The Gap Between Felt and True

I remember, when I was nine years old, doing an exercise in geometry at school. Draw a three-dimensional shape, measure it out on paper, cut it out, put it together. I got the task wrong.

I had a teacher, Mrs. R. (Dad once called her a Battleaxe") – and she really didn't like me. She got very upset, and marched me down to the principal's office. Back in the days when corporal punishment was still a real thing.

The principal looked over his desk at me and said: "A good carpenter always measures twice and cuts once." And then dismissed me off to morning play time, without punishment.

Measure twice, cut once. It's stuck with me ever since, and it isn't really about carpentry. What it warns against is the single measure: cutting on one read, before anything's confirmed it. As a boy I trusted one measure and it failed me, plain carelessness. But the trap doesn't go away with experience; it just hides better, because the more years you have behind you, the better that one read becomes. An owner's first read isn't careless. It's instinct, the compressed reading of years in the business, and last issue was about honoring exactly that. But even the best instinct is still a single measure. The second measure is insight.

I saw what that second measure is worth in a room last year. I was running a workshop with a client I think the world of, and somewhere in the afternoon we reached the part nobody enjoys: the deals they'd lost. The executive team already knew why. They could tell me without checking: they were being beaten by competitors, on price and on offer. This was no careless read but the considered judgment of people who'd been in their market for years, and the morning had already turned to where to cut rates and what to add to the offer.

So before we redesigned anything, I asked if we could look. Not at the impression of the losses, at the losses themselves. We pulled the last twenty, put them on the screen, and went through them one by one: the deal, what it was worth, where it had gone.

By the time we reached the bottom the room had gone quiet. Of the twenty, four had gone to a competitor. The other sixteen had gone nowhere: the client had decided to do nothing, to stay as they were and sit on it. Those deals weren't lost to Company A or Company B. They were lost to inaction.

That moment, when the room's certainty and the deals on the screen pulled apart, is the second measure doing its work. And insight is more than running the numbers.

Insight is where we confirm the instinct. We take what the owner is feeling and we hold it against two things: what they're actually trying to achieve, and what they have to work with. The aim, and the resources. Then we measure, because this is where measurement earns its place.

In that room the aim was plain enough: win more of the work they bid for. The feeling was that competitors were taking it. The measurement was the win rate, read deal by deal. Held against each other, the feeling and the truth came apart on the screen: they weren't losing to competitors at all. That gap is the insight. Everything before it was instinct; everything after it is built on what the gap reveals.

It never told the team their instinct was wrong. They were right that something was off with how they won work, and that read was sound. What the analysis moved was the claim the feeling had reached for, the competitor story, in service of the instinct rather than against it: it took the feeling seriously enough to find what it was really pointing at, and shifted the target from somewhere they could only blame to somewhere they could fix.

A number on a screen changes nothing by itself. Sixteen of twenty is a fact, not yet a direction. What makes it insight rather than trivia is what it lets you build: against the aim, with the resources you have, a strategy the feeling alone could never have produced.

Held that way, the sixteen meant the problem had never been rates or offer. You don't win back a client who chose to do nothing by lowering your price, because they were never weighing you against a cheaper rival; they were weighing doing something against doing nothing, and nothing won. The real competitor in that market wasn't a company at all. It was the pull of the status quo sitting inside their own prospects. There's an old line in consultancy that sometimes your biggest competitor is the one who does nothing, and that afternoon it stopped being a line.

It changed what to do with the resource, too. Every hour the team had spent on a deal that was never going to move was an hour taken from one that might. So the strategy wasn't sharper pricing; it was sharper qualification: learning, before committing to a bid, what was actually forcing a client's hand, and stepping away early from the ones where nothing was. Same aim, win more of the work they chased, but an entirely different plan for reaching it, because the truth beneath the feeling wasn't the one they'd assumed.

That room was a sales conversation on its surface, but the work inside it was advisory: the kind a virtual CFO does sitting beside an owner on a decision that matters. And the move reaches well past proposals. A client arrives certain the threat is external and named: a competitor undercutting them, a hire who isn't working out, a market gone soft. Their sense that something is wrong is usually sound; their account of what it is usually isn't, because the named outside villain is the easiest story to reach for and the hardest to check from the inside.

It works the same whether you're forecasting a client's cash, pricing a service line, or weighing that hire, and whether you advise as a fractional CFO, are moving from the books into the advice yourself, or hold the year-round relationship as their CPA. The owner certain their margin problem is their pricing, when the leak is in the jobs they under-quote and never measure. The one sure a rival is taking their customers, when the customers are drifting off quietly, months before they go. You take the feeling, hold it against the aim and the numbers, and find where the two come apart. Win rates were just the instrument that fit that room; cash flow, retention, margin by job: the instrument changes, the move doesn't.

One last thing about that afternoon, because it's the part the number misses. We did it live, together, the deals going up one by one while the team watched their own certainty come apart in real time. Had I emailed them a slide that read "you're losing to no-decision," they'd have argued with it or filed it. Because they uncovered it themselves, with the numbers as the anchor and the conversation doing the work, the conclusion was theirs before I'd finished drawing it.

But it's worth being honest about what we had at the end of that day and what we didn't. The gap was visible. The strategy was clear. Nothing in the business had yet changed. Insight on its own changes nothing; it only makes the next move possible, by handing you something true to act on in place of something merely felt.

And before you carry any insight into that next move, here's the test, the critical questions I run on myself first.

A second measure you've quietly rigged to agree with the first isn't a second measure at all. It's the same read, taken twice. The only check worth the name is the one you'll let come back and tell you that you were looking in the wrong place all along - or in the right place for that matter.

That win-rate exercise only worked because the numbers were up on a screen we could read together, in real time. The tool behind moments like that, more often than not, is Data Studio: Google's free reporting tool, the one that spent a few years going by Looker Studio before quietly changing its name back this year.

It plugs straight into Google Sheets, so once a client's figures are in a sheet, I can build a live dashboard that keeps itself current, whether the question is win rates, cash, or margin by client. No license, no install, nothing to email back and forth.

What I value isn't the charts. It's that it puts the pattern up where the owner and I can look at the same thing at the same time, and watch it pull away from what they'd assumed. That shared screen is where instinct gets its second measure.

The next edition carries on around the circle to that next move: intention, where seeing becomes a decision, and a decision becomes a plan you've agreed to back.

If you've ever run the numbers for a client and watched the real story turn out to be nothing like the one everyone walked in believing, I'd like to hear what the gap was. Hit reply and tell me.

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Know someone navigating the compliance-to-advisory transition? Forward this email — or better yet, send them to baifokal.beehiiv.com to subscribe.get "good meeting, thanks" as they walk out the door, that one's for you. Hit reply and tell me about it — I'm genuinely curious how many of us have had that exact experience.