What We See in Successful Businesses
5 minute read
There are no certainties in business. Clients give verbal approvals and then pull back. Deals feel done until they aren’t. Pipelines look healthy right up until they suddenly aren’t. Anyone who’s been in business long enough learns not to count outcomes before they actually land.
What does exist, though, are patterns. As Herbert Simon once said, “A pattern is information compressed.”
Patterns aren’t guarantees, and they don’t remove risk, but they repeat often enough that ignoring them becomes dangerous. Your ability to recognise those patterns early, and act on them properly, has a real impact on whether your business grows or stays exactly where it is.
One of the clearest patterns we’ve recognised didn’t come from analysing campaigns or reviewing results after the fact. It came from a small operational decision we made internally, charging for our strategy work.
Before that change, starting with new clients felt extremely unpredictable. Some relationships compounded year after year and turned into genuine partnerships. Others stalled quickly, sometimes immediately, despite looking similar on the surface. Same industry, similar size, similar ambition. There was always an explanation after the fact, but very little that helped us identify the difference early enough to avoid the bad fit in the first place.
Charging for strategy changed that almost immediately.
The work itself didn’t change. The questions didn’t change. The time spent understanding a business and mapping a pathway forward stayed the same. The only difference was that the first step now required a small financial decision. The result was confronting. Around ninety percent of the clients who historically became poor fits disappeared almost overnight.
That forced us to look more closely at why.
The cost of that strategy work isn’t significant. It covers several hours in a workshop, and then several more hours post-workshop of thinking and mapping required to properly understand a business and sequence its next moves. In most cases, it’s only a fraction of what an ongoing engagement would cost. In the context of running a business, it’s a relatively minor commitment.
But as a pattern, it turned out to be incredibly accurate.
The businesses that accepted that step behaved differently from the outset. They engaged with the process, examined uncomfortable areas of the business, and moved through the work with intent. Those businesses consistently got more out of marketing, as well as improvements across operations, team structure, and the work they attracted.
The businesses that resisted that step tended to reveal something else. The hesitation was rarely about the money itself. It usually came down to committing to work that didn’t produce an immediate, visible return. Strategy takes patience and trust in sequencing. It asks an owner to invest before certainty exists.
To be clear, we also operate in an industry that routinely invests significant time and money into planning and preparation specifically to reduce risk and protect profit.
That difference lines up closely with what research consistently shows about successful founders and operators. Businesses that grow over the long term are usually led by people with a strong sense of control over outcomes. They assume results come from their own decisions, not from luck or external fixes. They invest earlier, tolerate short-term discomfort, and focus heavily on foundations that compound over time.
On the other side, businesses that remain stagnant often look for certainty before acting. Decisions get delayed until outcomes feel guaranteed. Investments are evaluated almost entirely on short-term payoff. Over time, that approach compounds in the wrong direction. The business becomes increasingly hesitant to move.
Marketing sits directly in the middle of this divide.
When marketing is added to a business that’s already moving forward, it tends to work as expected. When it’s added to a business that’s hesitant or stalled, it’s often asked to do work it can’t realistically carry.
Charging for strategy didn’t magically improve our ideas. What it did was change who we were working with. Since making that shift, churn dropped sharply. Engagement improved. Outcomes became more predictable. Not because the process suddenly became smarter, but because the businesses on the other side were already willing to do the work required to move forward.
That first paid strategy step has become one of the clearest indicators we have. Not of budget or intelligence, but of intent. Businesses that are willing to step into that process tend to keep building, even when things feel uncertain, and 2025 made that especially clear. Businesses that aren’t tend to stay where they are, still searching for something external to unlock progress.
None of this guarantees an outcome. What it does provide is a behavioural signal. That early willingness to invest in thinking and direction tends to carry through into how decisions are made throughout the rest of the relationship. In our experience, that pattern has repeated often enough to be useful, even in an environment where very little is ever certain.
