Unclear Roles and Goals: A Costly Mistake Many Business Owners Make

One of the biggest obstacles to growth and long-term success isn’t a lack of strategy—it’s the lack of clarity. Too often, business owners assume their team understands expectations, but when roles and goals are unclear, confusion, duplication of effort, and costly mistakes follow.

In this episode, we dive into how unclear roles and undefined goals silently erode productivity, weaken accountability, and limit profitability. We’ll also explore why this becomes especially dangerous when it’s time to sell or transition a business. Buyers and successors don’t just look at financials—they look at systems, leadership, and how well the company can operate without the owner. Without clear structure and measurable goals, the value of your business can take a serious hit.

If you’re thinking about succession or planning for a future sale, this conversation will help you see where clarity creates confidence—not only for your team today but also for the future owner who’s evaluating whether your company is truly built to last.

[00:00:00.00] - Alice

Hello. Welcome to Books in the Biz, a podcast that looks at both the financial and operational sides of success. Please welcome our hosts, Dan Paulson and Richard Beltré. Dan is the CEO of Envision Development International, and he works with leaders to increase sales and profits through great cultures with solid operations. Rich is CEO of the Veltre Group and a financial strategist working with companies to manage their money more effectively. Now on to the podcast.

[00:00:44.16] - Dan Paulson

Good afternoon. Welcome to Books and the Biz. Richard, it is now October as of this recording. How are you doing?

[00:00:53.00] - Rich Veltre

I'm whining again about how cold it is.

[00:00:55.16] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. Well, I won't whine for a couple of days because here we in the '80s, which is unseasonably warm for this time of year. I will take every warm day I can get at this point, because most days, once it starts getting cold, gets really cold here in the Great White north of Wisconsin. But With all this talk, we've been actually talking with several prospects and clients, and I picked up a theme going on here. I thought that would be a good discussion for today's episode, which is goals and objectives. And it still amazes me the number of businesses that are sometimes successful in spite of themselves, if you will. Maybe it's because they locked into the right industry at the right time or they had the right skillsets. But then when you talk with them about goals and objectives and how that aligns with their staff, they don't really seem to have anything going down. And And I know you and I have been in a couple of conversations with a couple of clients we have, and also a couple of people that we've been talking to about these very issues. And I'm just curious, from your perspective, what have you gleaned from some of these conversations?

[00:02:17.11] - Dan Paulson

And where from a financial guy side, are you seeing maybe some hiccups or red flags that companies should be looking at and starting to address?

[00:02:30.00] - Rich Veltre

I think that there's been a lot lately where I've talked to people and I just get this feeling of the old saying of flying by the seat of your pants. And that makes me a little nervous because I'm saying, well, why is that? Why is there no process procedure? Why is there no red flags going up when the surprises show up? Last week, looking at a PnL by month and realizing there's three months in there with no activity. You were in business, right? Yes. Then what happened? How did you not know that you have no bookkeeping done? You have no idea what the numbers look like. And so that scares me a little bit because I think with the advances in technology and everything that's going on out there and the changes going on in the world, all more reason for people to be much more nailed down on their procedures and their processes, and not accepting when something is not going the way it's supposed to. That's where surprises come from. That's where bad things happen.

[00:03:45.26] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, it surprises me because I've had similar conversations with some of my clients, too. And there are some clients that, for whatever reason, they might have certain goals or objectives, but they refuse to share them with anybody else. It's like it's some secret that they need to protect and that maybe their employees don't or shouldn't know about it. And I just don't understand that. You're expecting people to do a job. You're expecting them to be successful in their job, but yet you're not willing to tell them what success looks like or how to get there, other than looking at the job from maybe more of just the task to do, right? It's just weird to me that owners, for whatever reason, let's look at it from a number standpoint. The thing I always struggle with is owners don't want to share the numbers with their employees or explain how those numbers come about and what costs go into those numbers. So if you're Building a million dollar project, for example. They don't want to talk about because I, and this is what to me plants the bad seed of the employee now looks at the owner and says, well, you're making millions of dollars on this.

[00:04:57.14] - Dan Paulson

Why am I only making how much I'm making as a salary. And I think if there's more transparency around certain things like that, you can roll people in and get them empowered to actually help you reach the goals that you're striving for. I'm just thinking recently also of a client that I'm working with on some different things to try and improve things like quality and service. And we're talking about this, but it's like I'm trying to teach something, and it's It's like you're taking a class in school. Talk about the information. Make sure you talk about this information. But when it comes to now going out and practicing it in the field, it's like, well, it's just isolated to this meeting. It's like, no, they should be leaving here with some skillset or some ideas of what to do. So that way, when we come back, we can talk further about what they're learning or what they're observing. And it's just, again, this whole disconnect between, I check the right boxes I might do the right things, but those things don't lead to the outcomes that I'm looking for.

[00:06:06.07] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think it reminds me when I was younger, where everybody was talking about open book management, where getting into the point of having reports that come out and they're shared amongst the people who are actually managing the company. If you're the sole manager, and you're the sole person who knows the numbers, and you're the sole person making decisions, then it's not really a company. I don't think. It's just it's you. And I think the push was that New ideas can come from being open with those other people who also know the company pretty well because they've been working there for a while. And I think it also goes back in my head, it goes back to, was it Steve Jobs that said, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I hire people to tell me what to do? I'm getting the quote wrong, I think, but basically that was what it was. I hire smarter people to tell me what I should be doing.

[00:07:16.19] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I'm not sure if that was Jobs, but I've heard that from a couple of different people in a number of different ways. And one of the things is, surround yourself with people smarter than you. And that might be a It might also be some of the other ones, but that is a pretty common- It might be Gates, but it was one of the big tech people that said that type of thing.

[00:07:40.20] - Rich Veltre

And when we look and talk about these things, that can resonate. It doesn't have to be a thousand plus person firm. It can be a small business that looks at it the same way. I hired you to come in and help me. And if you're not allowing that person to talk or give you ideas or help you make decisions, then what'd you hire them for?

[00:08:04.05] - Dan Paulson

I often saw that in the strategic planning that I either was involved in or helped facilitate. I can think of a time back when I was in the work a day world, and I won't point out the company I was with at the time, but they had a rather tedious and lengthy planning process that we had to do in each division we were in. In the division I was in, It took roughly about three months to come up with what our core goals and objectives were going to be. But here's the interesting part. They asked for our opinion, but then they went ahead and did whatever they wanted to anyway. Why are you wasting all these resources, all this money, all this time, and you've already got to figure out what you want to do? It really doesn't matter what I say or any of the other people say. It's not going to lead to the outcomes that you're looking for. So what I experienced in that process is we go through this three months process. We would then assign objectives or goals to individual employees based off of what came out of that planning process.

[00:09:12.19] - Dan Paulson

And usually by, I'd say, a month, two, most of that stuff was scrapped until you got to the end of the year, the following year, when they did their annual reviews. And now these things were brought up, but they were irrelevant. So now you You end up with a situation where you're measured by something you didn't work on because as you got into it, they changed directive or whatever because the planning part wasn't thought out clearly, and they didn't listen to the people they had brought in the room, hopefully the smarter people that had new ideas on things. I just see that in some way, shape, or form time and time again. Now, smaller companies tend not to do a lot of strategic planning. It's usually the owner has an idea, the owner wants to enact that idea, and everyone else follows goes along. I think both of you and I have dealt with companies of 50 people or less, where it's very common place, where the owner drives the vision, even though he might not clearly communicate that vision to the people he's got. So to me, it's really interesting how we go about this process of trying to get clear goals and objectives.

[00:10:24.02] - Dan Paulson

But it seems like most owners, especially in small to medium-sized companies, don't want to do that. Now, here's my speculation for that. I think any time you put in place a plan and directive, you also create discipline because people should be accountable to that plan, including the owner. Owners tend to want to run. I think you even said this maybe before we got on the podcast here. Owners tend to run by the seat of their pants, and to some degree, I think they like doing that. If you put in place a plan and you direct not only what everyone else is going to be doing, but how you're going to handle things, and what you're going to be doing, and where your focus is going to be, it doesn't give you that freedom when that next shiny object pops in, and you want to make a change, but you haven't budgeted for it, you don't have the time for it, and your employees aren't directed to do it. So I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but that just seems to be where people want their freedom, but then that freedom leads to loss of control.

[00:11:30.00] - Dan Paulson

Almost.

[00:11:31.11] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. I'm not sure that I'm saying it's in the right timing, but just yesterday, I was talking to someone who does work similar to mine. And her take basically was that sales, operations, finance, everybody has to somehow be connected and communicate. And she said one of the biggest examples she ran into was company was looking for something, looking for, like you said, a shiny object. Big sale comes in, they go after the deal, and sales comes in. They're all happy that we have this deal on the table. The owner says, This is okay, and signs off on 60-day payment terms, but nobody asked finance. So the problem was, it's a manufacturing company. So for 60 days, now you got money going out. You got money going out to pay for the material materials to build the widget or whatever it was that they were selling, and no one had asked finance. And now you're waiting for 60 days. Number one, you have to produce. Then you send the bill. Then you get the 60 day term. It's like, by the time you get any money, you've just made the company feel even worse while you're running around popping champagne corks.

[00:12:48.01] - Rich Veltre

No one asked, can we do this? And the owner was just like, I'm in charge. I'm the owner, and signed off on 60 day terms, and they couldn't afford 60-day terms.

[00:12:58.17] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. And 60 day terms. So now This is really 90 days, because they will cut that check at 60 days, and you might get it 30 days after that.

[00:13:06.04] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, if you're lucky. So again, the realistic part of that is the owner just popping champagne cork saying, Hey, this is fantastic. We got this great deal. And you could go out of business because you're waiting on all this other stuff to happen, and you're laying out money in order to get that sale. So it's interesting It's interesting to watch sometimes because you can write a book about it, but it's not so interesting when you're living it.

[00:13:38.26] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I can relate to this with a current situation. So I've got a company, and now we've talked a lot about succession lately. This is where, again, not having clear goals or objectives can really affect a succession planning situation. So here's a company, manufacturing company, two partners, and they're in a situation now where private equity is knocked on their door and through an obscene number at them. Well, one person says, let's take the money and run I'm done. We'll get whatever we get on everything after we get the guaranteed money. And hopefully that works out to our benefit. If not, we made a good run. We got our cash. We're done. The other partner, though, goes, well, I see more opportunity that we can do. I think we can achieve greater numbers than what they're projecting for us even. And if we sell out now, we're going to miss that growth opportunity. He still understands that there's the upside of getting that upfront cash. But at the same point, he's saying, well, I can probably recoup what they'd be paying us in the next 2-3 years. So now what do you do? You got two owners that have different viewpoints, different visions of where they want to be and what their end game is.

[00:15:04.18] - Dan Paulson

And neither one really has solidified a unified thought on that. I see this a lot in family businesses. One member of the family sees one thing, other family member sees something different, and they just work in circles and nothing ever gets done. And especially when you're getting to a point where you're starting to think about, what does that end game look like? Where should we be? And if you don't have that preparation in hand, it's going to slow down the process, or it could give you the situation where you miss a great opportunity when it is present itself. So for example, on this one, maybe private equity is the best thing for them to do right now. Or again, they're also going through a pretty strong growth spurt right now. So is it something where, hey, if we just put a couple more years into it, the business is probably be worth twice what it is now. And we would benefit not only from the near term, getting that growth and that revenue and that profit, we'll also benefit the long term because somebody is going to come knocking on our door and want to pay us even more money.

[00:16:15.00] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. And this is one of the reasons I really like working with you, because not everything runs with numbers. I mean, the numbers can really narrow things down and say, you can't fudge them too You can tweak them a little bit, but you can't really fudge them. You can't really mess them up to the point where it can sway too far one way or too far the other, especially if somebody has the knowledge to know where to look. The numbers can't really go that far. But it's really wild when you get into these conversations with people and you realize that, you've realized how messed up a company can become when the vision is not aligned.

[00:16:59.14] - Dan Paulson

Right?

[00:17:00.21] - Rich Veltre

Whether it's one guy who's got way more cash motivation and the other guy's got growth motivation, they don't necessarily coincide. You could be growing a company getting minimal money, but the growth is so great that the end game is the best deal when you sell the company. Where if you're kicking off cash and everybody's getting cash and the growth isn't as big, some people don't matter. But if you have one on one side and one on the other, that's a really scary opportunity or really scary dilemma. Two people who really want to go completely left and right, and the company is in the middle basically getting pulled. And a lot of times you don't see it until that pull becomes a break. And that's the part that I love really exploring sometimes, because it's tough love when you have to tell people, look, you can't keep be going with one guy wanting this and one guy wanting that. You have to get aligned somehow or this is going to explode. You're not going to like the aftermath.

[00:18:09.26] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, definitely. And it is that challenge. And to me, it also creates more confusion because, like I said, maybe this is the right deal. Maybe it's something different. But if you don't have clear goals and objectives and there isn't alignment across the board, you'll sit there and waffle back and forth on whatever is put in front of you. And then it's that, well, what if I make a wrong choice? Well, none of us have a crystal ball. None of us can look at something and say, is this the best thing for you? Only you as an individual can do that for yourself. But when you do have other partners or other people involved, if there's not constant alignment with what that outcome is going to be, it just makes it so much tougher. And over time, if you don't address Trust that alignment issue, you will run into problems where it will impact sales and profitability. Because eventually, as you pointed to, there will be this tug of war, and then there will be a break. The break might not be in the relationship necessarily. The break might be because there's two complete disagreements or multiple disagreements.

[00:19:21.02] - Dan Paulson

Sometimes you have multiple partners. So if there's multiple disagreements and nobody's in line with what needs to be done, you create these rifts, and then you take your eye off the ball, and that in turn affects sales and everything else. It affects employment. If your employees see that you're struggling with something, or you're unclear about your messaging to them, or what their expectations are, they're going to be more likely to walk out the door and go somewhere else.

[00:19:46.23] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I mean, one of the big cases recently was exactly that. There were two factions of a company that was already struggling. And there was the CEO who was hired to turn this company around and had an idea that if we grew fast, took on some investors, then all of a sudden that growth would be enough to solve the company's problems. But the actual owner of the company was sitting there and hemming and hawing over the whole thing and finally said, I don't really want to do that. They had already taken some of the investors' money, though. So now you've got lawsuits galore between who's fighting who and whose fault was it? And to be honest with you, who cares? The company died. I mean, literally the company was over. So they'll be hashing that out for years.

[00:20:33.29] - Dan Paulson

And only spending money on it. And when it goes to the courts, it gets really expensive and takes a really long time.

[00:20:42.21] - Rich Veltre

And the lawyers get new cars.

[00:20:44.24] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. The lawyers are the only ones who win because they're the only ones who get paid out of all this.

[00:20:49.23] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. That's why it's just such a tough topic. Such a tough topic.

[00:20:57.19] - Dan Paulson

But I found something And I found that maybe we aren't Harvard grads, but hey, look at this. Found this article, Harvard Business School: Setting goals and objectives, four considerations. And we can include the link here in the notes for the podcast, but just something to show you here. I'll get down towards the end. Here's the four goals and objectives. Let me know if any of these sound familiar to you, Rich. Number one, financial measures, being clear on what you're tracking, being clear on how you measure it, and being clear on the expectations for that. I would agree with that. I constantly harp on my clients about that, even though I don't directly deal with all that. Number two is customer satisfaction. So again, no happy customers, no new customers, no existing customers. So it's important to focus on that, which, ironically enough, I've been talking a lot about with certain clients lately and doing a lot of training and development on that. Number three here, internal business processes. You brought that up just earlier in this discussion, having internal processes and actually being able to track and measure what you're doing and be consistent about it.

[00:22:17.21] - Dan Paulson

I can't tell you the number of times I talk to companies where they might have multiple employees doing a similar type task, maybe it's for different clients or whatever it might be. This is especially true in construction. I actually remember this construction or this with one of my construction clients, where they were talking about, they were building a wall or a façade, and there were two different people working on it, and one person insisted that he was going to do it his way, which was different than the way the other person was doing it. Now, maybe to the average untrained eye, like you and I would be, there's very little difference in how that wall was constructed or the visual impact of that. However, for the contractors, they're going, Well, neither way was wrong or is wrong. However, both ways create a slightly different look. And if they're working on the same building, depending upon where that meets up at, that could create a completely different outcome. So here's an example of where you let the chickens rule the roost, and one's decided they're going to do it their way, come hell or high water, and the other one is going, Well, this is the the way we're supposed to do it.

[00:23:31.22] - Dan Paulson

And now you end up with a situation where it's a complete quality impact on the result of the work. So if you don't have those systems in place and they aren't consistent, that becomes a huge problem. The last one here is learning and growth opportunities. And this is the one I think a lot of organizations miss, which is why they have such high turnover that they do. Because there aren't clear goals and objectives, especially for employees, where opportunities exist in the organization, they're going to go somewhere else. Given the opportunity in many cases in certain industries, like manufacturing and construction, where there's been a shortage of help for so long, they're more in demand, and there's more jobs than there are people, which means it's a buyer's market if you're an employee. So to me, if you don't have those learning goals and objectives is in place for that individual, I would start career pathing individuals pretty much right out of the gate from the time you hire them. Where do you want to go in the organization? What do you want to learn? What do you want to gain here? Can we map out a process over the next couple of years where you can get the experience you want and eventually move into, if you want a leadership role, move into a leadership role.

[00:24:52.23] - Dan Paulson

If you want some other role in the company that isn't leadership but still takes you the career path you want to go, how do we get you there? And I just don't see a lot of companies doing that. I think they want to plug somebody in a job and hope they're going to stick with that job for 20 or 30 years. Both you and I know that is few and far between anymore.

[00:25:14.00] - Rich Veltre

It's unfortunate I think I am seeing it more and more now where it is just, well, I hired you to do this. Just go do this.

[00:25:22.17] - Dan Paulson

Right.

[00:25:23.20] - Rich Veltre

Well, no. It goes right back to the comment we talked about before. You If you hired someone, hopefully they have some ideas, or maybe they work for another company that you didn't work for. If I worked for my company as long as I have, then I go and hire people and bring them in, and someone says, Well, wait a second. There's this other firm, we did it this way. I'm not going to shut that down. I'm going to look at it and go, did you really? I'm a relatively small practice. So if you're coming from a bigger practice and they're doing something slightly different, and I can benefit from the fact that I hired you, and you can explain to me how they did that, why am I going to shut that down for ego or for whatever my problem would be? Why would I do that? I just hired somebody, and For free, the employee gave me an additional piece of advice that I didn't expect. And I can either act on that or I could say, No, it doesn't really work here, but let's keep that in mind. Or that's something that as we get a little further, we might be able to pull that off.

[00:26:32.08] - Rich Veltre

How are you going to keep doing everything the way you're doing? And then AI comes in. And I'm not saying that AI is going to come in and take everybody's jobs. That's not the conversation. But AI is speeding things up. So if the guy down the street invests in AI and you don't, he's probably moving faster than you. So how do you not take the advice of someone saying, we could use AI and it could do this, this and this, and you're not going to listen?

[00:27:00.00] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I think the key to any of this is, like you said, hiring employees just to do a task is one thing, and yes, to some degree that does help. Utilizing that knowledge and that experience and then giving them an opportunity to grow within that knowledge and share that knowledge is going to be far more impactful on the business, and it's going to lead to better results, lower costs. Ultimately, you created a valuable employee who could potentially help you take the company further than you could have on your own. And that, to me, is extremely valuable, and especially on some of these older companies that have 20, 30 years of experience in the books, if they're not looking to grow and update with the times, it's going to be very hard for them when it does come time to sell to somebody else to sell at the price point they want. They're going to be discounted up because somebody else is going to come in with AI or somebody else is going to come in with the automation, and they're going to figure it out And they're going to buy you at a discount so that they can implement some of those tactics on their own.

[00:28:08.05] - Dan Paulson

So with that Rich, it's strategic planning time. What would be your takeaway or leave behind if somebody was listening to this that they really should focus on related to goals and objectives right now.

[00:28:22.25] - Rich Veltre

Well, we're in the fourth quarter. So if I stick with my finance hat and I leave my finance hat on, How did you do so far? You have three months to determine how the rest of the year is going to go and how it's going to impact the entire year. So nine months down, are you below where you want to be? How can you get back to hitting your targets? Now is the time to look at it. And if your bookkeepers are three or four months behind, I think at that point, my head would explode.

[00:28:56.21] - Dan Paulson

Which, by the way, I'm also seeing more of a problem with where We're coming across that so often now.

[00:29:04.09] - Rich Veltre

It's unnerving for someone like myself who I don't like to do those numbers. I like to use other people who are better at it than I am. And I keep stepping in it a little bit and saying, I'm going to have to update this because I don't see how this company is doing. So get your people to give you numbers. Make make sure you know where you stand. Make sure you know where you want to be. And then that way, you can also start talking about, what am I going to do when I get into 2026? It's around the corner. It's literally around the corner. So that would be my take. How about you? From the non-financial side.

[00:29:50.27] - Dan Paulson

The non-financial side. Well, I think the financial side ultimately sets you up for what you're going to do on the non-financial side. You're busy forward thinking on this. So I'm looking forward to and saying, well, if your plan is growth or your plan is succession or whatever it is, have your plan, put it in place. It doesn't need to be a three-month process. It doesn't need to be a 300-page document. Actually, most great plans are anywhere from, I'd say, one page front to back to no more than five pages. If you want to get into some of the details for what you're going to do. Enroll your employees in where your vision is for the business, whether it's adding a new industry or new vertical, or we're going to grow our sales by 20 %. Start talking about the big picture ideas, but then enroll your team to actually come up with the dirt or the details on how to make that happen. You will engage them more. They will get more bought in. They will then hopefully lead to coming up with some of those ideas you're talking about. Maybe they are looking at AI, maybe they are looking at automation.

[00:31:05.23] - Dan Paulson

They can figure out how to make those objectives happen. But do not keep them a secret. Do not just share them with your wife or just keep them in the back of your head. Really let your team know about it because they're the ones who can help guide you. And if you have the right people, they should be able to jump on board and help you out with that. Now, let's say for a moment that they are stuck, they're confused, they don't know what Rich, how should they get a hold of you? Maybe for some help and some guidance.

[00:31:33.25] - Rich Veltre

Send me an email, rich@xcxo.net.

[00:31:37.22] - Dan Paulson

And you can do the same with me at dan@xcxo.net. Rich, as always, great discussion. Hopefully, as people get into planning time of year, they will start thinking about some of this stuff. If they're stuck, give us a call.

[00:31:50.29] - Rich Veltre

Absolutely.

[00:31:52.01] - Dan Paulson

All right. Bob, take it away.

[00:31:54.24] - Bob

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