everyone’s selling a fix. But is it the right one?
Brought to you by The Art Of Positioning Podcast
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I've had the same conversation about more times than I can count this year - and it’s spanned different industries.
Someone hires a specialist. That specialist does exactly what they're paid to do.
And the business is still stuck in the same spot six months later.
Despite it feeling like that, nobody's getting scammed here.
Legit, I get it that's the annoying part. Everyone did their job.
Except, the job was just aimed at the wrong thing.
(Quick note: the example below is a mashup - Changed the industry, changed the name, kept the shape of what actually happened.)
"Priya" runs a boutique gym. Open for six years now with loyal clients, and a decent word of mouth.
She hired an agency to redo the branding.
New logo, new site, fresh sounding words.
Six months later, enquiries were actually…down. 😬
Nobody screwed up the design. The problem was never the logo.
It was that Priya never actually decided who the gym is for.
Is it the 6am grind crowd training for something, or the "I just want to move my body without being yelled at" crowd?
Different offer, different price, different everything downstream.
But, I’ll keep sayin’ this, a prettier version of "we're for everyone" is still "we're for everyone."
That's the thing about hiring a fix before you know what's broken. You get a competent af answer to the wrong question.👇
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Wendy Murphy, CEO of Timber Tech Truss bought two companies in 18 months. Tripled her headcount.
And her Day 1 move? Nothing. Nada.
Zero changes. No pink slips. No system overhauls.
She spent 90 days just watching. Their people. Their processes. How they actually work when you're not in the room.
And then audited the hell out of it.
Because of that approach, she uncovered stuff that would've tanked the whole thing if she'd rushed right into it as is often the case.
What she found (and fixed) changes everything about how acquisitions actually work.
Wendy reveals the 3 moves that made her the exception in the full episode.
"Acquisitions Without the Chaos" out now on this The Art of Positioning Podcast episode - listen here.
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why the wrong fix feels so right in the moment
So why does this keeps happening?
Well, it's not "vendors only see their own lane" (though, yeah, that's true too).
It's that hiring a specialist gives you something that diagnosing a business problem never does: the feeling of doing something.
You sign a contract, you get a deliverable, you can point at it.
Diagnosing why your ideal client keeps ghosting you after the first call? That feels like standing still, even when it's the actual work.
So the automation gets bought before anyone asks why the team can't make a decision without the owner in the room.
The sales script gets rewritten before anyone asks why the prospect can't tell you apart from the cheaper option down the road.
Action feels like progress. And it’s also lining up with the belief of ‘fail fast, fail forward’ typa growth.
Diagnosis feels like delay.
It's the opposite, most of the time.
And there's overlap between what each specialist can actually reach.
A good sales trainer can absolutely fix a weak close.
What they can't fix is a prospect who was never sold on why you specifically, at any price. That's not a sales problem. That's upstream of sales.
Same with marketing: it can get more people through the door. It cannot make the people already there stop asking for a discount.
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🏏 The Badass Tip: the fix filter
That’s the frustration that has been weighing on me over the last year or so. And it’s why I built a diagnostic matrix a few months back. Not to add to the “buy our service, pick me, pick me” typa thing - you’ll see other recs. But I got tired of watching money go toward a fix that was never going to touch the actual issue.
Here's how to use it: find the row that sounds like your business right now, the one that makes you wince a bit, and look across it.
Wherever it's ticked, that's a lane worth spending on.
Wherever it's not, save your money, no matter how convincing the pitch sounds.
That's it, no extra steps, no order of operations.
Just: find your row, follow the tick.
And here it is:
There's a lot of noise telling you what to fix next.
Here’s to it not having to be like that.
🦘 B
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Often, I see businesses hit a growth wall when their offers and brands don't complement or build on each other (to the point they end up unintentionally cannibalizing each other), so I put together two decades of knowledge from serving brands across various industries and built a tool intended to find the best solution for your brand mix and business goals.
It's a honed-in set of questions, covered in less than 10 minutes, that give you direction right up front: Align your offers and brands today.
