For a long time, I thought I had a marketing problem.

Then I thought I had a sales problem. Then I thought I had a positioning problem.

In the last couple hours reviewing my website, I had a different realization altogether. The issue wasn’t the any of those things I mentioned. The website was simply reflecting a business model that didn’t fully match how I actually operate.

As I read through the existing copy, something felt off. The language suggested that I had already diagnosed the situation, understood the problem, and was ready to move someone toward a solution. The structure implied certainty, yet when I looked at my actual experiences with clients, that wasn’t how any meaningful piece of work has ever started.

It started with curiosity versus certainty

Curiosity about what someone was seeing. What they thought was happening. What they would’ve tried already. What kept recurring. What didn’t make sense. The conversation always came first and understanding followed. Often the issue that brought someone into the conversation turned out not to be the issue at all.

When I looked back over nearly three decades of work, I realize that every significant opportunity I have ever had emerged from that process. It wasn’t from a sales pitch, a proposal, or a marketing funnel. One conversation led to inquiry, inquiry morphed into better understanding and understanding revealed a need, a misunderstanding, a possibility, or an opportunity. The work followed naturally from there.

What is interesting is that organizations face a similar challenge.

1. A business model describes how a company intends to create and capture value.
2. An operating model describes how people, decisions, processes, and systems function every day.

Ideally, the two should mirror each other. One describes the blueprint. The other describes reality, and when they drift apart, friction appears.

A company says it values one thing but rewards another. It claims to operate one way while employees and customers experience something different. Leaders find themselves repeatedly responding to symptoms because the assumptions embedded in the model no longer match what is actually happening.

What struck me today is that the same thing can happen to individuals.

We can build businesses around who we think we should be. We can adopt approaches that work brilliantly for other people. We can spend years optimizing a model that was never a natural fit for the way we create value in the first place.

Which leaves me sitting with this question:

Does your business model reflect how you actually operate?

Not how successful people tell you to operate, or how your competitors operate. It’s not about how you wish you operated, but how you actually create value.

Sometimes the breakthrough isn’t finding a better strategy. Sometimes it’s recognizing that the blueprint and the reality have been describing two different businesses all along. The work then becomes bringing them back into alignment.

In my own case, it meant accepting that conversations, curiosity, and understanding have always come before solutions. Once I saw that, the business model started to make a lot more sense.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where in your business, career, or life are you trying to force yourself into a model that looks good on paper, perhaps even sounds good, but doesn’t reflect how you naturally create value?

What changes if you start there instead?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with an inaccurate understanding of the situation.

I’m increasingly interested in how leaders make sense of uncertainty, complexity, and important decisions. If you could better understand one thing about your business right now, what would it be?

Giselle Hudson is a Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor who helps leaders gain clarity before major decisions are made or resources are committed to the wrong solution.