Hey :) 

Here’s a lesson in strategy I keep coming back to.

A few years ago, I made a pretty significant shift in my work.

I moved from coaching businesses to coaching coaches.

Before that, I was a They Ask You Answer coach — working with seven-, eight- and nine-figure companies to roll out the framework across their sales and marketing teams. I’d been doing that for years.

Then the company introduced a partner programme.

The idea was simple enough: other agency owners and business coaches could be trained, certified, and then go on to coach companies in the They Ask You Answer methodology themselves.

On the surface, it sounded reasonable.

Teach more people the framework.
Create more impact.
Scale the ideas beyond a single organisation.

People from all over the world joined. At one point, there were around 50 certified partner coaches.

I didn’t start the programme, but I took it on and began coaching the coaches.

And personally? It was great for me.

It forced me to sharpen my thinking, articulate my methods more clearly, and really examine how I coached. That work eventually led to me writing a short book off the back of it.

But despite all of that, the programme itself failed.

And it took me about a year to fully see why.

The issue wasn’t execution.
It wasn’t the quality of the coaches.
It wasn’t even the framework.

The problem was much more fundamental.

There was no actual business problem being solved.

What really happened was this:

Someone came to the agency and said,
“We’d love to learn how to do this.”

So an opportunity was created around that request.

Instead of asking:
“Is there a strategic reason to build a partner network?”

We asked:
“How do we package this so we can sell it?”

It was the tail wagging the dog.

Because there are only a handful of reasons a partner network makes sense in the first place.

The big one is demand exceeding supply.

If there are more companies wanting a They Ask You Answer coach than the core team can handle, then a partner network helps absorb that excess demand.

That wasn’t the case.

The agency was never oversubscribed.
There was no backlog of opportunities to pass on.
There was no unmet demand.

The second reason is operational capacity.

If the agency can’t realistically service all the opportunities available to it, a partner network can extend reach.

That also wasn’t true.

In reality, the agency was the number one competitor to the very partners it was certifying.

Which meant the whole thing was doomed from day one.

The partners were being trained to sell the same service, into the same market, against the same organisation that controlled the brand, the leads, and the authority.

There was no strategic problem being solved.
No structural gap the programme existed to fix.

In the end, the business made a few thousand pounds selling certifications...

But as a strategy?

It failed.

And the reason I keep coming back to this is because I have to remind myself of it all the time.

To slow down.
To challenge my own thinking.
And to encourage the people around me to do the same.

Because this mistake shows up everywhere.

Someone comes to you with an idea.
A request.
An opportunity.

And on the surface, it sounds reasonable.

But the real question isn’t “Can we do this?”
It’s “Should we be doing this?”

Is this actually solving a real problem in the business?
Or are we reacting to something that’s landed in front of us?

This is where I think about the idea of the tail wagging the dog.

Is the business setting direction and making deliberate, proactive choices?
Or is it being pulled around by whatever opportunity happens to show up next?

In this case, an opportunity was mistaken for a strategy.

And that’s the mistake I’m far more careful about now.

So the question I keep coming back to — and the one I try to ask before taking action — is simple:

Is this a deliberate, proactive decision? 
Or is it a reactive one?

Because those two things might look similar on the surface.

But they lead to very different outcomes.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.