A leader at a company I'm working with nailed something recently that I've been trying to put into words for years and find a true solution for.

"Every time I think we've got something figured out, something else breaks. We fix that, and the first thing breaks again. I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole."

Same game plays out in every scaling company I've worked with And almost nobody can see it while they're in it.

Let me show you what I mean & how I’ve fixed it.

You'd describe it as progress. Your team is heads-down. Problems are getting solved. Things are moving.

But nothing actually gets better. Or, if it does, it’s at a snails pace.

These are all real scenarios from companies I’m currently working with. Names changed for obvious reasons.

Company A finally cracked their top-of-funnel after some rapid experimentation. Leads were pouring in. Marketing was thrilled. Then show rates collapsed...turns out the nurture system was broken underneath. Automations were blocking texts. Confirmation emails were still firing after people had already booked calls. They solved lead generation. The problem just moved to lead conversion. Sales was still stalled.

Company B had the opposite issue. Marketing was generating hundreds of sales calls, but only 5-10% were qualified. Sales was drowning. So they tightened qualification...and volume cratered (but sales was closing more and had more time to follow-up with past leads). But suddenly marketing "wasn't working" again. Marketing was forced to amp volume back to “good” levels.

Company C hired two more salespeople to accelerate growth. It worked...pipeline doubled. But every new client still had to be manually entered across four different systems by one ops person. Errors spiked. Onboarding slowed to a crawl. Customers started complaining before they'd even started. They "fixed" sales capacity and broke fulfillment.

Three different companies. Three different problems. Same pattern underneath. Every fix created the next fire.

I call this Problem Ping-Pong.

Marketing fixes something, ops breaks. Ops fixes that, revenue dips. Sales tightens qualification, pipeline shrinks. Marketing loosens it, lead quality tanks. Problems don't get solved. They get relocated.

It happens because departments solve for their own metrics in isolation. Marketing is chasing leads. Sales is laser-focused on close rate. Ops is heads-down on efficiency. Each one optimizes their slice...and accidentally breaks something in the department sitting right next to them. (And then blames that department for "not executing.")

And who's the only person who can see this happening?

You.

Because nobody else on your team is hired to see the whole picture. Your marketing lead sees marketing. Your ops lead sees ops. Nobody sees how the pieces connect. So you end up bouncing between fires, playing referee between departments that are all "doing their jobs" while the company stays stuck.

Your instinct is to move faster. Hire faster. Solve faster. But speed makes it worse. Every rushed fix that doesn't account for what it breaks downstream is just another serve in the match.

You don't have 10 problems. You have one problem expressing itself 10 different ways. (Welcome to the seven-figure ceiling.)

I told a founder recently...I am so adamant about sequencing when to solve problems and when to make hires, because anything out of order creates another obstacle. It costs time and money. And it pulls your attention away from the thing you should've been working on first.

That's Problem Ping-Pong's kryptonite. Not solving faster. Solving in the right order.

I use a four-layer mental model I created. Nothing groundbreaking...just a way to force myself to slow down and solve things in the right order. It’s not easy to do this (especially looking at your own company—biases are tough to see), but it is simple if you are 100% honest with yourself and militant.

Layer 1: What's actively destroying value right now?

The bleeding neck. If something is losing you money, nothing else matters until it stops. One company I worked with was subsidizing two money-losing products with their one profitable engine...to the tune of ~$312K a year. They wanted to pour another $500k into advertising this year. I said...selling what, exactly? Until we know which products are worth selling, that $500K ad budget creates the next problem instead of solving one.

Layer 2: What protects the thing that's actually working?

You've got a cash engine somewhere. Something keeping the lights on. (Hopefully.) Is anything threatening it? Don't get so locked in on fixing the broken stuff that you let the working stuff quietly degrade. I've seen this happen before...founder spends six months chasing a shiny new product line while the thing that actually pays the bills slowly deteriorates. Protect the golden goose at all costs.

Layer 3: What gives you visibility to make good decisions?

Can you actually see what's working? If your attribution is wrong, your data is siloed, or you can't answer "which channel acquires customers profitably"...every decision from here forward is a guess. Fix the seeing before the doing. A single source of data truth is typically treated as “nice to have”, and it is—it’s super nice. Get you some.

Layer 4: Now you build, hire, scale.

Org structure. Leadership hires. New initiatives. This is where most founders want to start. (I get it. This is the fun stuff.) But every one of those decisions depends on answers from Layers 1 through 3.

Reverse any two of those and you get Problem Ping-Pong. That company was about to drop $500K on ads to sell products they hadn't determined were profitable. That new ad budget would've relocated the problem, not solved it.

Now...the part I almost don't want to admit.

I nearly missed Layer 1 on that same engagement. We were two weeks into building a diagnostic around scaling and alignment...the stuff I usually see. Then we caught that nobody had examined product-level profitability. The entire plan reshuffled overnight. Every layer resequenced because the foundation shifted.

Call it Layer 0: make sure you're even looking at the right data before you sequence anything. (That single source of truth)

You can nail the sequencing. Get every layer in perfect order. But if the diagnosis underneath is wrong...if you're working from bad data or assumptions nobody thought to question...you're just playing ping-pong with a different ball entirely.

The sequencing is only as good as the diagnosis underneath it. And that's the part even I have to keep reminding myself.

Problem Ping-Pong thrives in silence.

When teams don't feel safe surfacing cross-departmental problems, those problems go underground. They don't disappear. They just put on a disguise and show up in someone else's Slack channel.

Here’s what actually breaks the cycle:

Create a rhythm. Weekly leadership meeting where every department puts their top problem on the table. Not status updates. Not wins. Problems. The real ones that keep you up at 2am wondering if this whole thing is built on a house of cards. Don’t let problems fester in silos. Surface them, name them, then estimate the business value solving that problem creates.

Pick one. Sequence it against those four layers. Work it to 100% completion. Not 80%. Not "good enough for now." Done. Because that last 20% you skipped? That's exactly where Problem Ping-Pong hides. The almost-solved problem that quietly seeds the next one.

If your team is "solving problems every week" and things aren't getting measurably better...you're playing ping-pong. The ball hasn't stopped moving. It's just on the other side of the table.

When's the last time your company solved a problem completely...without creating a new one? Like David Beckham says, be honest.

You've heard me mention "the gap nobody owns" a few times now. Next week, I'm going to show you what that gap actually feels like from inside...and why it's the real reason you can't step back.

—Chris Piper
The Growth Operator