Small But Mighty
The biggest risks in business rarely arrive with sirens, writes Jessica Hatzis, so you’d be wise to listen to people who have walked the path before.
Jessica Hatzis. Source: SmartCompany via Canva
I’m often asked what the biggest mistake of my career has been.
People wait baited breath, expecting a story about a mistake of seismic proportions. A moment of hubris that nearly took everything down. But there hasn’t been one.
What has kept me up at night, consistently, across every business I’ve built or advised, are the small, seemingly insignificant things. The problems that haven’t been labelled as such yet. The ones that don’t feel urgent enough to address today. The ones you convince yourself you’ll ‘circle back to’ once things calm down.
Here’s my real business worry list.
1. Too much inventory
Inventory is one of the most emotionally deceptive parts of a consumer business.
When sales are good, excess inventory feels like an opportunity to scale. When sales slow, it quickly turns into anxiety, cash flow pressure, and poor decision-making.
Too much inventory locks up cash, limits flexibility, and forces brands into short-term behaviour: heavy discounting, rushed campaigns, panic promotions that train customers to wait for a sale. I’ve watched otherwise strong brands undo years of positioning in a single quarter because they were overstocked and under-prepared.
Inventory pressure shrinks your time horizon. You stop thinking six months ahead and start thinking six weeks ahead, or even six days ahead. Strategy collapses into survival and you find yourself pivoting harder than Ross Geller. The irony? Over-ordering often comes from optimism, not recklessness, however optimism without discipline is risk wearing a friendly outfit.
2. A lack of clear priorities
If I had to name one silent killer of momentum, it’s this.
Most businesses don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because everything becomes important at once.
Without prioritisation (I call it “ruthlessly culling” in my businesses), teams spin out of control. Everyone feels busy, but not effective.
I’ve seen businesses with brilliant people stall simply because no one could answer a very basic question: what are the three things that matter most right now?
Clarity creates calm. When priorities are clear, decision-making speeds up. Teams feel safer. Energy stops leaking sideways. When priorities aren’t clear, even high performers start second-guessing themselves.
Busyness is not a proxy for progress, but it’s a very convincing disguise.
3. Staff without KPIs and performance rhythms
This one sneaks up on you.
In early-stage businesses, everything feels collaborative and intuitive. Everyone is ‘just getting on with it’. But as teams grow, the absence of structure and process feels confusing and frustrating.
Without clear KPIs, expectations are vague. Without performance reviews, feedback becomes reactive or emotional. And without regular cadence, issues only surface when something breaks.
The true cost of this is resentment. Your staff begin to dislike you. They disengage and you see it in the numbers when it’s too late. A revolt begins and before you know, they’re walking out the door like lemmings.
High performers burn out because they carry more than their share, meanwhile others feel unsure if they’re doing a good job.
Good people need (read: deserve) clarity. KPIs are about alignment. They tell your team what winning actually looks like, and they give you a shared language to talk about progress without blame.
If you’re avoiding this because it feels ‘corporate’, or seems unimportant compared to ‘just getting on with it’, know that your staff deserve better and avoidance will cost you far more later.
4. Doing too many things at once
Most founders don’t struggle with ambition, but rather with restraint.
There’s always another lever you could pull. Another idea or partnership that sounds exciting. Another initiative that promises growth. The danger isn’t saying yes to one too many things, it’s never saying no long enough for anything to truly work. Every time you say yes, you pull the team’s focus off the thing they were already executing and getting good at.
Focus isn’t about playing small; it’s about letting momentum compound.
The businesses that scale sustainably are the ones doing the fewest things exceptionally well, for long enough to see results. Depth beats breadth almost every time. Because when everything is a priority, nothing is.
The truth
None of these worries make for a glamorous keynote slide. They won’t get you headlines or applause. But they’re the difference between businesses that feel constantly fragile and those that feel steady, even when things get hard.
There’s a reason I have spent the last few years coaching highly successful, but overwhelmed and floundering founders about these very things. They think the problem is in their meta account, when it’s in the fact that there is no organisational structure that makes sense. They think their problem is that new product development is slow, when in reality it’s that they are winning and losing accounts at the same speed because they take too much on.
The biggest risks in business rarely arrive with sirens, so you’d be wise to listen to people who have walked the path before, and who are laying out “Use other footpath” signs at every hazard.