The Customers You’re Losing Without Knowing It

During World War II, military engineers were trying to solve a problem that felt both urgent and impossible to fully grasp. Bomber planes were being sent out on missions and not coming back, and every loss carried weight. Pilots’ lives were at stake, resources were limited, and the pressure to reduce casualties was immense.

When aircraft did return from missions, they were examined closely. Engineers mapped every bullet hole, every tear in the metal, every place where the plane had been hit and somehow survived. Patterns emerged quickly. Wings were riddled with holes. Sections of the fuselage showed repeated damage. The conclusion seemed obvious: these were the vulnerable areas. These were the places that needed reinforcement.

If armor could be added where the bullets were hitting, more planes would make it home.

It was a practical conclusion. Logical. Grounded in visible evidence.

And it was wrong.

The turning point came when the statistician Abraham Wald looked at the same data and asked a different question. Wald was part of the Statistical Research Group tasked with helping the military make better decisions under uncertainty, and what he noticed wasn’t where the planes were damaged, but what the data itself was missing.

Every plane being studied had one thing in common: it had survived.

The planes that hadn’t made it back weren’t represented in the analysis at all. They weren’t part of the sample. Which meant the data was incomplete in a critical way.

When Wald reframed the problem, the story changed entirely. The bullet holes on returning aircraft weren’t showing where planes were most vulnerable. They were showing where a plane could be hit and still fly well enough to return to base. The truly dangerous areas were the ones with no bullet holes at all — the places where, if a plane was hit, it never came home.

Those were the areas that needed reinforcement.

The insight was counterintuitive and deeply important. It’s now known as survivorship bias: the error of drawing conclusions based only on what survives a process, while overlooking what doesn’t. When we focus exclusively on what we can see — the planes that returned, the companies that succeeded, the people who made it — we risk missing the very information that matters most.

The breakthrough didn’t come from gathering more data. It came from paying attention to absence.

That same way of seeing showed up for me again recently, not in a history book, but sitting across from Mike Cherim, owner of Redline Guiding. Mike has spent decades guiding people through the White Mountains, a place where conditions can shift quickly and mistakes compound fast. What struck me wasn’t a dramatic rescue story or a close call. It was how quietly he talked about success.

Mike described turning people around early in a hike. Not because anyone had failed or because conditions had already deteriorated, but because he was paying attention early. How someone was moving. How quickly they were getting cold. How present they seemed in their own body. These weren’t problems yet. They were signals.

At one point, he said it plainly: “The goal is the parking lot.”

Not the summit. Not the photo. Not the story. The parking lot.

From the outside, a day like that can look like nothing happened. No peak reached. No dramatic moment. No visible achievement to point to. And yet, those are the days when everything has gone exactly right. Everyone makes it home. The system holds.

Mike’s work depends on reinforcing things that never get noticed. Decisions made early enough that nothing escalates. Restraint that doesn’t look impressive. Attention paid to what hasn’t happened yet. Just like Wald’s planes, success is defined by what never occurs.

It’s the same logic, lived out on the ground.

I’ve been noticing this same pattern in another place as well, one that feels less dramatic than wartime aviation or mountain rescue, but no less consequential: how businesses are chosen, trusted, and quietly passed over.

In most small businesses, especially here, attention is focused where it has to be. On the customers who walk through the door. On the work that needs to get done today. On the problems that announce themselves loudly enough to demand action. That focus is not wrong — it’s how businesses survive.

What’s easier to miss are the customers who never arrive.

When someone searches for a business online, reads a handful of reviews, and decides to go elsewhere, there is no notification. No phone call. No email explaining why. The decision happens privately, often in seconds, and then disappears. From the business owner’s perspective, nothing happened.

But something did.

Reputation works quietly in the background, whether we’re paying attention to it or not. Reviews left unanswered. Patterns that slowly form. Stories being told in your absence. None of it creates an immediate crisis, which is exactly why it’s so easy to overlook.

This is survivorship bias playing out in real time. We see the customers who show up and assume that’s the full picture. We hear from the people who are already loyal and assume trust is intact. Meanwhile, the people who decided not to call, not to book, not to walk through the door are invisible. They leave no trace. They don’t complain. They just choose someone else.

The loss doesn’t arrive as conflict. It arrives as silence.

And that silence often looks ordinary.

It looks like a business owner saying, “We’re still busy, but it feels harder than it used to.”

Like needing to work longer hours for the same revenue.

Like a restaurant that fills up on weekends but never quite rebounds during the week.

Like a service provider who keeps attracting price-shoppers instead of the clients they actually want to work with.

Like blaming the economy, the season, or changing times, because there’s nothing concrete to point to.

Nothing is obviously broken. And that’s what makes it dangerous.

Just like the planes that never returned, just like the hikes that never became emergencies, the most consequential moments are often the ones we don’t see.

Only after sitting with all of these stories together did I start to notice how often I do this in my own life. How quickly I orient myself around what’s visible, measurable, and already marked. How tempting it is to treat silence as neutrality rather than information.

I feel it most when something matters deeply to me but doesn’t produce immediate proof that it’s working. When I’m pulled toward work, people, or places that make sense intuitively before they make sense analytically. I’ve said it before, and it remains true: it’s not a brain thing, it’s a heart thing — and that kind of knowing is hard to defend in a world that prefers numbers and certainty.

What the airplanes, the mountains, and reputation all have in common is the same discipline. Paying attention early. Reinforcing what doesn’t get applause. Taking responsibility for what might happen, not just what already has.

The world we’re living in rewards reaction. It trains us to respond to damage once it’s visible, to fix problems after they announce themselves loudly enough to be undeniable. But resilience — whether in aircraft design, outdoor safety, or business — is built much earlier than that.

I’ve been practicing asking myself a simple question: What am I not seeing? 

Not as a critique, and not as a call to fix everything at once, but as a way of widening the frame. A way of remembering that absence can be information, and that silence often carries the most critical message.

If you run a business and things feel steady but strangely heavier than they should, it may not be because something is failing. It may be because the most important signals aren’t the ones making noise.

Sometimes the work is simply learning to notice sooner, to reinforce the parts of the system that don’t leave marks, don’t complain, and don’t announce themselves as vulnerable until it’s too late.

Often, it’s what we don’t see that makes all the difference.

-Amanda