As an owner of an American-Made manufacturing brand you’ve likely created something unique – built to last and something you know American consumers want. That separates you from the cheap crap from China. However, you know that competition is fierce and as a result you have been relentless about eliminating production line wastage, optimizing your processes and minimizing your operational costs. Unfortunately, while you have been highly successful in all of those pursuits, there are three hidden wastage points not on your production line that are outside of your view.
The fact that you don’t know what these are is not your fault. They are basically invisible to the average manufacturing owner, because you are focusing on the tangible things in front of you that you can touch and feel such as materials, machines, and workers. The fact is knowing and fixing these hidden wastage points is critical to your bottom line and in many cases your survival. Knowing this devastates me and is why in this blog post I am going to outline exactly what these three hidden wastage points are and exactly what you need to do to rectify them.
The number one issue I see devastating American manufacturing is when owners burn their budget on siloed metrics. What is a siloed metric you say? In short, it’s when an organization focuses on fixing a single metric in one department that blows up a far more important metric within another. I’ve seen this issue present itself often within departments that pride themselves on being well integrated and having open communication. Yet the results are stressed out staff and an even more stressed-out owner.
The best solution to this is to understand your top-level goal, usually increasing profitability through reducing cost of acquisition and to create a hierarchy of metrics that supports that goal. This tells your team that they can fix any metric in your organization as long as it doesn’t drastically hurt another more important one, like closure rate.
Josh was a great example of just that, an amazing manufacturer producing high quality American-Made outdoor kitchens out of small-town New Hampshire. He took pride in the fact he was employing 35 people. As a matter of fact, he took it as his personal honor and duty to make sure their families were looked after while delivering an amazing product nationwide for the last 7 years.
Unfortunately, he was confronted by a staggering increase in the cost of his leads and his marketing team reacted by pulling their budget from some of the costliest geographic locations. Over the next month, his sales team started freaking out. While they blamed it on the economy, closure rates had plummeted and they didn’t know what to do.
On our first call, Josh quickly realized what had happened. His marketing team had fixated on fixing lead cost and it blew up his closure rate. Josh couldn’t believe that such a small change had such an extreme effect on profitability and his gross revenue was tailing off. On the call Josh said, I was freaking out that I would have to consider terminating team members, all because I didn’t help my marketing team connect lead cost to closure rates. He quickly went to work putting together a metric hierarchy which helped his team understand which metrics were key to understand the impact of their actions against the top-level goal.
Within the space of three months, Josh’s changes resulted in a 1 million dollar increase in revenue and more importantly this was a 20% increase in profitability. This increase in revenue allowed Josh to ensure his employees and their families were well looked after. As a matter of fact, he was even able to expand his operations and add 4 more employees to meet all the new demand.
American manufacturers often suffer from siloed decisions that lead to hidden wastage. Learn from Josh’s example and create a clear hierarchy of metrics that you can communicate to your team. Josh reaped the benefits of everyone pulling in the same direction, putting additional profit directly in his back pocket.
Imagine a business owner, pacing the floor at midnight, buried under a mountain of dashboards, chasing a high that never quite delivers. Data promised answers—but instead, it brought a craving. More reports. More dashboards. More spending. More Worry. And less clarity. It’s an addiction—a dangerous one. We call it heroin decision making. While the next hit of data feels like a good thing, its distracting you from the real life-blood of your business. Clouding your judgment and moving you away from your goals. The tragedy? The insights that could save you are usually hiding in plain sight—ignored, underutilized, and lost in the avalanche of data you and your team endure daily.
This may seem like the exact opposite of what you think right now but I promise you the answer isn’t more data; its knowing what data is your north star. Instead of collecting data just because you can, ask: What decision will this help me make? If you don’t have a clear answer, let it go. Focus only on the data that serves a purpose. Matt’s story is a perfect example of this.
When we first met Matt, he was pulling his hair out. Not only had his marketing costs exploded higher by 30% over the last year, things were going from bad to worse with his sales not keeping pace with the increased spend. In fact, he’d started worrying he’d need to let go of at least five team members, just to keep afloat. The weight of that decision sat on his chest like a boulder. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, and felt like he was failing the people who trusted him most.
On our very first call, it hit him. Matt realized he’d been seeking more and more data, but it had blinded him from the data that provided true answers. He’d fallen deep into heroin decision making: snap decisions off one random metric, one new report. To break free, he started asking a simple but powerful question: What goal does this data actually support? And if he couldn’t answer it? He let it go.
Equipped with this new question, Matt identified his main issue in under two weeks. He was shocked to find his marketing team had been prioritizing money bleeding affiliates while ignoring the more effective direct mail campaigns. Eliminating the hoard of data allowed him to correctly identify and correct this, leading to a refocus of effort on direct mail. Today, his actions have skyrocketed sales by 57%, while still growing bottom line. Matt felt relief, knowing he no longer had to consider firing his staff. In fact, he delightedly welcomed 20 new team members to his staff.
You’d never allow physical waste to build up and slow down your production line. Yet many businesses allow marketing waste through unnecessary reports, endless KPIs, and data for the sake of data, to pile up pulling you down to rock bottom. Before you collect one more data point, even if you say to yourself that it might be useful in the future, ask yourself: What goal does this data actually support? Eliminate everything that doesn’t have a clear connection to a goal.
The worst pain isn’t when something on your production line breaks. It’s when you think you’re doing everything right, but your conclusions are built on a lie. That’s dashboard delusion. It’s the knife in the back you never saw coming. You collected the right data, but the reports didn’t deliver and somewhere the truth got twisted. And now, you’re making decisions that feel right, but instead are slowly draining your profits – if you are lucky – and putting everything you have worked so hard to build at risk.
Here’s the good news, this is fixable. Once you recognize the problem, you can reclaim control. The moment you start asking questions like: How is this data being represented? Is it aligned with the way my customers actually buy and how I actually make decisions? Everything starts to shift. It’s like getting the compass you’ve long been missing, and the insights you need to stay on course, which makes the right decisions obvious. There is no better example of this than Niko.
When we first met, Niko was freaking out. At $39 million, Niko’s company had a strong foothold but, in his industry, standing still is the same as falling behind. With competitors circling, the $60 million target became his way to stay ahead of the pack and protect everything he’d built. What freaked Niko out was every dollar he spent yielded a smaller and smaller return, making him think he’d hit a wall for his company’s potential.
On a call, it clicked for Niko. For weeks, he’d been buried in numbers that made no sense. Campaigns underperforming, sales stalling, nothing connecting the way it should. He’d started to question everything: was the data being collected correctly, the copy that had worked for years, his target markets, even his own ability to lead. The weight of what looked like failure had been sitting heavy on his chest. The answer became clear, the updated reporting didn’t account for the lag in their long sales cycle. They were tying today’s spend to today’s sales, making every campaign look like a disaster. With this simple insight, everything changed. It looked like Niko was 100 pounds lighter and he breathed a sigh of relief. The story the numbers told was completely different and finally made sense.
With clarity on what was actually working, Niko doubled down on the right campaigns and it paid off within just a few months. Revenues jumped 35% or over 3 million dollars, outpacing the growth trajectory for his $60M goal.
Niko’s story is a wake-up call for American manufacturers. You can’t safely scale what you can’t predict and if you try, you are just running on borrowed time until your luck ends.
As an American manufacturer I want you to know the world needs your product and more importantly, your community needs you to grow. But the truth is, unless you put an end to these hidden wastage issues by giving them the same attention as everything else, you are giving your competitors the leg up they need to win.
We won’t let that happen. If the advice from this article didn’t give you the answer you need to win the war against cheap Chinese crap, then click here to schedule a free call with us. We’d be honored to assist you with some customized, free guidance so you can continue to serve the communities you support so well.
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