And if there’s one place I see businesses struggle, it’s making the shift from “educated guesswork” to a test-driven way of validating product ideas, feature concepts, and market moves. I get it. Testing sounds simple in theory. In practice, it’s hard. Not because businesses don’t care, but because testing has a few built-in traps that make it easy to avoid, postpone, or do poorly. Over time, I’ve noticed three reasons this happens again and again. First, our tests are often

In a world of nonstop disruption, resilience is the minimum. Anti-fragile businesses do something better: they protect the downside and keep investing in the upside while others freeze.

Most small and mid-sized businesses don’t lose to a single dramatic punch. Instead, they lose to a slow, almost imperceptible drift. A competitor ships something slightly better. A customer expectation quietly shifts. A new channel starts working for everyone else. Prices change. Tech gets commoditized. And by the time you notice, you’re not “a little behind”, you’re trying to do a frantic catch-up lap with your shoelaces tied together. That’s what a market radar is for: a s

Most small business strategy discussions have a weird problem. They happen in a vacuum. You’ll see a familiar parade of frameworks: boxes, bullet points, tidy categories. “Capabilities.” “Capacity.” “Initiatives.” “Investments.” Everything gets typed into neat little containers. However, the missing ingredient is usually the one that matters most: context. Where is the market going? What are competitors doing? Where is the ground already occupied? Where is it wide open? Most