer’s Espresso.)

• Planning: Customers don’t like to wait for morning coffee. Doesn’t matter how gentle you were to the beans before you ground them. A good bar layout, staff scheduling, and inventory management make a dramatic difference in speed and accuracy.

• Handoffs & Accurate Communication: Effective, clear communication (often indicated by the codes written on your paper cups) saves time and reduces errors and waste.

• Simplified Administration: Simple, consistently applied policies and procedures. Don’t expect a clean shop if you leave ‘deep cleaning’ up to the interpretation of each 18-year-old working for you. Define it.

The Profit is Already There
The extra profit doesn’t require more of anything. It’s already in the system—just stuck behind the knots:

• Walk the hose.
• Unsnarl the systems.
• Feel the pressure return—and keep more of what you’re already earning.

Take good care,
Christian