Method
The Platform Methodology
Most consultants have opinions. A practice has instruments.
Anyone can tell you what they would do with your business. The question worth asking is how they got there, and whether they would get there again with a different business on a different day.
These are the tools used in every engagement. They have names because they get used again, and because you should be able to tell what you are buying before you buy it.
The Decision Room Method
Four stages, run in order, on one real decision at a time. The order matters more than anything else here — most bad business decisions are made by starting at stage four.
Frame
State the decision as a decision, not as a feeling. “Should we hire a second salesperson” is a decision. “Sales are bad” is not. A surprising amount of stuck-ness is just a decision that was never framed.
Ground
Separate what you know from what you are assuming and from what you do not know. This is where the Assumption Ledger comes in, and it is usually the point at which the real problem becomes visible.
Test
Take the assumptions carrying the most weight and check them against something real. Not all assumptions need testing. The ones holding up the decision do.
Commit
Make the call, write down what would have to change for you to reverse it, and then stop revisiting it. A decision you reopen every week is not a decision.
The Assumption Ledger
Three columns: what you know, what you are assuming, what you do not know. Every input to the decision goes into one of them, and nothing is allowed to sit in two.
The reason this works is that most founders are carrying assumptions they have stopped noticing — about why customers buy, about what a competitor is doing, about which part of the business is actually profitable. Writing them in the middle column makes them visible again, and visible assumptions can be tested.
Each assumption then gets weighted: if this turned out to be wrong, how much of the decision falls over? The heavy ones get tested. The light ones get left alone. That weighting is what stops the exercise becoming research for its own sake.
The Evidence Ladder
Three rungs, and the goal is to know which one you are standing on.
Claim
“Our customers are price sensitive.” A statement about the business, offered as fact.
Evidence
What actually sits behind it. Three customers mentioned price last quarter, or a measured drop in conversion at a specific price point. These are not the same thing.
Interpretation
The story connecting the two. This is the rung where most errors live, and the one nobody examines.
Most of what a founder calls a fact turns out to be an interpretation that hardened. The ladder is simply a habit of asking which rung a statement is really on before a decision gets built on top of it.
The Strategic No List
Prioritising is not choosing what to do. Everyone can do that, and most priority lists are really just wish lists with numbers on them.
Prioritising is writing down, by name, what you are not going to do this quarter — the opportunity you are turning down, the market you are not entering, the product you are not building, the client you are not taking — and then being willing to be held to it.
It is the hardest exercise in the method and the one clients come back to most. A business that cannot name what it is declining is a business with no strategy, only appetite.
See where your business sits.
The Business Strategy Test applies the same thinking across ten dimensions of how your business is actually run. Ten questions, about four minutes, no charge.