Most strategy documents I’m shown are lists of things to start. New markets, new products, new hires. Very few contain a single thing the company will stop doing, which is why so few of them change anything.
Every company I’ve worked with had more ideas than people. The constraint is never imagination. It is attention.
Why stopping is so hard
Everything you might stop has someone who cares about it: a customer who loves it, a team who built it, a founder who announced it. Stopping feels like admitting a mistake, and there is always a chance it would have worked next quarter.
Count the real cost
When Kova looked at its four product lines, the headline margins looked fine. Once returns, support time, inventory and the attention of a 32-person team were added in, three of the four were losing money. Nobody had been hiding it; nobody had added it up.
- What does it really cost, including the people who work on it?
- Who would miss it, and would they pay more to keep it?
- What would you do with the time if it were gone?
Decide on a date, not a direction
“We’ll wind down the kitchen scale” is a hope. “We stop selling it on 30 September and support ends on 31 March” is a decision. Dates let customers, partners and your own team plan around the change.
A strategy that doesn’t stop anything is a wish list with a budget.
Expect a bad month
The weeks after stopping something are uncomfortable. Revenue dips, someone leaves, a loyal customer writes a sad email. This is when founders are most tempted to reverse course. Write down before you decide what you expect to happen, so you can tell the difference between the expected pain and a real warning sign.
Kova’s bad month came and went. Two quarters later, the product it kept was growing 62% faster than before.
