What you can test in your company on your own

For: owner · sales director · marketing

Lost a tender by a few percent? Good product, on-time delivery, strong references. The other two bidders offered exactly the same, so the buyer with the red pen did the only thing you can do with three identical offers: circled the lowest price.

Try this

• Take your advantage statement: “We're reliable and high quality.”
• Say the opposite out loud: “We're unreliable and low quality.”
• If no one would ever claim the opposite, it's not an advantage. It's table stakes.
• If someone does the opposite and wins, you've written a real choice. And strategy starts exactly where you deliberately give up one of the options.

Three pairs that thrive side by side in the same industry

• Broad stock and immediate dispatch, next to a company that makes everything to order, to spec.
• Sales only through your own sales force, next to a model built entirely on partners.
• Everything under one roof, next to one thing the company does better than anyone.

Both sides of every pair make money, because they chose, and they can say who they deliberately don't sell to.

What it tells you: run the test on the three claims your company makes about itself most often. The ones that survive are your real advantages.

What you just wrote is your version. Ask your leadership team the same question and note how far their answers are from yours.

For: owner · the whole leadership team

“Strategic” sticks to anything and commits you to nothing: sales hears growth, operations hears stability, finance hears cost savings.

The label adds weight, not content. Nothing changes; it just looks better and becomes harder to challenge, because questioning anything “strategic” looks like you don't get it.

Strip the word out and two questions remain that nobody can answer with just a nod: how do we win, and what do we stop doing as a result? You have to be able to finish “we're the only ones who…” with a fact, not an adjective.

Try this: say how your company wins in five sentences

• Who we sell to, and who we deliberately don't.
• What customers get from us that they can't get elsewhere.
• Why they pay more for it.
• What we stop doing as a result.
• What our people will do differently next week.

Then you use those five sentences in every budget, every hire, every pricing call and every dispute between departments. Not just once, at an offsite.

What it tells you: the sentence you can't say is a decision you haven't made. And those are the decisions that cost a company the most.

That's the view from your chair. Give the same test to your sales director: the gap between your answers is exactly where the company loses money.

For: owner · CFO

The annual plan has ten items, and every one is a yes. Ten yeses in a row means the company hasn't chosen.

A real choice hurts, because someone always loses something:

• a segment we stop serving,
• a product we stop developing,
• a customer we let a competitor have.

A strategy where nobody gives anything up is a wish list with a budget.

Adding something new is easy: you just nod. Stopping something that's already running is hard: people, budgets and reputations hang on it, and everyone protects their turf.

Meanwhile you have the same people and the same money. Spread a team built for five things across ten, and everything runs at half speed. The company doesn't have ten priorities then. It has none.

Try this

• List everything you put people and money into today: products, segments, markets, projects.
• Ask two questions of each: if we didn't have this today, would we start it tomorrow? And what does the customer lose if we stop?
• Wherever the answer is no, or nothing, you have a candidate to stop.
• Stop enough that what's left runs at full strength. For every item you stop: an owner, an end date, and who tells the team.

What it tells you: which of those ten would your customer not even notice if it stopped? Strategy starts with what you deliberately give up. Without a trade-off, it's only the illusion of choice.

You can do the test alone in ten minutes. What you can't do alone is measure the gap between your answer and the answer of the person who was with a customer on Tuesday.

For: owner · the whole leadership team

Execution is the easy target: it points at people, discipline and middle management, never at the decisions made at the top. The problem usually sits higher, in how the strategy was made. It comes down to three things.

First · What strategy is and isn't

A budget, departmental targets, a list of initiatives, a three-year plan, a vision on the wall: you can write all of it without making a single choice. A living strategy needs seven answers:

• Where we play, and where we deliberately don't: segments, customers.
• How we win there, and what makes us unique.
• What capabilities we have to do it: people, know-how, money, infrastructure.
• Which management systems hold it together: structure, processes, incentives, metrics, feedback from the market and between departments.
• What company culture will carry it, and whether it's safe to tell the truth.
• What we stop doing as a result.
• What we want to achieve: our winning aspiration.

The third answer is the one most often skipped. A choice you have neither the people nor the money for can't be executed.

Second · How it's made

The usual way: the leadership team builds it with consultants, the finished strategy is announced, and people see it for the first time when it can no longer be changed. They nod, and carry on doing things their way. How it should work:

• Middle management and the frontline are in the conversation from day one.
• Decisions are owned by the people who will carry them out.
• Everyone knows how their work connects to the company's direction.
• A fixed review cadence: at least quarterly, monthly in the early phase.

Strategy is owned by the people who shape it together and then carry it out. The leadership team can sustain it only while the people across the table own it too.

Third · How it turns into action

Only once the choice is agreed do you set decision rights: what each level can decide on its own, up to what limit, and on what basis. Projects and tasks come after that. Not the other way round.

• Every department spells out what the choice means for it.
• It's aligned across departments, so sales doesn't promise what production can't deliver.
• Everyone knows what to stop, what to keep and what to start doing differently.
• One consistent message to customers from every department.
• If a department comes back saying it can't be done with today's people and money, you revisit the choice, not the department's competence.
• An owner, a deadline and a check-in a month later for every change.

If nothing was stopped anywhere, the strategy never made it into action. You just added another layer of work.

A question for your next meeting: not “where is execution stuck?”, but “how is our strategy made, who was involved, and does it make sense to our customers and to us?”

Write your answer down and leave it for a week. Then ask three people who report to you the same question, and compare what you wrote with what you hear.

For: leadership team · middle management

Direction and choices are the compass: they shouldn't change every quarter. The route is the GPS, and it recalculates all the time. When a company changes both at once without saying which, people can no longer tell a route correction from a change of destination.

And the signal to recalculate doesn't sit with the leadership team. It sits with the people who were with a customer on Tuesday. The whole loop is only as good as the honesty of what people feed into it.

What it tells you: next time you change the plan, say one sentence out loud: are we changing the destination, or just the route? You'll save yourself six months of confusion.

What you just wrote is your version. Ask your leadership team the same question and note how far their answers are from yours.

For: owner · marketing

A better online shop, faster logistics, a wider range: soon everyone in your category will have them, because better means comparable. And whatever customers can compare, they compare on price. What was your advantage ten years ago is table stakes today.

Companies that coasted on being good for years are the first to lose their position. Not because they got worse. Because everyone else got better.

What it tells you: Unique is better than better. The harder your value is to replace, the less price matters. Being better is exhausting. Being different is a decision.

You can read this on your own. Whether it holds in your company, only the people who deal with customers every day can tell you.

For: owner · sales director

Try this

• Imagine you raise prices by 10% tomorrow.
• Write down, by name, which customers would leave and which would stay.

What it tells you: if many would leave, your customers like you but don't value you. Two different things, and only the second one pays. The harder your value is to replace, the more pricing power you have.

Write your answer down and leave it for a week. Then ask three people who report to you the same question, and compare what you wrote with what you hear.

For: owner · leadership team

• Value: customers pay you more than they'd pay anyone else, because you give them something they can't get elsewhere.
• Cost: you deliver the same for less than anyone else, because you built the whole company to do it.
• The dead end: not the cheapest, and unable to charge more. Nothing protects your margin there.

And to be clear: value is no licence for higher costs. If you deliver more and it costs you more than it should, you'll be a decent company, not a great one. Exactly the kind of company an acquirer looks for: they cut the costs and pocket the margin themselves.

What it tells you: which of the two ways out your company is on. If that's hard to answer, you're in the dead end.

That's the view from your chair. Give the same test to your sales director: the gap between your answers is exactly where the company loses money.

For: owner

• What you sell. At Probugas we stopped selling litres of gas and started selling the project, its operation and the certainty that came with them. Competitors stayed cheaper, and we still became number one, because nobody was comparing litres any more.
• Your place in the value chain. At Cylinder Gas, nine out of ten cylinders went through dealers. Over five years we moved that business onto direct contracts, and for the first time the company knew who was buying and why.
• Price and the rules around it. One price list for everyone, with discounts for whoever shouts loudest, is the most expensive habit in B2B: you undercharge the customer who'd pay more, and you lose the one who won't pay anyway.

What it tells you: which of the three you can pull most easily. Start there. The other two stay in place, and today's model keeps paying the bills in the meantime.

That's the view from your chair. The only way to see it from the chair next to yours is to ask.

For: owner

You can keep adding skills forever: another course, another tool, another framework. Capacity doesn't work that way. Capacity is a container with a fixed volume: something new only fits when you empty something old out.

So you don't move forward by learning something new. You move forward by stopping doing something yourself.

Capacity rests on three things, and the weakest one sets the company's ceiling.

• Pressure: how much uncertainty you can live with while someone else decides.
• Letting go: how many decisions get made without your signature.
• Dissent: who last changed one of your decisions.

It looks like a loop: you make the day-to-day decisions because there's no system, and you can't build the system because the day-to-day has eaten your capacity. The way out is always the same: let go first, then build the system. It'll get worse for a while, and that's exactly the pressure you have to carry.

What you free up capacity for when you let go of the day-to-day

• Where the company is heading.
• The decision rights that let the company decide without you.
• Whether your people are allowed to disagree out loud and make their own decisions.

Three things that don't work without you, and that nobody owns. That's why an outside hire doesn't fix it either: a new sales director arrives, it looks good for six months, then everything is back where it was.

The one thing that matters hasn't changed: who decides. Managers stay just as quiet; only the person they stay quiet in front of has changed. Unless you change, the company is back to its old ways within a year.

Often you're not grinding because people or systems are missing; you can have both. Without a clear choice from you, all you get is the same grind, faster.

What it tells you: your best people hand you the biggest bill. They stop speaking up, and they're the first to leave, because they have options. You can hire people. You can't hire capacity. There's only one, and it's yours.

Nobody can take this test for you. Check your answers with the person who most often brings you decisions to sign.

For: leadership team · middle management

Full calendars, everyone rushing, dashboards glowing, and the company isn't moving. Lots of motion, little progress. It starts at the top: meetings without decisions, full calendars for everyone, and at the end of the chain a salesperson filling in spreadsheets instead of being with customers.

Your KPIs measure activity: meetings, quotes, calls. Measure activity and that's exactly what you get. Nothing more. When results don't come, the answer is always the same: do more. So everyone runs faster on the same treadmill, they're wrung out by month-end, and the numbers haven't moved.

That's why the dashboards are green: they measure busyness, not progress. You can't make decisions on numbers like that; the meeting notes them and moves on to the budget.

And nobody wants change anyway: “we've done it this way for ten years and it worked” sounds so safe that no one pushes back.

Meanwhile, the market has moved. Customers buy, compare and decide differently than they did a few years ago. Your numbers know nothing about it: they measure the past and are built to defend what you already have, not to show where you're heading.

So you don't lose your market position overnight. You lose it slowly, and find out late. While you're watching today, someone else is taking your tomorrow.

Try this: change the questions at your next meeting

• Instead of “how much did we do?”: what are we doing differently from last year, and for which new customers?
• What are customers paying us for today that didn't exist a year ago?
• Who did we stop selling to, to free up resources?

Nobody can accept numbers like these with just a nod, and running faster won't hit them. A meeting that looks at these numbers suddenly has something to decide.

What it tells you: the first is busyness, the second is business. You can report the first. You can bank the second.

Write your answer down and leave it for a week. Then ask three people who report to you the same question, and compare what you wrote with what you hear.

For: owner · anyone who runs a meeting

The difference is whether the decision can be reversed.

• For reversible decisions, calm works: a deadline, the order of tasks, a supplier on trial.
• For irreversible ones, silence is a different matter: the company's direction, price, a key account, people, killing a project.

When everyone nods there, the real opinion stays in the corridor. Four people give one answer, and it's the owner's: your word carries the most weight in the room, and once you speak first, nobody else does.

Meetings where everyone agrees look healthy at first glance. They're the moments when the whole company decides together to do nothing. Or to do something no one at the table actually agrees with.

Everyone weighs what it costs to speak up against what it costs to stay quiet. Silence always comes out cheaper, and nobody sticks their neck out.

Try this at tomorrow's meeting

• Before each item, ask whether it can be reversed.
• Decide reversible ones fast.
• Don't move past an irreversible one until you've heard everyone at the table. Give your view last.
• Open irreversible items with: “If you're only here to nod, you can go straight to lunch.”
• And once a month, ask: “What could I, as the boss, have done better this month?” Count the seconds of silence. Each one is a diagnosis.

What it tells you: you'll never see silence in the meeting room on an invoice. You pay for it later, under another name: a price you didn't raise, a project six months late, a customer who left without complaining. Silence is cheaper for everyone at the table; the company picks up the bill.

You can do the test alone in ten minutes. What you can't do alone is measure the gap between your answer and the answer of the person who was with a customer on Tuesday.

For: owner

Try this: answer six questions

• Which lucrative opportunity did you turn down last year?
• How many decisions are waiting for your signature today?
• Can someone in your warehouse say how your company wins and what it doesn't do?
• When did a customer's move, not a date in the calendar, last change your strategy?
• What did you last actually stop, with an owner and a deadline?
• Does the company run while you're away for a month, phone and email off?

What it tells you: if four of your six answers aren't good, your company is running on one cylinder. And that cylinder is you.

You can do the test alone in ten minutes. What you can't do alone is measure the gap between your answer and the answer of the person who was with a customer on Tuesday.

For: leadership team · middle management

We want growth, and we don't want risk. We want to give people autonomy, and we want to know what's going on. Tensions like these run for years, and the two sides take turns winning. A compromise produces an average that works for neither.

A third option holds the best of both sides at once. And you won't find it anywhere people aren't allowed to say out loud that the other side has a point.

What it tells you: in your next dispute, don't ask who's right. Ask what would have to be true for both sides to work at once.

You can read this on your own. Whether it holds in your company, only the people who deal with customers every day can tell you.

For: sales director · salespeople

What matters is the state the salesperson walks in with, and whether they come across as an equal or as someone who needs the deal more than the customer does. Sit down needing to close today, and you've lost equal footing before you've even opened your bag. You pay for it in the price.

This is where sales meets your company culture: a salesperson who's afraid to bring you bad news will be afraid in front of customers too. If people can't speak up inside, they won't speak up outside.

What it tells you: whether anyone in your company develops your salespeople's professional identity, not just their technique. A sales system should back your salespeople and make their work easier, not police them.

You won't see this in the numbers. You'll see it in how your salesperson walks out of a meeting with you.

For: leadership team · production · service

• Every promise to a customer has a named owner inside the company.
• Handovers between departments follow a fixed format and timing, not a corridor agreement.
• On larger deals, you know what you promised would change for the customer, and six months later you know how much of it they've actually got. That's the strongest reason they'll call again without shopping around.

The last people to deal with the customer, the driver, the service technician, the billing clerk, are your fastest source of truth from the market. Today that truth mostly dies at the loading bay and never makes it back inside. Claims and complaints aren't a nuisance: they're the cheapest data you'll get on where the company breaks down.

Try it as a test: ask a customer who left whether it was the product, the price or the last bad handover. Usually it's the handover.

The call takes ten minutes, and nobody can make it for you.

For: owner

Try this

• Do you know exactly why the company is growing?
• Is that your doing, or just a good market?
• Could someone other than you use the same growth driver?
• Do you have a plan to accelerate it while it lasts?
• Which advantage from five years ago are you still paying for out of your margin, even though customers no longer value it?

What it tells you: growth is fire. Either it hits a ceiling you can't explain, or conditions change and it dies down as fast as it flared up. If you know what's fuelling your growth, you can defend it.

That's the view from your chair. Give the same test to your sales director: the gap between your answers is exactly where the company loses money.

For: owner · leadership team

Exploit means getting the most out of what pays the bills today: today's customers, today's offer, today's way of selling. Nothing gets torn down here; this is where you defend the margin. Explore means running two or three bets at the same time: a different segment, a different region, a different way of creating value and charging for it.

Rules that make it work

• Both tracks get people, time and money allocated up front. “When we have time” means never; the day-to-day eats everything.
• A bet isn't a slide at a meeting: it's a test with a few real customers, with a deadline and a named owner.
• When you disagree, don't ask who's right. Ask what would have to be true for it to work, and test the one or two shakiest assumptions cheaply in the field.
• If today's business can't yet fund its own running, exploring has to wait. You can only run both tracks from solid ground.

What it tells you: count how many bets you have running today with an owner, a deadline and a budget. Zero means you're only exploiting, until the day the market moves.

That's the view from your chair. The only way to see it from the chair next to yours is to ask.

For: owner · purchasing · sales director

Between the manufacturer and the end customer there's a chain, and everyone has a position in it: one player controls the bottleneck and dictates prices and terms, another can be swapped out within a week and takes whatever is left.

Try this

• Map the chain from manufacturer to end customer and mark where you sit.
• Who in it can say no?
• How long would it take your customer to replace you?

What it tells you: who really dictates your margin. Until you know, someone else is writing your price list. And if you don't sell direct to the end customer, you have to build value for both at once: for them and for your channel.

What you just wrote is your version. Ask your leadership team the same question and note how far their answers are from yours.

For: sales director · marketing

• The first market: customers actively looking for what you sell. That's where they compare you, and price decides.
• The second market: people who aren't looking, and who buy when something catches their attention. It's bigger, and a customer who decides before the need even arises doesn't compare you at all.

What it tells you: look at who your marketing and salespeople are targeting. If it's only people already asking for quotes, you're playing in the smaller of the two markets. And the worse one.

Write your answer down and leave it for a week. Then ask three people who report to you the same question, and compare what you wrote with what you hear.