How good would the Internet be if every home page answered Steve Krug’s 5 questions?

1. What is this?
2. What can I do here?
3. What do they have here?
4. Why should I be here (instead of somewhere else)?
5. Where do I start?

The lesson. Think UX before UI.

The businesses Stratify helps look great from the outside. Strong P&L and balance sheet, sales every month, happy employees, feared by their competitors.

Rainbows and unicorns, right?

But behind the curtain they’re declining, slowly, day by day.

They’re drifting away from what made then strong in the first place. Their trajectory goes from growth, to flatline, to slow decline, to administration.

Fortunately it’s reversible – if it gets caught soon enough.

Year one, your head is full of upside.

Year five, it’s all about the tax debt you’re accumulating rather than clearing, and the client you should have let go eighteen months ago.

Revenue slows because there’s always another deal around the corner.

Cost increase because that’s what costs do.

And so the drift compounds, month after month, until the business that looked so healthy two years ago barely survives the month.

Every business I’ve watched fail had the same problem: the owner thought it was one thing but it was always something else.

Usually they blame cash flow. But low cash flow is the symptom, not the cause.

It’s never the problem. It’s just what breaks first.

And when it breaks, the business is fkd.

Nobody in your business will ever schedule a meeting to ask this question. So you have to ask it yourself.

Does the business still deserve to exist in its current shape?

Not ‘Is it still profitable?’ Not ‘Should I sell?’

Just: ‘Does the shape you built in year one still fit the business you’re actually running now?’

Most owners never check. There’s always a wage run, an invoice, a supplier problem that feels more urgent than an audit of your own assumptions.

So the business keeps running on year-one thinking while everything around it has moved on.

I’ve spent two decades working inside and alongside small and mid sized businesses across a range of industries.

The pattern is consistent. The businesses that recover and grow aren’t the ones with the best product or the most capital. They’re the ones that stop ignoring what they already have.

Our work sits at that intersection.

We help business owners and leadership teams identify where value is being lost, and build the systems to recover it.

Your chances of making the sale improve when you offer your prospect:

1. A quality product
2. That does what they want it to do
3. At a price they can afford to pay.

Tick these 3 boxes, you’ll do okay.