Strategy without execution is just decoration. It's like a fancy architectural blueprint of a building that never gets built.
I'm working with a firm that looks exactly like this right now. About 15 people. The current owner bought the firm from a founding partner who ran it for twenty years, and we put real time into the new positioning. It's good. Great even, because it aligns the owner with the business extremely well. But he still believes he has to make every decision, so every issue gets escalated to him. Big or small. Some of his people have been there five, ten, fifteen years, and none of them had been handed ownership of the change. The document was done. The transformation is just beginning.
Buy, but, but, but Mike... didn't you tell us that "the founder IS the position"?
Yes I did. But that article only states that the founder is the only one who can make the critical decision initially. It doesn't say that you can't codify judgement and decision making.
For that matter, the last step in becoming founder-driven, rather than founder dependent is building the systems. Which is exactly what I want to discuss here.
The Clear-But-Still-Stuck Firm
Owner and Positioning Clarity is the first step to solving the founder bottleneck. But without proper activation, the operating problem remains untouched. What's worse, the messaging that comes out of positiong work can provide a false sense of progress. You did the hard part. You argued over the wording, decided on the tradeoffs, and wrote down who you serve and who you don't. Everyone nodded in agreement. Then Monday arrived and the same questions came back to your inbox.
You can't blame the work, because the work was right.
A recruiting and staffing firm I worked with shows how this plays out. Through positioning they had decided which industries, which seniorities, and which functions they served. The decision was made. But every time work came in from outside that box, they held the same conversation: do we take it or not? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, on different criteria every time. The founder had made the decision but the people doing the work relitigated it every time anyway.
A good positioning document tells you who you are, who you want to be, and how to close that gap. But it doesn't tell anyone what decisions they are allowed to make day-to-day.
A firm with a positioning document is not the same as a firm that is positioned. Positioned means your ideal clients actually see you the way you intend, in the market you serve, in relation to competitors. The document is the intent. Most firms also do the work to find the gap between that intent and how the market actually sees them. Then they do very little about the gap.
Nothing actually changes unless behavior changes. And that requires dedicated change management and systems. Without that, the firm stays founder-dependent, because the connection between what the founder believes and why the position matters never got distilled into the rest of the firm.
There's a real cost to this, and your buyers feel it. They aren't looking for the best option. They're looking for the safest one. If a prospect gets a different answer about what you do depending on who they talk to, or they see that every decision requires your approval, you've handed them a reason to say no.
What Activation Looks Like When It Works
A large boutique life sciences consulting firm. Several hundred employees. A BD team of five.
We got leadership clear on the ideal client profile and the leadership team communicated it. The Chief Revenue Officer modeled it first: he turned down poor-fit work in front of the team. Then comp plans changed. Deals that met more ICP criteria paid more. Not life changing, but enough to nudge the BD team to make the right decisions when the time came.
Some time later, a business development director sat on a call with me and said a referral had come in for one of their target accounts, and he was recommending they pass. The work didn't support the direction the company had agreed it was moving. Other conversations in that same account were a better fit. He was several layers below the CEO and the partners who built the position. On paper, that call cost him money in the short term.
And the most beautiful part of this story, was that it was business as usual after. That's what successful activation looks like. A critical decision, with real financial impact stopped being a story and became routine.
That firm ran everything through the positioning lens, including M&A targets. They found a gap in what they were promising, specifically regulatory expertise, and acquired a regulatory firm. Their podcast, their service design, and their comp plans all answered the same question: does this support the position we are claiming?
The Founder Breaks the Rules First
When firms drift from their desired position, it's most often the founder's fault.
Cash flow tightens, you meet someone at a conference who doesn't fit the ICP, you like them, and you tell them "we can help you." Or you feel unneeded inside your own firm, and you start getting involved in decisions you shouldn't. It's your company, so you can. But now every partner and leadership team member has watched you do it, and they're thinking: if they can, I can too.
I worked with a founder who started his firm with interns and junior people, then as the firm evolved, repositioned it as senior practitioners only. A while later he wanted to bring back the intern program. Everyone in the firm knew it made no sense. He was searching for himself inside his own firm, and the program was how he built the place in the first place. We leveraged his mentor/coach identity instead of going against it. We built a partner track program for his senior consultants, with a staggered buyout for the ones he selected that took him from 100% owner to 25% transitioning to a chairman role over five years. The decision made sense for him as an individual, and for the firm as it was positioned.
If the position doesn't fit the founder, or the founder never adjusted how the firm operates to support it, the founder will drag it back to the old way.
Here's What I Want You to Do
Positioning is a lens for decisions. It's also a system that needs upkeep, because the market, the firm, and the founder keep changing.
I want you to think through the following critical actions that have to get done over and over:
- Which clients you take and which you turn down
- Which people you hire and which you pass on
- How the work gets delivered, and when the delivery model changes
- What message goes out and what gets canned and rewritten
For each one, ask who other than you is able to make the decision and allowed to make it. Able means they know the position. Allowed means you've given them the authority.
Say you run a $5M firm and a $1M opportunity arrives from a target account, but it's the wrong type of work. Who can say no? Maybe it has to go through you because of the size. Maybe your BD lead or minority partner decides on their own. There's no universal right answer, because it depends on your risk tolerance and how much trust you've built. But there has to be decision logic and authority written down, before the deal shows up.
What I'm Diving Into Further
The rest of this week follow me on LinkedIn as I explore what it takes to turn a positioning strategy into an operating system. I'll cover how to establish decision rights actually, why the messaging is the wrong first thing to install, how a firm stops sliding back to the old way when cash gets tight, and what the founder has to change in their own behavior for any of it to hold. I'll use real examples as much as possible, rather than theory.
Because I want you to make decisions based on what I know and have seen, rather than only based on what I believe.
If you believe you have clarity, but still feel stuck, reply and tell me which critical decisions still route through you. I read every response.
If you know a founder who finished positioning work and says nothing changed, forward this to them.
-Mike
