The 90/10 Principle: Why “We’re Too Unique” Is Killing Your Growth
July 31, 2025
By Paul Lennick
How mid-market enterprises can break free from the complexity trap that’s consuming their resources
“Our business is too unique. Our processes are too complex. What works for other companies won’t work for us.”
If you’re a mid-market enterprise leader, you’ve probably said this. And you’re not wrong—your business does have unique elements. But here’s what we’ve learned after working with mid-market companies across diverse industries: in reality, only about 10% of your processes are truly as unique as you think compared to industry peers.
The 90/10 Principle
Most mid-market businesses operate under a dangerous assumption: that they’re 100% unique. In reality, they’re about 90% similar to other companies in their core operational processes, with only 10% truly unique characteristics.
That 10% is real and valuable—it may even be part of your core DNA or your competitive advantage. But the problem? That 10% uniqueness is being used to justify avoiding proven solutions for the other 90%.
The Real Cost of the “Uniqueness Trap”
While you’re convinced everything needs to be custom, here’s what’s actually happening:
Your Leadership Team Spends 60% of Their Time on Routine Functions Instead of strategy sessions about market expansion, your Monday meetings focus on “Why did month-end take so long?” and “Who’s handling the new compliance requirement?”. Your VP of Operations troubleshoots payroll instead of optimizing supply chains.
Your Best People Are Leaving High performers joined to solve interesting challenges—not to build custom solutions for problems that are already solved everywhere else. When talented employees spend more time on routine tasks than meaningful work, they start looking elsewhere.
You’re Falling Behind Competitors While you perfect your “unique” accounts payable process, competitors using standard solutions invest those same resources in customer acquisition, product development, and market expansion. They move faster because they’re not reinventing the wheel.
Capital Gets Consumed by Operations Instead of Growth Every year, significant portions of your growth budget goes toward maintaining and updating custom internal systems. The CFO presents budgets where operational improvements consume resources that could fund revenue-generating activities.
Decision Making Slows to a Crawl Every operational decision becomes a months-long evaluation process searching for the “perfect fit”. Meanwhile, market opportunities pass by while you’re analyzing whether your invoicing process is too unique for standard solutions.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
The business environment has fundamentally shifted:
Talent wars make every hour of high-value employee time precious
Speed to market determines winners in digital transformation
Capital efficiency is critical in uncertain economic conditions
Regulatory complexity requires specialized expertise that’s expensive to maintain internally
Where We Come In: Separating Your True 10% from the Other 90%
This is exactly what we help mid-market enterprises solve. We’ve seen this pattern across industries—from manufacturing to professional services to healthcare organizations, and more. The underlying operational challenges are remarkably similar, even when the surface-level processes look different.
Our approach is straightforward:Identify Your True 10%: What genuinely is, and needs to be, different in your back office processes? Identify the things that are handled in some unique way for a very valid business reason — these deserve tailored solutions and specialized focus to maintain the integrity of the impact and meaning to the business.
Optimize Your 90%: Most likely, 90% of your financial management, HR processes, IT infrastructure, compliance tracking, and reporting are, at their base, common practices that can leverage proven solutions in order to optimize them.
Free Up Strategic Capacity: When routine operations run efficiently through standardized solutions, your leadership team can focus on what actually drives growth—the strategic initiatives that leverage your true competitive advantages.
The 90/10 Reality Check
Ask yourself these questions:
What percentage of your leadership meetings focus on truly strategic issues versus operational challenges?
Where are you spending resources solving problems that have already been solved by others in the market?
What could you accomplish if you freed up 30% of your operational bandwidth?
Which of your “unique” challenges are actually common problems in disguise?
The Bottom Line
Your business is valuable and different, but probably not unique in all the ways you think. The companies that scale successfully recognize where they’re truly differentiated and protect that fiercely, while optimizing everything else with proven, efficient solutions.
Stop letting operational complexity disguised as uniqueness consume the resources you need for actual growth. The 90/10 Principle isn’t about minimizing your business’s value—it’s about maximizing it by focusing your limited resources where they create the most impact.
The question isn’t whether you can afford to standardize your operations. In today’s competitive environment, the question is whether you can afford not to.
At QBSS, we specialize in helping mid-market enterprises (MME) break free from the uniqueness trap. For over 25 years we have guided MME companies across various industries in identifying their true 10% competitive advantage while optimizing their 90% through proven operational outsourced service solutions. Our expertise lies in distinguishing between genuine business differentiators and common operational challenges disguised as complexity.
Ready to discover where your business is truly unique—and where it’s costing you growth? Contact QBSS today for a strategic consultation.
Written by
Paul Lennick
SVP M&A Services
Paul, as the SVP of M&A and Private Equity at ContinuServe, a subsidiary of Quatrro BSS, spearheads ContinuServe's global strategy, team leadership, and operational management for its M&A business, focusing on its carve-out practice. Leveraging expertise in consulting, private equity, and client service, he focuses on driving IT and back-office value creation through outsourcing and optimization.
