Sarah is leaning so far across the mahogany conference table that I can see the frantic pulse in her neck. She is vibrating at a frequency usually reserved for hummingbird wings or malfunctioning electrical grids. ‘Twenty-nine minutes,’ she says, her voice a sharp-edged whisper that cuts through the hum of the air conditioning. ‘I told the client they would have the wire in twenty-nine minutes. That is what the landing page promises. That is why they signed the $89,999 contract. If we don’t move, they’re gone.’
Across from her, Dave is not vibrating. Dave is eroding. He is the Director of Operations, a man who looks like he has spent the last 19 years trying to hold back a mudslide with a plastic spoon. He has a stack of 49 printed emails in front of him, and his hand is resting on a folder that contains the physical evidence of why Sarah’s promise is currently a lie. ‘The credit department is backed up,’ Dave says flatly. ‘And the UCC filing has a typo that needs 9 different eyes to review before we can resubmit. Your twenty-nine minutes is currently looking like forty-nine hours. Maybe fifty-nine if the server stays this slow.’
I am sitting between them, Jax P.-A., professional mediator of conflicts that shouldn’t exist in the first place. I feel a strange, hollow sensation in my chest, a social vertigo I experienced only three hours ago when I waved enthusiastically back at a woman on the street, only to realize with a hot flash of shame that she was waving at someone directly behind me. It is that same feeling of misplaced connection-the realization that what you think is happening and what is actually happening are separated by a gulf of 139 miles. Marketing is waving at the future, while Operations is still stuck in the parking lot of 2009.
The Speed Gap: The Silent Killer
This is the Speed Gap. It is the silent killer of growth, the corrosive agent that eats away at the foundation of trust before the ink on the first invoice is even dry. We live in an era where the front end of the business-the website, the sales pitch, the glossy PDF-is built with the speed of light in mind. But the back end, the engine room where the actual work of moving money and assessing risk happens, is often a collection of rusted gears, 19-tab spreadsheets, and manual workarounds that rely on one guy named Phil not taking a sick day.
“
The gap between what we say we are and what we actually are is where the soul of the company goes to die.
“
Companies invest 79% of their budget into the ‘Customer Experience’-which usually just means the part the customer sees first. They buy the $999 logo, the $5,999 website template, and the $29,999 advertising campaign. But they balk at the $499-a-month software that would actually automate the credit check or the $1,999 infrastructure upgrade that would stop the internal servers from wheezing like an old dog every time someone tries to upload a batch of 19 invoices. This is a fundamental betrayal of the brand. If your marketing says ‘Instant,’ and your operations say ‘Eventually,’ you aren’t a tech-forward company. You are a manual labor firm with a very expensive mask.
Investment Misalignment
Frontend Spend
79%
Customer Experience (The Gloss)
VS
Infrastructure Gap
Minimal
Core Operational Tools (The Engine)
The Hard Lesson of Speed
I once made the mistake of siding with the ‘Speed’ side of this argument without looking at the ‘System’ side. In a previous mediation for a factoring firm in the Midwest, I pushed the operations team to meet a 19-minute deadline for a new client. I told them to ‘find a way’ and ‘be agile.’ They did. They skipped 9 essential verification steps. Within 29 days, we discovered that the client was a professional fraudster who had siphoned off $69,999 before we even realized the invoices were fake. I learned then that speed without structure is just a faster way to fall off a cliff. But the opposite is also true: structure without speed is just a very organized way to go out of business.
“Speed without structure is just a faster way to fall off a cliff. But structure without speed is just a very organized way to go out of business.”
– Jax P.-A., Mediation Log Entry 49
What Sarah and Dave are fighting about isn’t just a deadline. They are fighting about the fact that they are living in two different realities. Sarah lives in the world of ‘The Speed We Need.’ She knows that in the modern factoring and lending landscape, if you aren’t fast, you are invisible. There are 19 competitors waiting to take that client the moment Sarah slips up. Dave lives in ‘The Speed We Have.’ He knows the limitations of the legacy systems they are using. He knows that the internal database takes 9 seconds just to load a single page, and that every manual data entry point is a potential $10,000 error waiting to happen.
Eliminating the Distance
The real tragedy is that most leaders treat this as a personality conflict. They think Sarah is too aggressive and Dave is too stubborn. They tell them to ‘communicate better.’ But you can’t communicate your way out of a 49-hour process gap. You can’t ‘synergize’ away the fact that your team is using tools designed for a world that no longer exists. The solution isn’t more meetings or better vibes; it’s an honest assessment of the operational infrastructure. It’s about admitting that you can’t run a 9-second race in a 19-pound pair of lead boots.
49%
Dave’s Time Spent on Manual Data Entry
True operational excellence isn’t about working harder; it’s about reducing the friction between the promise and the delivery. It requires a radical alignment where the tools used by the back office are as sophisticated as the tools used by the marketing team. When I look at firms that actually scale without burning out their Daves and infuriating their Sarahs, I see a common thread. They have moved away from the ‘Frankenstein’ approach-bolting 9 different apps together with digital duct tape-and toward integrated systems that handle the heavy lifting of risk management and funding automatically.
It’s about more than just software; it’s about a refusal to let the promise outrun the execution. That’s why firms that actually survive this transition usually end up looking at something like factor software to close that yawning chasm between what the brochure says and what the server actually does. When the operations team has the same ‘lightning-fast’ capability that the sales team is selling, the internal friction vanishes. Suddenly, Dave isn’t the villain, and Sarah isn’t a liar. They are just two people on the same team, moving at the same pace.
The Ghost in the Machine
I think back to that moment on the street, waving at the wrong person. The reason it felt so bad wasn’t just the embarrassment; it was the realization that I was out of sync with my environment. I was performing an action that had no recipient. This is exactly what it feels like to work in a company where the internal systems can’t keep up with the market demand. You are performing the ‘action’ of business, but you have no ‘recipient’ because the customer has already left for a faster competitor. You are waving at a ghost.
The Grind vs. The Glamour
In my 19 years of mediation, I have seen 49 different companies collapse not because they lacked a good product, but because they lacked the courage to fix their back office. They would rather spend $99,999 on a new CRM than $19,999 on the core operational software that actually moves the money. They are obsessed with the ‘glamour’ of growth and terrified of the ‘grind’ of infrastructure. But the grind is where the money is made. The grind is where the trust is built.
Acknowledgement Progress (Lie → Truth)
10% Completed
[Speed is a promise, but infrastructure is the delivery of that promise.]
I look at Sarah and Dave again. Dave has finally opened the folder. He shows Sarah the typo on the UCC filing. It’s one digit off-a 9 where a 4 should be. That one digit represents 9 hours of work to fix under their current system. Sarah puts her head in her hands. She isn’t angry anymore; she’s exhausted. She realized that she isn’t selling funding; she’s selling a fantasy that her own company isn’t capable of fulfilling. And Dave? Dave is just tired of being the one who has to break the news that the fantasy is over.
We spent the next 59 minutes not talking about the client, but talking about the system. We mapped out the 19 steps it takes to get an invoice from ‘Submitted’ to ‘Funded.’ We realized that 9 of those steps were completely redundant, leftovers from a policy manual written in 1999. We realized that 49% of Dave’s time was spent manually re-entering data that the client had already provided digitally. It was a mess. It was a beautiful, fixable, expensive mess.
The Courage Required to Scale
🛑
Stop the Clock
Admit current speed is a lie.
😔
Embrace the Grind
Infrastructure is trust building.
🤝
Align Back Office
Tools must match marketing speed.
You cannot build a high-speed future on a low-speed past. You can’t keep apologizing for your technology while expecting your clients to remain loyal. Eventually, the gap between the speed we need and the speed we have becomes too wide to bridge with apologies. Eventually, the client stops waiting for you to catch up and goes to the person who isn’t waving at the person behind them, but is looking them right in the eye, ready to deliver on the very first second.
I left the office at 6:59 PM. The sun was setting, casting long, 9-foot shadows across the pavement.
We didn’t solve the client’s problem that day-not really. But for the first time in 19 months, Sarah and Dave were looking at the same map. They were finally acknowledging the weight of the boots they were wearing.
The truth is often slower than the lie at first, but it’s the only thing that can actually sustain the race. I walked to my car, consciously keeping my hands in my pockets, making sure I didn’t wave at anyone unless I was absolutely certain they were looking at me.