Are you lugging rocks uphill?

Image generated by Firefly AI using Gemini 3.1 with Nano Banana 2

This month, our Third Friday Group of business owners took on one of the hardest questions in business: Are you spending your time and money on the right things?

Not whether you are working hard enough. You probably are. Not whether your offerings are good enough. They probably are. The question is something more structural and more uncomfortable: Does your product and service mix actually fit the market — or are you just pushing rocks uphill?

We asked group members to assess product/service fit using our Strategic Fit Engine.™

"Complexity Creep"

Here's something to chew on.

Bain & Company's research showed that as companies add products and services without a formal process for removing them, their administrative costs grow twice as fast as their revenue. Not a little faster. Twice.

That's not just inefficiency. That's a structural tax on your business, one you imposed on yourself, usually without realizing it.

Most businesses have done it. A client asks for something a little different. We say yes. A promising idea comes along. We add it to the list. An old service never quite took off, but we haven't officially killed it either, so it lingers, consuming bandwidth, cluttering our messaging, and quietly dragging on our margins.

What Bain calls "complexity creep," I envision as something more visceral: the slow accumulation of rocks in your pack. You barely notice each one as it goes in. But they add up and eventually you are trudging uphill, exhausted, wondering why the view never seems to change.

McKinsey's research offers the flip side of this. They studied 1,600 companies and found that those who actively reallocated their resources — capital and talent — to their most promising opportunities achieved 30% higher total returns than those who stayed tied to the same mix of offerings.

Thirty percent. That's not a rounding error. That's the difference between a business that grows and one that just maintains.

The Audit: What's in your pack?

The first step in the Strategic Fit Engine™ is the one that's often resisted, not because it's complicated, but because it forces honesty.

Map your offerings. All of your products and services in all their permutations. The active ones you sell today. The dormant ones you tried and exited, or that are sitting on the shelf as "good ideas someday." The prospective ones you're actively considering.

You cannot reallocate toward your winners if you haven't identified everything in the pack.

Once you have your inventory, then you run each offering through three filters:

Filter 1: Market Pull. Is there documented demand? Is the market being pulled toward this offering because it relieves a real pain — what we call a "Headache" — or achieves something genuinely desirable? Or are you pushing it onto a skeptical or uninterested audience through sheer persistence and hustle, by the weight of your marketing and sales effort? The indicator is simple: How hard is it to get in the door?

Filter 2: Positioning. Is this offering "Special" — genuinely differentiated, solving a problem competitors can't or won't? Or is it "Me-Too" — essentially the same as what others offer, meaning the only lever left is price? A Zook & Allen study of sustained value creators found that 80% of profit typically flows from a "special" core. When you're undifferentiated, you're not just trying to compete: You are racing to the bottom.

Filter 3: Velocity. How fast does this offering move through your business system? How long is the sales cycle, from identified to prospect to closed sale? And when do you actually collect the money? Before the work starts (Pay on Access), or after, in milestones and net-30/60 terms that force you to fund the client's project with your own capital?

The intersection of these three filters tells you what you've actually got.

Three Categories. Three Different Futures.

Scalable Stars pass all three filters. They're differentiated. Demand for them is obvious. They move fast and pay upfront. These are your engines. Maximize your resources here. This is where the McKinsey 30% premium lives.

Heavy Lifts have potential but are flawed. The market genuinely values them, and you're uniquely qualified to deliver them, but the structure is broken. Maybe the sales cycle is too long. Maybe the terms delay payment. Maybe the investment required is too high. Your move here is not to discard these offerings, it's to re-engineer them. Modularize the service. Figure out how to reduce the required investment. Change the terms. Sharpen the niche to make the offering more appealing to a target audience. These can become Scalable Stars with the right structural adjustments.

Friction Traps are dangerous: They often appear to be better than they are. They might even have a quick sales cycle — which makes them feel like winners. But if the offering is "Me-Too," with no real differentiation, you are not building a brand or margin. You are eroding both. The market for these offerings ultimately defaults to a price shootout, and in a price shootout, nobody wins for long. The action: Exit.

Are you ignoring a "Lurking Winner"?

Here's where the output of the Strategic Fit Engine™ gets people's attention.

In many businesses, there is an offering — sometimes dormant, sometimes in development stage, sometimes just underfunded — that already has all the structural characteristics of a Scalable Star. It is differentiated. It has market pull. The math works. But because Friction Traps are consuming most of the organization's time, capital, and attention, this offering doesn't get the resources it needs to scale.

We call it the Lurking Winner.

It will "sell itself" when presented. It has a short sales cycle. It will produce strong margins. But it's not a focus of the business's marketing or delivery efforts, not because it doesn't deserve to be, but because the rocks in the pack haven't been removed to make room for it.

Part of the value of this kind of audit is simply seeing what you've been too busy to see.

Try a strategic fit quarterly sprint

The Third Friday Group launched its Strategic Choice Quarterly Sprint last week. You can launch your quarterly strategic fit sprint as well. Make the quarter's goal to use the Strategic Fit Engine™ to categorize your entire product and service inventory and define a going-forward strategy for each offering.

In the next 30 days: Finish your strategic fit audit for all of your offerings — current, discontinued, and possible.

By the end of the quarter: Based on how your offerings are categorized in the audit, make the hard choices. Scale the Scalable Stars and Lurking winners. Fix the Heavy Lifts that are worth fixing. And exit the Friction Traps that are quietly costing you more than they're generating and crowding out better opportunities.

The result will be a smarter business, whose energy is concentrated on what the market wants, rather than scattered across everything you've ever said yes to or are squandering time and resources on.

A question to get you started

Look at your list of active, benched, and potential offerings and ask: Which of these does the market really want and which of these do we have to push?

The ones you push are worth a hard look, because every hour you spend lugging a rock uphill is an hour you're not spending scaling a star.