What’s Your Problem?
It's a real question. I've sat with leadership teams who couldn't answer it the same way twice in the same meeting, and every one of them was fighting a bigger problem downstream that started right there.
If that sounds like the reality you're working in, you're in the right place.
Why I ask
Most consulting is common sense wrapped in the theater of execution
Six weeks of interviews, and you get back the thing your VP of Sales said in week one, laminated. Somewhere around page forty there is a framework with four quadrants, and you are in the top right, which is a relief, because everyone is always in the top right.
Then somebody says what you really need is the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Everyone writes it down. Nobody asks what any of those three words mean inside your company, because then the meeting would have to keep going.
The answer usually isn't hidden. It is just expensive to say out loud, because saying it means somebody was wrong in front of other people.
I'm not selling you the six weeks. I'm selling you the part where somebody finally says it.
Everyone can recite the goal.
Almost nobody can name the problem.
A goal is where you want to be. A problem is what is in the way. Only one of them tells you what to do on Monday morning.
Goals are comfortable. Twenty percent growth implicates nobody in the room. "We cannot explain what we sell" implicates everybody. So the plan gets built around the number, and turns into activity pointed at an outcome rather than decisions pointed at an obstacle.
I have spent 25 years in agencies, data companies and healthcare organizations, and the pattern underneath is almost always the same. Leadership never answers the question together, so every team answers it alone. Product builds toward its own priorities. Marketing tells the story it finds interesting. Thought leadership explains the weather to people who just need an umbrella. And a rep sitting across from a customer, with nothing usable to work from, builds their own deck and their own value proposition out of whatever they think they can sell.
Now there are forty versions of your company in the market. None of them exactly wrong. None of them the same. What you sell has quietly become whatever the last rep said it was.
None of it was intentional. That is what makes it so hard to see from the inside.
When it finally gets named, it gets called an alignment problem. Alignment is the word we use when six people disagree and nobody wants to go first. Or it gets called a sales problem, because sales is where you notice it. Sales is the smoke detector. Nobody blames the smoke detector.
Everybody is working hard. They are just not working on the same thing.
Until you pick it, every team keeps filling in the blank themselves. Once you pick it, most of the arguing stops, because everyone is finally solving the same thing.
And sometimes the problem is that nobody knows what the problem is. That is not a failure. It is where this starts.
what i find
WHERE TO START
Two questions get us most of the way there
01
How high does it sit?
The thinking works either way.
What changes is who needs to be in the room and how long it takes.
Enterprise
The whole company. How you win, sell and keep customers everywhere at once.
Brand
One product, one brand, one service line. Same questions, tighter frame.
02
Which part of the business is it in?
Four places the trouble tends to live. Most people pick the wrong one first, which is useful information on its own.
Positioning
Nobody can explain why you matter.
What problem do we own?
What's in the box?
Why should they choose us?
Three arguments that fail one at a time, and most companies have quietly lost at least one of them without noticing
Customer Experience
You win them and then you lose them
What happens after yes?
Retention runs on three good people, and renewals arrive as a surprise to everybody including the customer.
Go To Market
Customers can't figure out how to buy
Why is it hard to buy from us?
Nobody assembled the answer, so the customer has to do it themselves, out of an endless pantry of products.
Planning
The Plan doesn’t survive the quarter
Will anyone actually use this?
The plan is a document instead of a way of working, so it lasts about three weeks and then the quarter takes over.
HOW THE WORK RUNS
Know
A Check
Two weeks
We agree on what we are looking at, then I go find out what is actually happening and put it in writing. Ninety minutes together to walk through what I found and what to do about it.
Know, fix and grow
It always starts the same way. A conversation, where we work out what you are actually trying to solve. What comes after that depends on what we find. You will not get a three-ring binder. Nobody has ever opened one of those twice.
Fix
A Workshop
Half a day, or a full day
Six to ten people, one question, in a room together. Half a day gets the decision, written up inside two days. A full day and the afternoon goes into building what you decided.
Grow
An Engagement
Six to eight weeks
For when the answer is clear and the work is building it. Something your team can use, not a document they will admire once
.
One more thing
Who can I talk to about all of this?
The higher you go, the fewer people tell you the truth. Your team reports to you. Your board evaluates you. Your peers are competing with you for the same budget. Everyone in the room has a stake in your answer.
And not everything fits in a box. Some of the best work I have done never had a statement of work attached to it and ran for years rather than weeks.
So if what you want is somebody who knows your business, has no stake in the politics, and will tell you the true thing on a Tuesday afternoon, that is a different conversation. I am glad to have it.
So. What's your problem?
Forty-five minutes, no fee, nothing to prepare. Bring the thing that is stuck and we will work out together whether it is the thing that is actually stuck.
Doing the work is the floor. Everybody is paying for that. The part worth having is what happens past it, and you cannot get there while the room is still arguing about what the problem is.
If it turns out you don't need me, I will say so. Shorter conversation, everybody gets their afternoon back. And if what you are after is a deck that agrees with you, there are firms that do that beautifully. I am not one of them.
Contact: chad@gtggrowth.com · 312.493.0829