Most stuck businesses aren't strategy problems — they're concentration problems.
Why the answer to 'we need a marketing strategy' is almost never a marketing strategy.
Talked to a founder this week who said she "needed a marketing strategy."
Two questions in, the real problem surfaced. One person on her team was the bottleneck for every decision — pricing, hiring, partnerships, copy, the lot. Marketing wasn't broken. The decision-making layer above it was overloaded.
No marketing strategy will fix that. You can build the cleanest funnel in the world; if every change has to wait three weeks for one person's attention, the funnel still leaks.
Most stuck businesses aren't strategy problems. They're concentration problems — too many decisions, signals, and dependencies funnelling through too few people. The fix isn't more strategy. It's redistribution. Push some decisions down. Take some off the table entirely. Make the next move possible without the bottleneck having to be in the room.
The interesting work, almost always, is upstream of where the symptom shows up.
Here's the test I use now: when someone says "we need X", I ask what would be true if they had X tomorrow. Half the time, the honest answer is "nothing would change, because the real blocker is somewhere else." That's the conversation worth having.