Once you watch this recording, make sure to sign up for the upcoming AMA on this topic on August 6th.

‍Most firms treat positioning like a marketing exercise. They update the website, refresh the deck, and call it done. Then they wonder why nothing actually changes.

I recently sat down with my friend, Nathan Young, from How To Be Second, to walk through some real case studies — scrubbed and anonymized, but drawn from actual client work — that illustrate why positioning is fundamentally a business strategy decision, and why the operational implications are where most firms get stuck.

The story starts with a medical device engineering firm. Their original positioning was broad: "we help med-device companies develop innovative products" That sounds good. It sounds like a real value proposition. The problem is it describes roughly eighty percent of the firms in that space. When everyone claims the same thing, no one owns anything.

The Positioning Shift

The repositioning was surgical. Pun intended. Instead of general product development, they became the firm for implantable device speed-to-market. Specifically they became experts in the regulatory and operational complexity that makes implantables harder and slower than other med-device categories.

This is the kind of positioning work I do with clients; find the intersection of what you're genuinely good at, what the market actually cares about, and what you can credibly own. But here's what most founders miss: the moment you make that positioning decision, you've just created a list of operational changes that must be executed for the market to believe it.

The Operational Cascade

Nathan and I mapped out what actually had to change inside this firm once the positioning shifted. It wasn't a short list.

Sales process. The old sales process was essentially a capabilities presentation. "Here's what we do, here's who we've worked with." The new sales process had to demonstrate that they actually understood the implantable regulatory path before the prospect ever became a client. The way you sell becomes proof of the positioning itself.

Staffing and accountability. The firm had built their team around general med-device expertise. The new positioning required regulatory specialists who understood implantable-specific pathways. That meant changing the accountability chart, identifying which contractors needed to become full-time, and building a capability the firm didn't fully have yet.

Thought leadership and go-to-market. The old content was broad med-device thought leadership. The new content needed to speak directly to implantable device product leaders about the specific regulatory and operational bottlenecks they face.

Adjacent capabilities. The firm had to evaluate every potential service expansion against a clear criteria: does this directly accelerate implantable device timelines? Does it match our position? Does it deepen our moat or dilute it? Without that filter, it's easy to creep back toward generalism.

Project management. The nature of the client relationship changed. Focusing on speed-to-market required pulling clients through a known regulatory sequence rather than simply responding to their requests, and developing prototypes. The PM function shifted from carrying to almost dragging clients through the steps they already know they need to take.

The Iterative Loop Nobody Talks About

Here's the part that's often an aha moment for clients, as it was for this one: positioning and operations are not sequential. They're iterative.

You make a positioning decision. That drives operational changes. Those operational changes surface new constraints, new capabilities, new market realities, which then feed back into the positioning.

In this case, the firm needed regulatory capabilities to be true. They needed contractor-to-FT transitions to be true. They needed a sales process that demonstrated expertise before purchase. Those weren't marketing problems.

The Proven Process Framework

Nathan uses a framework I find useful for making this concrete. Most for-profit companies operate on the same basic model: get work, do work, get paid. The complexity lives in the middle, which is your business model, your operating model, how decisions actually flow.

When you change your positioning, you're essentially changing the left side of that equation (who you're for, what work you get) and forcing a cascade through everything to the right. The proven process is the mechanism for making that cascade visible and manageable.

Most firms want to jump straight to tools and automation. They want the efficiency gains without doing the hard work of defining what good actually looks like.

The Spider Web Effect

There's a line from this conversation I keep coming back to: "the whole web shakes when you flick the spider web."

That's what happens when you make a real positioning change. It's not one department. It's not one process. The entire operating model shifts, sometimes in ways you don't anticipate until you're already in it. The regulatory build-out changes your staffing model. The staffing model changes your cost structure. The cost structure changes your pricing. The pricing changes your sales conversation. The sales conversation changes your marketing. Everything is connected.

Most firms don't do this work. They do the positioning exercise, update the website, and stop. Then they wonder why the market still treats them like a generalist.

The Real Work

The real work isn't identifying a position. That's hard enough, but it's the beginning, not the end.

The real work is bringing that positioning to life, and consistently reinforcing it over time. It's the operational cascade that follows. It's asking: what needs to be true for this position to be credible? What's the gap between what exists and what needs to change? Which changes are sequential, which are parallel, and which are iterative?

It's building the regulatory capability. It's changing the sales process so it demonstrates expertise before purchase. It's shifting the PM function from carrying to pulling. It's making the adjacent-capability decisions that prevent generalism creep. It's defining what "good" actually looks like before you automate anything.

This is why positioning is a business strategy problem, not a marketing problem. The marketing is just the visible output. The strategy is the decision. The operations are where the decision actually lives or dies.

If you're wrestling with positioning and the operational implications that follow, Nathan and I are hosting a follow-up AMA. Reach out with questions — the specific ones are usually more useful than the general ones.

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