Startups need precision. When you’re building from zero, you can afford to align 80% or more of the company behind a single strategic direction. There’s no legacy infrastructure pulling you sideways, no established processes resisting change, no cultural memory of “how we’ve always done it.” The entire organization can pivot on a dime because there’s nothing to pivot away from.
Mature companies don’t have that luxury. They have momentum, sometimes decades of it, in many cases. They have established customer relationships, operational systems that work well enough, teams who’ve built their expertise around specific ways of working. When a mature company tries to execute a comprehensive strategic overhaul that addresses too many issues simultaneously, they don’t get alignment. They get paralysis.
This is why I advocate for what I call the 60% solution. It’s not about addressing every problem. It’s about identifying the specific operational, financial, and strategic levers that are actually destabilizing revenue right now, and focusing exclusively on those. The goal is to redirect momentum and generate measurable success quickly enough that the organization builds confidence and capacity to tackle remaining issues from a position of strength.
The metaphor I use is getting the plane off the ground. A startup is building the plane while falling. Ray Bradbury’s line about living at risk:
“jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down”
That’s startup life. But a mature company already has a plane. It’s in the air. It’s been flying for years. The problem is that it’s headed in the wrong direction, or it’s losing altitude, or the engines are sputtering. You don’t rebuild the entire aircraft mid-flight. You stabilize what’s failing, adjust the heading, and get back to cruising altitude. Then you can address the other issues.
The 60% approach starts with a controlled diagnostic. I use a proprietary scoring model to create shared understanding about what the actual problems are and where we need to prioritize. This matters because mature organizations have accumulated complexity. Different stakeholders see different problems. Finance sees cash flow issues. Operations sees process bottlenecks. Sales sees competitive pressure. Marketing sees brand erosion. All of these observations are true, but they’re not all equally urgent, and they’re not all equally addressable given current capacity.
The scoring model forces the conversation about what matters most right now. Not what matters most in an ideal world where we have unlimited resources and perfect execution capacity. What matters most given where we actually are — our current financial position, our current operational capacity, our current cultural readiness for change.
Once we’ve identified those priorities, we build the infrastructure that will enable the organization to focus on them. This is where most comprehensive strategic plans fail. They assume the organization already has the capacity to execute on the recommendations. They don’t. If they did, they wouldn’t need the consultant. The infrastructure phase is about creating the conditions for success — the processes, the decision-making frameworks, the communication rhythms, the accountability structures — before asking people to change how they work.
This is also where the psychology of leadership becomes critical. A technically perfect solution that the leadership team can’t actually implement is not a solution. I’ve learned to mitigate the structured diagnostic process with practical understanding of organizational culture and leadership psychology. Some leaders need to see quick wins before they’ll commit to deeper change. Some need extensive data before they’ll move. Some need to feel like the solution was their idea. None of this is weakness. It’s reality. The solutions have to be adoptable and implementable, not just correct.
The obvious objection is that 60% isn’t enough. If we’ve identified ten problems, why would we only address six of them? The answer is that addressing six problems successfully is better than attempting ten and failing at all of them. More importantly, successfully addressing the right six problems often makes the other four easier to solve later. Revenue stabilizes. Cash flow improves. The team gains confidence. The organization develops muscle memory for executing strategic change. You’re solving from a position of strength rather than desperation.
The other objection is that this approach leaves problems unaddressed. It does. Deliberately. A mature company that has developed momentum over decades cannot change everything at once without creating more disruption than value. The 60% solution is designed to begin the process of alignment and get the plane headed in the right direction. It’s not designed to solve everything. It’s designed to solve enough that the organization can then solve the rest.
This is fundamentally different from the startup model, where comprehensive alignment is both possible and necessary. A startup that only addresses 60% of its strategic challenges probably doesn’t survive. A mature company that tries to address 100% of its strategic challenges simultaneously definitely doesn’t survive the attempt. The contexts are different. The strategies should be different.
What makes this approach sustainable is that it’s a methodology, not a personality. The diagnostic process, the prioritization framework, the infrastructure-building phase — these are repeatable. They can be implemented by other consultants trained in the same model. The differentiation isn’t in having a unique insight that no one else could possibly have. It’s in having a proven process for helping mature organizations change direction without destroying themselves in the attempt.
The value proposition is straightforward. This is a cost-effective, streamlined, highly prioritized approach to achieving specific goals. It’s not about addressing 100% of an organization’s needs, or even 80%. It’s about addressing the 60% that will actually make a strategic and financial difference right now, and doing it in a way that the organization can actually execute.
Mature companies need a different kind of precision than startups do. They need the precision to identify what not to change, what to change later, and what to change now. They need the discipline to focus on the critical levers rather than the comprehensive list. They need the patience to build from 60% to 80% over time, rather than attempting 100% immediately and achieving 20%.
The 60% solution isn’t a compromise. It’s the right strategy for organizations that already have momentum and need to redirect it without losing it entirely. It’s the difference between changing course and crashing the plane.
