Do You Also Employ Time Thieves and Money Thieves?

Not long ago, a client sat across from me, full of determination. “I want to go to the bank and get a 500k Euro loan,” he said. He was convinced that more money was the answer to his business challenges. With that loan, he imagined new machines and fresh marketing campaigns. But I stopped him. “You don’t need a loan,” I told him. “What you need is to clean up your business.”

Time Thieves and Money Thieves are eating your profits.

The Real Culprits: Time Thieves and Money Thieves

Every business has what I call time thieves and money thieves. They sneak into organizations quietly, eating away at productivity and profitability.

Examples of Time Thieves

• Unclear responsibilities and communication loops → employees spend hours clarifying tasks and correcting mistakes instead of moving forward.

• Bureaucratic approval processes → simple decisions stall because too many meetings are required and managers lack the information they need to decide.

• Outdated tools and lack of digitalization → manual data entry, duplicate work, or waiting on slow systems.

• Unnecessary meetings → long discussions with little output that delay real progress.

Examples of Money Thieves

• Inefficient processes → wasted resources because workflows are longer, more complex, and more costly than they should be.

• High error costs → mistakes caused by poor processes that result in rework, customer complaints, or lost revenue.

• Idle capacities and waiting times → employees or machines that sit unused while still generating costs.

Individually, these inefficiencies don’t seem dramatic. But together, they can consume hundreds of thousands of euros—the very same money many entrepreneurs believe they need to borrow from the bank.

The Attic Problem

Here’s what I’ve seen time and time again: businesses, just like houses, collect clutter.

The older they get, the more they resemble an attic full of boxes nobody has opened in years. Outdated processes, redundant tools, and habits that once made sense but now just take up space.

And even young startups aren’t immune. In their race to scale, they focus on product and growth while neglecting the systems and processes holding everything together. Very quickly, they end up with a messy back office that drags down the entire operation.

The Conversation Shift

So I asked my client: “Why borrow half a million when you already have half a million slipping through the cracks?”

Silence.

That’s when the lightbulb went off. It wasn’t about getting more money from outside—it was about reclaiming what was already inside the business.

The Real Growth Strategy

Loans add obligations: debt, interest, and pressure. Cleaning up your business adds freedom: efficiency, speed, and profit. The real growth strategy isn’t more capital. It’s fewer drains.

And here’s the truth: if you don’t deal with the inefficiencies, the thieves will swallow any loan you take—no matter how big.

The Takeaway

So before you rush to the bank, pause. Walk through your business as if it were a cluttered attic. Open the boxes. Throw out what’s weighing you down. You might just find the money you were about to borrow—sitting there, hidden in plain sight.