Nobody Finds A Moving Target

Somebody asks for a beer we don’t carry, and then somebody else asks, and the answer is the same one we gave the week we opened.

Before we opened I wrote a fear down on a piece of paper: people won’t come back to us. That one came true. It keeps coming true. Most of it is on purpose, which is a strange sentence to have to make peace with.

The temptation, when a position costs you somebody, is to explain it. Walk them through the sourcing, the rotation, the reason that beer sits where it sits and not on our wall. You can spend a whole night doing this. It feels like generosity and it works like a hearing…

Notice what explaining does to the thing you just said. It turns it into a proposal. A position you defend is a position you have agreed to put up for a vote, and now the other person is the judge, and now you are standing there waiting on a verdict you never needed.

“I disagree” is a complete sentence. You can set it down on the bar and go wipe something.

No case, no evidence, no follow-up email. Some people hear that as rude, because we’ve all been trained to believe a position owes the room a receipt.

The ones who belong with you are not in that argument. Most of them are not even here yet. They are a year out, two years out, working somewhere that sands them down a little every Tuesday, and the only way they ever find you is by triangulating on a signal that has not moved. Consistency isn’t a virtue thing. It’s a findability thing.

Every flip resets their search or merely makes them miss out entirely (or worse, find a competitor who is saying a similar thing to you – consistenlty)

This gets worse inside a company than outside one. A team cannot stand next to something that moves. Say the strategy in March, soften it in May because a loud person sighed, and by July nobody will repeat it out loud with their own name attached, because repeating it is how you end up holding a thing the building already set down. You didn’t lose an argument. You taught the room not to carry anything.

Brands do the same flip in public and call it a refresh. New category language every two quarters, a new enemy every fall, each version perfectly defensible on its own. Together they train the exact buyer you wanted to stop memorizing what you are, because what you are has a shelf life now and they’ve learned to wait for the next one.

(None of this is a case for being stubborn about something you got wrong. Changing your mind because of new information is a completely different physical act than changing your answer because somebody in the room sighed.)

The cost is real and it arrives first. You lose people, and some of them tell other people, and that all happens early. The ones who came for exactly the thing you refused to change show up late, quietly, already sure.

They were never going to be argued in. They were looking for something that stayed put long enough to be found.

Stay Positive & Still Not Carrying It…