The hum that cost me a refrigerator
My refrigerator died this weekend. There were signs it was coming for months. The low hum that came and went. The temperature fluctuations. I noticed it off and on, but pushed it into the pile of things I’d deal with later. It became easy to ignore because the problems would come and go, and let’s be real, no one wants to shop for appliances and deal with the hassle of it.
So, consciously or unconsciously, I just let it fall by the wayside until that low hum became a persistent, loud whirring and the temperature in the fridge and freezer began to sink. Now, we have an urgent problem on our hands, and of course, the timing is terrible.
This is exactly what happens in business when we let low grade problems go unattended. Last week, we talked about Refine, and I urged you not to overreact to those problems and make them bigger than they are.
As we dig into REINVENT, I’m going to say the opposite: don’t underreact.
It’s easy to treat small annoyances in our businesses as just that. We see dips and ebbs in the flow, then get one good week or one positive signal, and we tell ourselves it's fine, or hope it resolves on its own. This is a completely normal response to ambiguous data, but it's also exactly how businesses end up in Reinvent without ever consciously deciding to go there.
Before we press forward, I want to acknowledge something, so it doesn’t seem like I’m casting blame. Running a business is hard, and knowing when to act and in what order is genuinely difficult. It doesn’t say anything about you as the leader of the business if you miss something or send a hope and prayer into the universe that the situation will resolve itself. That’s what makes Reinvent such a hard space to be in.
I also want to acknowledge that there are often things outside our control that can exacerbate and accelerate the problems when we’re in this space. There’s no doubt that market volatility, political and economic uncertainty over the past few years, the rise of AI, and the caution it's created in how people buy has wreaked havoc on many businesses. And… these kinds of fluctuations, some even more severe, aren’t new. They often aren’t something we can just continue waiting out and hoping they settle down. As a leader, it’s your job to be responsive, and where possible, proactive, regardless of what's happening externally.
If you haven’t yet taken the Business Crossroads Diagnostic, I highly recommend doing that before you press forward. It’s 5 questions and will take less than 2 minutes. You can access it here.
So, where do we look first when we find ourselves in REINVENT?
I always encourage clients to start with three questions:
Has the market shifted, or have you? How do you know?
What problem did your business used to solve that it may not solve anymore… or is no longer needed?
If you rebuilt your business from scratch today, knowing what you know now, what would look different?
These three questions give us some important information. We can dig into where the shift or tension we’re feeling may be coming from, external and/or internal shifts. It could be both. It also invites us to look at whether the problem we’re known for helping clients solve is still relevant, and it gives us the space to think more creatively about what we’ve built and what we might do differently if we didn’t feel bound to what we’ve already created.
From there, we tackle three areas, and the priority of those will depend a lot on your unique business. I mentioned last week that it’s easy to get sucked into doing what others are doing, following their frameworks or methodology, or worse, following generic advice that you might get via ChatGPT or Claude. Those things can be useful in a broad sense, but at the end of the day, your business is unique, and what is actually happening under the hood is also unique… which means you need solutions for your business that are also unique.
Positioning and Messaging
If you’ve been in business for a while, you know the market doesn’t always reward the best solution. In almost every case, it rewards the clearest one. If your positioning hasn’t kept pace with what’s shifted in the overall market or with your ideal client, you could be doing genuinely good work and still be invisible to the people who really need your help. So ask yourself:
If a stranger read your website or saw your content on social media, would they know exactly who you help and how?
Is the language you're using still relevant to your ideal client? It’s quite common to see phrases you may have coined start to become commonplace, which then means your message and terminology aren’t landing the way they used to.
The last thing I’ll say here is that your positioning should evolve with you. As you shift who you’re actually serving vs. who you used to serve when you started the business, your positioning and messaging have to evolve, too.
I have done this several times. When I shifted away from working only with corporations in 2018, At the time, I was mostly serving women who had just made the leap into entrepreneurship from corporate. Their needs and challenges are quite different from who I actually serve today: established female founders of service-based businesses. Their needs and challenges, and the support they need, are different from early stage entrepreneurs. Neither is bad… just different, and I’ve had to evolve my offers, my messaging, and how I’ve positioned myself in the marketplace to be responsive to that.
Offer Alignment
An offer that was right for the problem people had two years ago may not be the problem they have now, even if nothing about the offer itself has changed. Ask yourself:
Who is actually inquiring about your services right now?
Is your offer solving the problem people have now, or is it solving the problem you were solving when you built the offer originally?
I’ve talked a lot about AI recently, but I think it’s important to think about where and how is AI impacting the way your clients are solving their primary problem? One of my clients has consistently seen clients shift away from hiring Operations experts because they use Claude Cowork and other AI programs to streamline their own operations. So, the primary offers she had no longer meets the needs of clients who would have once been ideal for her. We are currently evolving her work, what she offers, and how she positions herself to address other challenges that show up in the Ops space.
Don’t be afraid to evolve. It can feel hard and a bit like trial and error, but sticking to what you’ve always done won’t keep your business safe.
Founder Alignment
You’ve heard me speak a lot over the last two years about big ideas, conviction-driven visions, and building from a place that is deeply in alignment with where you want to go in your business.
But this is a space that gets ignored, or at minimum, treated like a nice to have too often. It’s possible (and common) to have a business that’s technically working, and you, as the founder, feel the pull to Reinvent, because you’re not the same person who built it. Don’t shove this down in the later category. There are ways to strategically evolve your business without destroying everything you’ve built, so that everything is fully in alignment.
When a founder comes to me, and it’s clear that this is where the problem lies, I always ask the following question:
If you were starting today, with no sunk cost and no reputation to protect, would you build this same business?
We can learn a lot from this answer, and it’s almost always no. That doesn’t negate what you’ve built. In almost every case, the business you’ve built was designed by you and did the thing you intended… and people evolve. That means the business has to evolve with you, too.
If you’re no longer energized by the business, you've built, this is a good place to start. When you peel back the layers and figure out why then we can respond proactively.
Tailor Your Marketing and Offers for Traction
In the S.T.R.A.T.E.G.Y. Method, one of the most important elements is tailoring your marketing and offers for traction. Everything we’ve talked about shapes what this will look like. For years, I’ve encouraged my clients to think about The 5Cs of Client Attraction:
Captivate
Connect
Cultivate
Convert
Care
I won’t walk through them in detail here, but when you break down your marketing and sales system, where are the gaps? Most of us are better and more consistent about some of these than we are others. Knowing where the gaps are will give you a lot of insight into where to focus your time, energy, and attention.
One note of caution here. Don’t try to fix all of this at once. I see this happen too often where a founder in the Reinvent phase tries to fix all the challenges they’re seeing simultaneously, and without fail, it turns into months of chaos instead of a more targeted, faster fix.
That’s why I strongly encourage you to seek outside support if you find yourself in the Reinvent space. It’s too easy to ignore the hum in your own business. We normalize it, explain it away, pretend it isn’t as big of a deal as it likely will become, and hope and pray it resolves itself. After being in business nearly 15 years, I can honestly tell you it rarely does.
Getting an outside perspective isn't there to manufacture urgency; it's there to help you diagnose the real problem, determine the depth of the issue, and make strategic changes before you need a full scale overhaul… or a refrigerator, in my case.
If you haven’t yet taken the diagnostic, start here. When you get your results, you’ll also get an in-depth guide to help you unpack your findings.
And if you know you need support, The Founder’s Strategy Intensive is a 60-Day, done-with-you sprint that will help you diagnose exactly what's happening in your business (even if it's more than one thing), give you direction and a step-by-step plan to address whatever challenge you're facing, and the support and accountability to make it happen.
Next week, we’re diving into Expand. This is often a fun problem to have. You’re growing which means it’s easy to lose sight of when you’ve outgrown your own capacity.
Stay tuned… and in the meantime, I’ll be shopping for a shiny, new fridge.
