A management professor once told me that managers often believe their job is to maximize profit. He said it isn’t. Their job is to optimize it. Maximizing profit today frequently means underinvesting in the things that allow a business to perform tomorrow. Optimization requires a longer lens — one that accounts for the foundation you’re building, not just the returns you’re extracting.

I didn’t fully appreciate what he meant until I was managing restaurants early in my career. It was the early days of recycling programs, and I noticed something most of my peers had overlooked. Recycled materials cost significantly less to haul away than trash. By separating our waste properly I was able to cut our waste management bills meaningfully — and instead of banking that savings, I reinvested it into staffing levels.

The results were predictable in retrospect, though nobody around me seemed to expect them. Better staffing meant better service. Better service drove comp sales growth. Stores that had been underperforming started moving in the right direction, and they moved quickly.

Then my regional manager looked at my labor percentage and told me it was too high. I walked him through the connection — the extra investment in staffing, the service improvement, the revenue growth the other stores weren’t producing. His response was direct: yeah, but look how much more profit you would have delivered if you hadn’t spent that.

He wasn’t interested in the optimization. He wanted to maximize.

That dynamic plays out in support organizations every day, just with different numbers. Support is almost universally viewed as a cost center. Sales drives revenue. Services drives expansion. Support answers the phone when something goes wrong. In that framing, the job of support leadership is to do it as cheaply as possible, and budget cycles become justification exercises. Over time, support leaders build frameworks oriented around efficiency — not because efficiency is wrong, but because it’s the language that gets budgets approved. Response times. Handle times. Cost per case. These become the metrics that matter because they speak to the people controlling the resources.

What gets lost is the connection between support and the two things that actually determine whether a business is healthy — customer satisfaction and margin. Support, done well, directly drives both. Done poorly, it quietly erodes both. But the erosion is slow and diffuse, and by the time it shows up clearly in the data, the decisions that caused it are long forgotten.

This dynamic has particular consequences in private equity-backed businesses where cost optimization before exit is disciplined and deliberate. The pressure to tighten operations and improve EBITDA is real. But how that discipline is applied to support matters enormously.

A support organization built on the right foundation — where people, process, and systems are genuinely aligned to customer satisfaction and margin — can absorb aggressive cost reduction and still hold. The capability is real. The customer relationships are real. The institutional knowledge that keeps those relationships intact is real. You can cut into that organization and it will flex without breaking.

A support organization that has been running on efficiency metrics, budget constrained from the start, has no such buffer. When costs get cut, the customer experience absorbs it directly. Response times extend, relationships erode, satisfaction scores move in a direction that the next owner will have to explain.

The insight is straightforward: the time to optimize support is before exit mode, not during it. Build the foundation when you have the runway to do it right. A well-optimized support organization is an asset that holds its value through a transaction. One that was minimized as a cost center is a liability waiting to be discovered.

Optimizing support doesn’t mean spending more. It means investing differently — and measuring differently. It means anchoring every operational decision to the two goals support exists to serve rather than to the process metrics that are easier to report. It means understanding that metrics reflect behaviors, and behaviors reflect whether people’s skills are growing. The right operational focus is on reinforcing the behaviors that build capability and correcting the ones that don’t — because when the behaviors are right, the metrics follow. The efficiency approach manages directly to the metrics, and while the numbers may move in the right direction, the underlying behaviors don’t necessarily develop. Sometimes they get worse — people learn to produce the right number rather than deliver the right outcome, and the organization mistakes one for the other.

It means creating enough operational margin that when the business needs to tighten, there is something to tighten into without immediately compromising what matters.

My regional manager never accepted the connection between the labor investment and the revenue growth. The data was there. He just didn’t want to see it.

The most expensive support decisions I’ve seen in nearly thirty years haven’t been the ones where someone spent too much. They’ve been the ones where someone optimized the wrong thing — and didn’t realize it until the consequences were already entrenched.

Optimize the right things. Build the foundation. The returns will show up.