They Didn’t Fail from Laziness

I’ve had a front-row seat to a lot of businesses that didn’t make it.  And I’ve seen a lot of autopsy reports on why they died.  Laziness almost never makes the list.  

These were not people who slept in. They worked eighty-hour weeks. They missed their kid’s games. They put their own money in, then their family’s money, then the credit cards. They did the work. And still died.

So, if effort isn’t the variable, what is?

Here’s the answer nobody wants, because it’s less flattering than “the market wasn’t ready” and less comfortable than “I got unlucky.”

They did the right things in the wrong order.

Here’s what you were taught in fifth grade but probably forgot: 

2 + 3 x 4.

If you said twenty, you’re wrong. The answer is fourteen. Multiplication before addition. Same numbers, same operations — wrong order, wrong answer.

You learned that when you were ten. Then you started a business and threw it out the window.

Because in business, nobody grades your sequence. You can do all six of the right things in whatever order feels most comfortable, spend four years doing it, and never once be told that the order was the problem. You’ll be told your marketing is off. Your pricing is off. Your messaging needs work. You’ll hire people to fix symptoms while the actual defect sits upstream, untouched.

There is a correct sequence for taking a business or a new offer to market. Six decisions. And the order isn’t a preference — it’s a dependency chain. Get decision three wrong and your pricing in decision four is guaranteed to be wrong, because you priced against a differentiation you never established.

I call it the Go-to-Market Order of Operations.

Step 1: Select the problem you solve

Notice the verb. Select.

Most people don’t select a problem. They inherit one, because it’s what they know how to do, or what they went to school for, or what the last company they worked at sold. Then they spend a decade trying to make a market care about a problem they chose by accident.

You get to choose. Choose one that’s expensive, urgent, and recurring. A problem people are already spending money on — wastefully — is worth ten problems people agree are important but have never once opened their wallet for.

And be specific enough that you could say it out loud at a dinner party and have someone respond, “OMG, yes, that.” If your answer needs a paragraph, you haven’t selected a problem. You’ve selected a category.

Step 2: Identify your ideal avatar

Not “who might buy this.” You need to know who has this problem so badly that they’d pay to make it go away. Today.

Get granular. Demographics. Position in the organization, if you’re B2B. Are you selling to the person who feels the pain or the person who signs the check, because they’re often not the same person and they don’t respond to the same argument. B2B and direct-to-consumer have different physics. 

Here’s why this comes second and not first: you can’t identify who has the problem until you’ve named the problem. Everybody does this backwards. They pick a demographic they find pleasant to work with, then go looking for something to sell them. That’s how you end up with an audience that likes you and doesn’t buy from you. (They like and comment on every post you make, but you keep scratching your head, wondering why they never take out their credit card.) 

Step 3: Define how you solve it differently than anyone else

This is the step that gets skipped, and it’s the one that kills.

“We provide exceptional service.” “We really care about our clients.” “We’re passionate about quality.” That isn’t differentiation. That’s the same shit every competitor in your space also claims. 

Different means someone could put your approach next to three competitors and instantly tell which one is yours. It might be your method, your model, your speed, who you refuse to work with, or what you’re willing to be bad at. But it needs to be a real choice with a real cost.

If you can’t name what makes you different, your customer will find the one thing that’s always comparable: your price. Which brings us to the reason this step has to come before the next one.

Step 4: Determine your price structure

Your price is not a number you pick. It’s a conclusion you arrive at.

Price against the outcome you produce, not the hours you spend or what the guy down the street charges. Charging by the hour caps your income at your own exhaustion and punishes you for getting better at your craft. The faster you solve it, the less you make. That’s an insane way to build a business and most of the world runs on it.  Just in case you’re one of those people who always likes and comments on my posts but never whips out your credit card — see what I did there 🤣 — let me give you the most important thing you should know about this topic…

Price has NOTHING to do with your competition. 

Premium pricing is a strategy, not an ego trip. It changes who shows up, how they treat you, and how much of yourself you have to spend to deliver.

Here’s the part the people around you won’t say, but I will: if you undercharge, the problem usually isn’t your spreadsheet. It’s your worthiness issues. 

You don’t believe you create value at the level you’re asking to be paid for, so you discount preemptively, overdeliver to compensate, avoid the sales conversation entirely — and then you call it “being ethical.” It isn’t ethics. It’s the bullshit story you sold yourself.  

Step 5: Craft your compelling offer

Now — and only now — you build the offer.

By this point you know the problem, the person, your difference, and your price. The offer is where those four decisions get assembled into something a human being can say yes to.

Most offers fail because they describe what you’ll do instead of what changes. Deliverables are not an offer. A transformation with a price attached is an offer.

And if you build this at step one or two, which is what almost everyone does, you’ll build something you find impressive rather than something they find irresistible.

Step 6: Create signal to build market gravity

This is the fun one. It’s also where nearly everyone starts, and that’s precisely why they’re broke.

The logo. The website. The podcast. The content calendar. It feels like progress, it’s visible, and you can show it to your friends. So, people start here, broadcasting a signal into a room nobody’s sitting in.

Understand the goal, because it’s easy to get wrong:

The goal is not to be known. The goal is to be known for the problem you solve.

Fame without a defined problem is noise. You’ll get attention from people who will never buy, and you’ll mistake it for traction.

So you publish. You add value. Relentlessly, consistently, in public, for people who have that specific problem — long before they’re ready to buy anything. Do that with the first five decisions locked in place, and something shifts… 

You stop chasing the market. The market starts chasing you.

That’s market gravity. And it’s an outcome, not a tactic. You can’t start with it. You can only earn it.

Here’s your question of the week: 

Which of these six did you do out of order?

Be honest, because this is the rare business problem that costs nothing to fix and everything to ignore. You don’t need more effort. If you’re like most of the people who follow my work, you’re already working hard enough. That was never the issue. You need to go back to the step you skipped and do it in sequence.

Your revenue problem might be a step-one problem you’ve been treating as a step-six problem for three years.

Fix the order. Then work as hard as you were already working.

Peace,

– RG

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