17/10/2026 by Paquita Lamacraft, Author and Principal Consultant & Catalyst at Archer Business Europe
Why the thing your business needs is closer than you think — and why nobody has looked.
A man arrived late to a meeting I was chairing, and apologised.
He had spent the morning sorting out a shipping problem. His plant needed a particular chemical input, which he named: it came down-river by barge, and the barge had been delayed. Again. It was, he said, a recurring nuisance.
The man sitting a few seats along put down his coffee and said: what?
He repeated the chemical name. Is that what is on the barge?
It was.
He shook his head. That is a by-product of our process, he said. We pay to have it taken away. It is a constant disposal problem for us.
The two plants stood side by side on the same stretch of river. One was paying to bring the substance in from hundreds of miles away. The other was paying to get rid of it. They had been doing this, in parallel, for years.
Why nobody noticed
The obvious question is how two large, well-run operations could miss something so plain. It is worth answering carefully, because the answer is not stupidity, and if you conclude that it was, you will not spot the same thing in your own business.
Those two men knew each other. They had sat on industry panels together for years. But industry panels discuss the industry — regulation, safety standards, market conditions, the price of energy. They do not discuss what arrives at your gate on a Tuesday, or what leaves it as waste on a Thursday. Nobody stands up at a conference and describes their disposal costs.
So the information existed. Both men held half of it. There had simply never been a room in which the two halves could meet.
I was there because I was leading a cluster development programme along that river — finding the places where competing companies could sensibly collaborate, so that the whole region rose rather than each firm gaining ground at another’s expense. The meeting where this happened was our last. It came out in an apology for being late.
The same blindness, pointing outward
It would be comfortable to treat that as a one-off. It is not. I have watched the same assumption operate in the opposite direction just as often.
A small engineering firm in rural Australia built log splitters — the sort you tow into the forest behind a four-wheel drive, so that timber is split where it falls rather than hauled out whole. A good, practical machine, solving a real problem for people who work in difficult country.
They wanted an export market. They looked, as everyone does, at the obvious distant places.
The way in was a few kilometres up the road. Close enough, as they would say there, to be measured in stubbies (small bottles of beer that make long journeys seem shorter) rather than miles.
They had never looked locally, because they assumed — without ever putting the assumption into words — that companies near them served the same market they did. Local firms supply local customers. Everyone knows that. It is the kind of belief that is never examined precisely because it has never been said out loud.
What they found instead was a neighbour with established routes into markets they could not have reached alone. They did not have to build the export capability. They could travel on somebody else’s.
Building it yourself is usually the expensive answer
That last point deserves its own story, because it is the one most businesses get wrong.
Two friends in another country district built an off-road wheelchair. Four-wheel drive, genuinely capable, made because a mate of theirs had become paraplegic and they were not prepared to accept where he could and could not go.
I had a friend in the same position — an outdoorsman who had camped in country most people never see, and who had lost the use of his legs. I asked him to try it. He came back and described it as masterful. That is not a word he used lightly.
So the two builders asked me the reasonable question. What now? Start a company? Sell the licence?
My answer was neither, and it was not the popular one. Sell it independently, I said, and you will sell a respectable handful. Then somebody with more resource will look closely at what you have made, refine it, develop around your patent, and inside a few years you will not have a business. You will have a story about the thing you invented.
What they needed was not capital and not a buyer. It was a partner who already had the manufacturing discipline and the export routes — someone for whom their product was an addition rather than a departure.
I introduced them to the head of manufacturing at a firm that built highly engineered trailers for a luxury motorsport marque — extraordinary technical interiors, and years of experience selling into demanding overseas markets. He was as taken with the wheelchair as my friend had been. They formed a joint venture.
The chair reached the people it was built for. It would not have, alone.
Sometimes it is stranger than that
A woollen mill was exporting fleeces and finished woollen goods overseas. Wool is light and it is bulky, which is the worst combination there is for freight — you pay for the space, not the weight, and a fleece is almost entirely space. Shipping was eating the margin on every order.
Somewhere in the same trade lanes was an exporter of porcelain, who had precisely the opposite problem. Porcelain is fragile and needs packing, and good packing material has to be bought, paid for and shipped in before it can protect anything.
They partnered. The wool travelled as the packing. One consignment, two products, and a freight bill that shrank to a teacupful.
Nobody invented anything. Two firms with opposite problems were put in the same conversation, and the answer had been sitting in both their warehouses the whole time.
What this has to do with resilience?
Since 2020 every business has learned the word resilience. Far fewer have done the exercise, because resilience sounds like something you buy — a second supplier, more stock, an insurance line — and all of those cost money you would rather spend elsewhere.
But look again at the first story. Strip out the comedy and what is left is a plant whose input depended on a single distant supplier, a single freight route, and a river. Any one of those failing stops production. That is not a purchasing arrangement. It is an exposure, and nobody had ever written it down as one, because it had always worked.
The resilient alternative was already there. It was next door, it was cheaper, it was shorter, and it removed the river from the equation entirely. It had been available the whole time.
This is the part worth taking away. Cost and fragility hide in the same place, and they hide for the same reason — not carelessness, but the absence of anyone standing far enough outside the process to see it whole. Fixing one usually fixes the other. The shorter chain is nearly always the cheaper chain, and it is nearly always the more robust.
The assumption is the enemy, not the arrangement
In every case above, nothing was broken. The barge arrived, most of the time. The log splitters sold. The wheelchair worked. Wool and porcelain shipped. Each business was doing something perfectly sensible.
What was costing them was a belief nobody had tested:
That our supplies must come from where they have always come from. That the firms near us serve the same market that we do. That doing it ourselves is how we keep control. Each is reasonable. Each is sometimes true. None had been examined, and the cost of not examining them was paid quietly, every month, for years.
An afternoon that pays for itself
Here is the exercise. It takes one afternoon and needs no data you do not already hold.
Draw your supply chain on one sheet of paper. Every input, and where it physically comes from. Not the supplier’s head office — the place where the thing is actually made. Most businesses have never seen this on a single page, and the page alone is worth the afternoon.
Then work through five questions.
– Where is the single point of failure? Which input has exactly one source, one route, one port, or one person who understands it? If that one thing stops, what stops with it? Count it as an exposure whether or not it has ever actually failed — the fact that it has always worked is the reason nobody has written it down.
– What does distance cost you? Not just freight. Lead time, held stock, currency movement between order and payment, the hours somebody spends every month sorting out delays. Add it up honestly. It is nearly always larger than the invoice suggests.
– Who else could supply this within fifty miles? Not who does — who could. Most people cannot answer, which is itself the answer. Finding out is not difficult: the local chamber of commerce, the industrial estate directory, the trade association membership list. Better still, ask your existing suppliers who else they serve nearby, and ask your neighbours what they actually make. That last one costs a phone call.
– What do you pay to get rid of? Waste, by-product, surplus, obsolete stock. Somebody within reach may be paying to buy it. This is the question that catches people, because disposal is filed under cost of doing business and never revisited.
– Who nearby already goes where you want to go? Export routes, distribution, sector access, regulatory approvals. Building your own is slow and expensive. Travelling on someone else’s is neither.
Then — and this is the part people skip — have the conversation you have been avoiding. With a competitor, a neighbour, a supplier’s supplier. Not to give anything away. Simply to describe what you buy and what you discard, and to listen to them do the same.
That is all that happened in the room by the river. One man mentioned a nuisance. Another recognised it.
One last thought
The reason these things stay hidden is not that they are hard to find. It is that no one is looking, because everything appears to be working.
The barge did arrive. The invoices were paid. The waste was collected. Every process functioned exactly as designed, and every month a sum of money left both businesses that neither could see and neither had ever agreed to spend.
Whatever else you take from this, take that. The things quietly costing you most are rarely the things that have gone wrong. They are the things that have always been that way.
Go and draw the map.
Paquita Lamacraft FRSA is the author of SWIVEL — Again, More Shrapnel Free Explosive Growth and The Cuban Approach. She has spent more than twenty years helping organisations across eight countries find the growth already sitting inside their reach. She works as Archer Business Europe, from south-west France.