Founders feel it as a ceiling.
Investors price it as a discount.
Two moments. The same diagnosis.
Outbound. Content. A new sales hire. Better demos. None of it moved the number the way it should have.
It's not a sales problem. It's not a product problem. You're answering the wrong question — and the market wrote it, not you.
The Reset identifies the question you've inherited and finds the one that's actually available to you. Deals start converting. The conversation moves to the C-suite. You stop discounting and start setting the price.
Standard diligence covers the financials, the legal, the tech, and the competitive position. It rarely asks whether the company is answering the right question.
Standard diligence tells you what a company is worth inside its current frame. It doesn't ask whether the frame is wrong.
That's where 15–25× lives — and it goes unexamined in almost every deal.
About
Founder · Good to Great
30 years at the intersection of digital and business strategy. I've been inside the trap — at Piano, I joined to build a customer success team and realized within weeks that the entire category was answering the wrong question. I built the reframe, built the team around proving it, and helped close deals that shouldn't have been possible by the old logic. A four-year, $1M partnership in Spain. A $750K deal in Ukraine where the average contract had been $30K. The product didn't change. The question did. That experience — what worked, what didn't, and why — is the origin of this practice.