Every business has skeletons 💀 in the closet — important issues that leaders know about but no one wants to bring to light.

October is the perfect month to deal with them before they spook your 2026 planning. Just like in horror movies, what you ignore always comes back to haunt you.

Here are four scary situations that we see when coaching owners and conducting roadmaps with leadership teams.

1. Poor Performers and the Half Dead

The half dead are people in your company who aren’t performing their job—or are doing it only halfway—but are ignored because they haven’t yet turned into flesh-eating zombies.

You are focused on the urgent, but in reality you are avoiding important matters that can be painful.

Example 1: A very good client of mine just lost his Maintenance Manager, who moved on to another segment in our industry. We knew he was ‘half dead,’ with ongoing problems with management and other employees. When he left, even scarier issues came to light with clients.

In hindsight we should have dealt with the issue more proactively.

Which led me to ask my client, “Who or what else in your company is a potential half dead zombie that you are ignoring?”

Example 2: Another example we uncovered recently is the classic “manager failing to meet expectations.” It wasn’t until our client finally wrote out the manager’s KPIs that they realized the expectations had never been made clear.

In this case, the owner created their own Frankenstein.

Pro Tip: Set KPIs upfront, hold regular check-ins, and perform formal reviews twice a year so you are forced to look in the mirror and confront the half dead.

2. Accounting Dead-Ends, Budgeting Tricks and Profit Coffins

A common October surprise is backloaded budgeting. Owners tell themselves a weak spring will be made up by a strong fall—but that strong fall often never comes, thanks to poor weather and fickle clients, leaving year-end profits in a coffin.

Sources of other financial skeletons:

• Weak margins hidden by temporary savings in overhead. Under-hiring, fast growth or losing a key performer; these all will stress out the remaining people in the department.
• Over-reliance on a super strong division, which hides the weak performance of other divisions. For example, a contractor I work with is very strong in their “school divisions” doing regular high margin work for local school districts. This strength is covering up a dangerous lacking in other areas.
• Poor financial controls: slow month-end closes, sloppy receipts, and poor manual processes create a living hell.

(We have recently been bringing a strong Fractional CFO company into some of our clients, where they have uncovered many of these deadly outdated practices. He is speaking at our Financial Masterclass.)

Pro Tip: Bring a powerful financial flashlight (expert) to shine light in the dark corners of all your accounting and finance processes.

You are never too small a company to get financially savvy. Start now.

3. Vampire Clients that Drain the Lifeblood from You

Owners and companies often cling to blood-sucking clients for a few different reasons:

1. The owner sold the job personally (or it’s a friend or family).
2. Leadership fears the hit to external reputation.
3. The company lacks a clear client strategy, so cutting ties feels arbitrary even if the account is killing you.

All of these non-decisions are based on fear. But bad-fit clients like this suck the life out of your teams and profits.

Pro Tip: The sooner you define your ideal client profiles (you can have more than one), the easier it is to close the coffin on the wrong clients who should be dead to you.

4. Legal Skeletons, Dark Corners and Trap Doors

I-9 compliance. Insurance audits. Safety programs. Problems related to these issues often lurk in the shadows until an ICE raid, lawsuit, or accident brings them front and center.

Don’t wait until you mistakenly fall through a trap door—fix these bad scenarios before they happen.

October is the time for a risk assessment across HR, legal, and insurance evaluation.

Your Challenge: Shine a Bright Light and Clean Out the Cobwebs

It’s that time of year to drag the skeletons from the closet and finally deal with them.

Think about the following risk assessment formula:
Risk = Probability of an event × Impact (or severity) of the damage.

You need to deal with both the important high-probability issues as well as the less likely—but very high-impact—risks.

Don’t ignore the half-dead just because they have not yet turned into flesh-eating zombies.

The zombies always come out to get you—it’s just a matter of time.

Heading into 2026, do a realistic and honest SWOT in every single part of your business—focusing on people, process, and product.

Don’t get haunted by what lurks in the shadows—clean it up and enjoy a brighter 2026.

Happy Halloween 🎃 everyone!

Want to learn more about financial clarity and best practices? Join us at our virtual Financial MasterClass, where we will have expert speakers showing you how to run a financially savvy company with perfect pricing, markups, and expense ratios.

— Jeffrey Scott

P.S. The Early Bird discount for the Financial MasterClass ends in 3+ weeks, Nov 21, so register now.