Sticky Branding | 🦖 Too Many Threats

🦖 Too Many Threats
🧭 Direction Before Time
🔪 Kill Your Darlings

🦖 Too Many Threats

Fear is paralyzing, especially when it feels like everything is out to get you. And if you follow the media, it can feel that way.

Negativity is taking its toll. Consumer sentiment in the United States hit a 50-year low in May, according to the University of Michigan’s sentiment index.

Threats abound everywhere, but not all are equal. It’s a tangle, and you have to prioritize which threats to actively manage, which to monitor, and which to ignore.

In strategic planning, I like to ask, “What will eat you if you don’t eat it first?” We call these Predators.

You may face dozens of Predators of varying size and danger. The question isn’t what to do about each and every one of them, but how you’re going to navigate around, through, or with them to grow your business.

Prioritize the most relevant Predators. Often the scariest and most discussed ones are more bluster and bark than actual bite. They’re like a scary monster in the closet. Once you turn on the lights and examine what’s scaring you, you can make a plan to solve it.

The more problematic Predators are internal. They’re the things you’re not dealing with that make your business brittle to the big, external threats.

Once you can name and prioritize your Predators, you can build a strategy to combat and grow through them.

🧭 Direction Before Time

The compass was invented over a century before the clock. Time doesn’t matter if you don’t know where you are going.

Before the compass, Mediterranean ships typically stopped sailing between October and April, because the low winter visibility made celestial navigation too risky.

Time, or achieving things in certain time frames, is a good constraint once you have clear navigation.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras popularized the BHAG, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in their book, Built to Last. They defined a BHAG as a vision-level goal that requires 10 to 30 years of effort for an organization to complete.

With the speed and volume of disruption, the idea of a 30-year vision seems quaint to me. Time-based planning only works when markets are stable.

You need a compass, not a clock, to define your growth strategy.

I advise clients to navigate using growth levels, or 3X Growth. Stages of growth are a more tangible and predictable constraint to define infrastructure investments and manage Predators than time-based targets.

Every time a business triples in size, it fundamentally changes. You can break this down by revenue: $3 million, $10 million, $30 million, $100 million, and so on.

Your strategy navigates on two points:

Where you’re at: Is your organization under- or over-developed in specific areas (finance, operations, HR, sales) for its current stage of growth?
Where you’re going: What is the infrastructure and capabilities required to operate at the next level?

How fast you decide to grow is easier to answer when you know how to get to where you’re going.

📊 One Stat to Watch

$3.1 Trillion

Big Tech’s AI boom is being built on $3.1 trillion in off‑balance‑sheet commitments. This exceeds hyperscalers’ annual capex by five times, according to the Wall Street Journal.

🔪 Kill Your Darlings

“It’s not personal, it’s just business” is not true. Business is always personal.

We pour our creativity and energy into our jobs. We invest and make commitments. And it all becomes personal, especially when things aren’t going well.

One of the hardest moments for a CEO or business owner is to walk away from an investment you committed everything to.

We pejoratively refer to this as “killing your darlings,” but that’s not fair or accurate. If you committed millions of dollars to a new building, equipment, or a product, it hurts when you realize it’s not working. You committed to the initiative with the best intentions and the best data at the time. Then things changed.

You can try to grow to make the investment work. The trouble is it’s a losing game. Your business is overbuilt for the wrong market, and underbuilt for the right one. The darling is a liability.

It’s not easy. It’s downright painful. But it’s also just business.

When it’s not working, or it’s putting your business at risk, shed the sunk costs and investments that no longer serve your company’s growth or profitability.

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