The Playoff Paradox: Why My Business Was Stuck in Overtime (And How I Fixed It)

The Playoff Paradox: Why My Business Was Stuck in Overtime (And How I Fixed It)

By Chris Jenkin, CEO

I’m writing this still stinging from the weekend.

If you know me at all, you know I’m a die-hard Buffalo Bills fan. Bills Mafia for life. And if you’re also a Bills fan, you already understand the specific, slow-burn agony that comes with it. This isn’t the pain of being bad. It’s worse than that.

It’s the pain of being almost great.

Nine years ago, the Bills hired a new head coach. Seven years ago, we drafted a quarterback with generational talent. The narrative practically wrote itself. Year after year, the team improved. Playoff appearances became routine. The organization earned respect. Analysts started using words like “window” and “inevitable.”

This season, many experts finally crowned us the favorite to go all the way.

But as the games unfolded, something felt off.

I didn’t see a team asserting dominance. I saw a team surviving itself. Dumb penalties. Clock management errors. Inexplicable play calls. We lost games we should have won and won games against Superbowl contenders (sorry New England). The performance didn’t match the talent.

It was incoherent.

We limped into the playoffs as the sixth seed. We beat a strong Jaguars team in the Wild Card round, and for a brief moment, hope crept back in. Then came the trip to Denver to face the top seed.

We lost in overtime.

And not because we were outmatched. We had chances – multiple chances – to close the game. We had momentum. We had the quarterback. We had the pieces.

But we didn’t have control.

As the clock expired and the season ended yet again in the familiar fog of “almost,” my frustration shifted. Away from the players. Away from the refs. Away from bad luck.

Toward the sideline.

The Real Bottleneck

I’ve never quite connected with our head coach. Years ago, I noticed it in a press conference. Something about the presence felt… muted. At the time, I chalked it up to poor public relations skills.

And public relations isn’t the job. Winning is.

Coaches are ultimately judged on one thing: results. Their role is to take talent, align it, and produce outcomes. When a team consistently underperforms relative to its capability, the issue isn’t effort. It’s leadership.

Clock management. Strategic discipline. Situational awareness. These are not player problems. They are coaching problems.

And then the thought hit me, uncomfortably and unmistakably.

I stopped thinking about the Bills.

I started thinking about my business.

The Man in the Mirror

I’ve spent years building a company. Hiring talented people. Smart people. Hard-working people. People who, on paper, should be winning.

And yet, the story looked eerily familiar.

Revenue that refused to break out. Cash flow pressure that never fully resolved. Friction between teams. A sense of constant motion without clear forward progress. Always busy. Always tired. Always just short of the breakthrough.

For a long time, I blamed external forces. The market. Timing. Competition. Even my own team, quietly, in moments of frustration.

But here’s the truth most founders avoid:

If you have talent and you aren’t winning, the problem is you.

I am the head coach of this company.

If the strategy is unclear, that’s on me. If priorities shift too often, that’s on me. If execution feels frantic instead of focused, that’s on me. If we keep ending seasons in overtime, that’s on me.

I had hired my own Josh Allens – capable people who could perform at a high level. But talent without direction doesn’t win championships. It just creates wasted potential.

The win-loss record of this business is my responsibility. Full stop.

And that realization hurt more than the loss on Sunday.

Why the Biggest Companies Pay for Thinking

Once I swallowed that pill, I needed to pressure-test the conclusion. Was I over-personalizing the issue? Or is leadership really the central lever?

So I looked at the top of the business food chain.

What do companies like McKinsey and Company actually sell?

They don’t sell software. They don’t sell execution. They don’t even sell certainty.

They sell clarity.

They are paid obscene amounts of money to diagnose organizational truth. To identify misalignment, inefficiency, blind spots, and strategic incoherence. To tell leadership what they don’t want to hear but desperately need to know.

That’s when it clicked.

Most businesses don’t fail because they lack effort. They fail because they are operating under false assumptions.

And SMBs are the most vulnerable of all.

They don’t have boards forcing accountability. They don’t have consultants crawling through their operations. They don’t have time to step back and diagnose the system.

So they grind. They push harder. They add tools. They hire more people. They burn more cash.

And they wonder why nothing changes.

They are stuck in the Wild Card round, trying to outwork bad strategy.

The Missing Step: Diagnosis

That’s the part we skip.

We jump straight to solutions. New hires. New software. New marketing campaigns. All execution. No diagnosis.

You wouldn’t accept a doctor prescribing treatment without running tests. Yet in business, we do it constantly. We treat symptoms while the underlying condition worsens.

This is where my own company’s mission finally snapped into focus.

We are building a diagnostic engine called Gialyze™.

Originally, I thought of it as something external. A tool for clients. A product for the market.

But after this weekend, I decided to stop talking and start listening.

I ran Gialyze™ on my own company.

Turning the Lens Inward (Revised)

I wasn’t looking for validation. I wasn’t even looking for solutions yet.

What I wanted was visibility.

The hardest thing to live with as a founder isn’t failure – it’s not knowing where the real problems are. It’s the sense that something is off, but everything is too interconnected, too noisy, too close to see clearly.

That’s what finally pushed me to turn our diagnostic engine, Gialyze™, inward.

Currently, Gialyze isn’t publicly available so I used an internal beta – the same system we’re building to solve this exact problem for other businesses.

I ran it looking for one thing:

Truth.

And that’s exactly what it delivered.

Not a list of “fix everything” recommendations. Not a motivational plan. Not a generic framework.

A clear, prioritized picture of where effort was being misallocated, where friction was compounding, and where leadership decisions (mine) were creating downstream drag.

It didn’t tell me we were failing.

It told me why we were stuck.

And for the first time in a long time, I knew where to start.

What Actually Changed (And What Didn’t)

To be clear: this didn’t magically turn everything around overnight.

What changed instantly was clarity.

Before, we were busy everywhere and decisive nowhere. After the diagnosis, we had a sequence. We had order. We had a map.

Instead of guessing:

• what to fix first
• where cash was really leaking
• which initiatives mattered versus distracted

We had a ranked, evidence-based view of:

• current state vs. trajectory
• internal constraints vs. external pressures
• effort vs. return mismatches

The execution? That’s happening now.

We’re actively implementing the corrections the diagnosis surfaced – tightening workflows, re-aligning resources, removing low-leverage activities, and fixing leadership-level decisions that were unintentionally slowing everything down.

Our goal is this:

We will no longer improvise in the fourth quarter.

We will run plays we understand, in the right order, with intention.

A Word on How Gialyze™ Actually Works

I want to briefly address why this system exists, because it didn’t come out of thin air.

Gialyze™ is powered by a proprietary AI model we’ve been building and fine-tuning specifically for SMB realities – not enterprise theory, not generic benchmarks, not surface-level dashboards.

We made a deliberate decision early on to invest in our own infrastructure. Our own machines. Our own training pipelines. Because diagnosis at this level requires control, depth, and contextual memory.

At a high level, Gialyze does three things:

1. Data aggregation
   It gathers structured and unstructured data about a business, its market, and its competitors – not just performance metrics, but environmental signals.

2. Many-model analysis
   Instead of relying on a single lens, it runs multiple analytical models in parallel to evaluate:
   • current operational state
   • likely trajectory
   • deviation from comparable patterns
   • internal vs external constraints

3. Gap and priority resolution
   It identifies where reality diverges from intention and surfaces what matters most next – not everything, not hypotheticals, but actionable focus.

This isn’t about prediction theater. It’s about reducing blind spots.

And as a founder, that alone is worth everything.

The Season Isn’t Over – It’s Finally Clear

I’m sharing this not because everything is “fixed,” but because something far more important happened.

We removed ambiguity.

For the first time in years, I’m not waking up wondering:

• what I’m missing
• what I should be focusing on
• whether effort is actually compounding

But the paralysis – the invisible weight of not knowing where to start – is gone.

If you’re a business owner reading this and you feel talented, capable, and exhausted by motion without momentum, understand this:

You don’t need to work harder. You don’t need more tools. You don’t need another hire.

You need clarity.

That’s what Gialyze™ gave me in internal beta. And that’s why we’re taking the time to get it right before bringing it to market.

The difference between “almost” and “winning” is rarely effort.

It’s visibility, sequencing, and leadership alignment.

Fix the coaching. Fix the strategy. Then execute relentlessly.

Then go win the Super Bowl.