# Why a business stalls after success, and where to look first [Home](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en) › [Study](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study) › [Articles](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study/articles) author: [Axel Jedlitschka](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/about) published: 2026-10-13 updated: 2026-10-13 language: en reading time: 5 min topic: Personnel source booklet: [Leadership in Practice](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/leadership) When a business stalls after success, the first place to look is at what stopped happening. A new plan comes after that. When a business gets stuck after a good stretch, the cause is usually something that stopped happening. According to the source, an earlier program or order has almost always been dropped or forgotten, and a new plan is rarely what the business needs. ## Where to look when the business is stuck The source offers a diagnosis that is close to a rule of thumb. When an organization is bogged down after a period of success, an earlier program or order has almost always been dropped or forgotten. The source adds: “I have always been able to trace bogs to skipped orders.” When it sees a slump, its first question is which program was not executed. Notice the word always. The source states it with no hedge, and that gives an owner a first place to look: what did we stop doing, before asking what changed in the market. Suppose a business whose leads dropped over a quarter. What had stopped was the follow-up call a week after delivery, which was dropped during the summer overload. Or a garage where comebacks rose. Nobody had cancelled the final check. People quietly stopped doing it once the veteran mechanic went on vacation. And an owner who spent two months searching for a shift in the market, and finally found that she herself had stopped sending the monthly email. ## Why a new plan does not help Here the source stops a familiar reflex. As a rule, it says, a business needs follow-through on programs that were never complied with, and rarely needs new ones. This may be the most cost-saving line in the booklet, and it is easy to see why the reflex is strong. Launching a new channel, procedure or system feels like action, and going back to see what happened to something old feels like doing nothing. According to the booklet, though, every launch adds one more thing that will not get finished, while every follow-up brings back to life something that has already shown it works. Suppose an owner launches three marketing channels in two years, and none of them runs for six months in a row. He revives the first channel instead of launching a fourth, and it brings in more than the three new ones combined. Or a manager who set a rule that a new initiative starts only after an open one has been closed. A year later she had two initiatives, and both worked. ## An order carried out, but not as intended The source gives a full example, one that anyone who has handed off a task will recognize. Top management issues a policy: set up and run a lunchroom that gives employees good food cheaply, with clean and fast service. The lunchroom manager they hire knows nothing about organization and does not realize what a policy is, so he files it as a good idea. As an experienced lunchroom man, he is sure he knows what they really want, and he decides to earn the company a lot of money. From then on every order of his rests on that principle. He buys cheap, poor food, lowers quality, raises prices and saves on staff by not hiring, and he does make money. But the company's income comes from happy customers served by happy staff, so the lunchroom manager actually cuts the company's real income by neglecting the staff morale the policy was meant to serve. This story is about a failed hand-off. The manager did a good job measured against the goal he invented himself. Nobody explained to him what the lunchroom was for, so he filled the gap with his own reasoning, which was sensible and mistaken. The practical conclusion: pass the reason along whenever you pass a task to someone. Without the reason, whoever receives the task will invent one, and it will be plausible and wrong. Suppose an owner asks his team to shorten response time. The responses get shorter because the answers become partial, and the customers call again. Or a manager who asked his team to cut shipping costs. They switched to a cheaper carrier, and two packages went missing within a month. When he said to cut shipping costs without hurting delivery time, because that is what customers are buying, the savings turned up somewhere else. ## The hats collected along the way The source also gives a simple periodic check. About once a month, it looks up to see “whose hats I am wearing besides my own.” In other words, which roles that belong to other people have landed on you without a decision. The check takes a minute, and it catches the kind of creep that nobody decides on. A task lands on you once because somebody was sick, and it stays. A year later there are four of them, and not one arrived by an actual decision. Suppose an owner discovers that she has been ordering the office supplies for two years, ever since the employee in charge went on maternity leave. Or a garage owner who answered the phone every time it rang, because he once worked alone. He had not worked alone for three years. After a month of logging every call he picked up, he found that three out of four never needed to reach him. ## What the booklet has on this The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: What we stopped doing, and The reason. It also has a self-check, and it sits inside a full booklet about what the manager's job requires of someone who hired a first employee. If your business stalled after a good stretch, look first for what stopped happening, before you launch anything new. The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice on employment law. - [Leadership in Practice](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/leadership): A definition you can actually work from, four ways to spot yourself failing, and two jobs that define the role. --- [עברית](https://theonlyaxelj.com/he/study/articles/when-a-business-stalls-after-success) · [Español](https://theonlyaxelj.com/es/study/articles/when-a-business-stalls-after-success)