Four outpoints turn up in almost every small business: contrary facts, added time, wrong target and incorrectly included datum. Two of them shout and two of them hide, and each one has a tell that gives it away.

An outpoint, in the booklet's sense, is a datum presented as true that fails when you compare it with the rest. Outpoints are the road to the cause, the thing that brings the numbers back once you correct it. These four are the ones you will meet most.

Contrary facts

According to the source, when two statements on one subject contradict each other, you have contrary facts.

The source's own example could come from anyone's business. In the same period it was said that the business made a high of $12,000 that week, and also that it could not pay its staff. At least one of the two is false, and maybe both. The source admits you may not know which is true, but you do know they are contrary, and you can label it.

That is the tool. You do not need to know who is right in order to flag it. It frees you from the usual trap of waiting until things become clear, and meanwhile doing nothing.

Say an owner states in one conversation that this month was excellent and that he cannot pay a supplier. At least one of those is wrong.

Or someone says all her customers are happy and that none of them comes back. You do not have to know which statement is true to see that something is going on.

Or an owner says his employee cannot handle the workload and that the employee leaves on time every day. One of those needs checking.

Added time

The source defines it as the reverse of dropped time, where something that must carry a date has none. The most common example is something taking longer than it possibly could.

It has another side, though: something that took less time than was possible. The source tells of sending a junior executive a checklist of actions that would take a month to complete, and receiving a full compliance report by return mail. She had held the checklist for a single day. For the report to be true, 29 days would have had to be added to the physical universe.

This is the outpoint that is easiest to miss, because it arrives as good news. Someone tells you they have finished, and you are pleased. What gives it away is the gap between the time the job should have taken and the time it did take.

Say an owner gets a message that all 40 customers were contacted, half an hour after he asked. That works out to 45 seconds per customer, including the call.

Or an owner receives a custom supplier quote ten minutes after she asked for one. The quote was a template.

And in the other direction, an installer's jobs that should take half a day take him two. That is the same category, reversed. According to the source, the checklist example is also dropped time, because the categories overlap and that is fine.

Wrong target

The definition is short: an incorrect selection of an objective to attempt or attack. The source illustrates it in two lines. A firm has its premises flooded, and the manager promptly insists on buying fire insurance.

It sounds absurd until you catch yourself doing the same. A wrong target rarely looks foolish. It looks like a sensible, serious step that has no connection to the problem. In a small business it often means improving something that already worked well.

Say an owner is losing customers over delivery times and invests in a logo refresh.

Or an owner has slow collections and switches to new accounting software. Collections stay just as slow.

Or an installer gets complaints about cleanup after the job and buys more professional tools.

Incorrectly included datum

This is the least recognised of the four. According to the source it is the companion of the omitted datum, which is something missing.

The source's example is a camera store set up by someone with no idea of types of cameras. Instead of keeping everything a certain view camera needs in one box, the lens hoods of all the cameras end up jumbled into a single box marked lens hoods. Whoever needs to assemble one camera spends hours looking for its parts among boxes neatly labeled by type of part.

Everything here is beautifully organised, and that is what makes this outpoint so hard to spot. Sorting by the wrong criterion looks just like order.

Say an owner puts every contract in a folder of contracts and every invoice in a folder of invoices. When one customer asks him a question, he has to open four places to answer it.

Or a studio owner sorted her files by type: logos together, banners together, decks together. No project could be found in one place. When she reorganised the same files by client, search time dropped to zero.

What the booklet has on this

The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: contradictions, and time. After them comes a self-check. From there the booklet moves on to the sequence of steps for finding a cause, and to the step that usually gets skipped.

Two of these outpoints arrive in disguise, one as good news and the other as perfect order. Those are the two worth looking at twice.