Sticking with the self-image that made you successful is the mummification of your own business.
The best positioning of my life, I built by accident. And for years afterward, I could not have told you how.
Before Genesis, before any of it, two friends wanted to go skiing. Glenn Wastyn was one of them. They were students, they had no money, and they had one idea: if enough of us go together, we can afford it. They asked around, and fifty more students wanted in. One busload.
That was the whole company. A bus, some rented apartments, a stack of ski passes, gear hired in bulk.
I was not there that first year. The second year they came looking for me, because they needed someone who knew how to work, knew how to have fun, and could teach people to ski. That was the whole job description. I said yes.
We never sat down and wrote a positioning statement. We had one rule, and it was almost too simple to say out loud. The customer was us. We built the trip we would want to be on.
One small thing tells the whole story. While everyone was up on the slopes on arrival day, we carried their luggage into the apartments for them. After a ten-hour bus ride and an afternoon on the mountain, people came to the bar, picked up their key over a beer or two, and walked into an apartment where their bags were already waiting. They were ecstatic. We had produced nothing. We had simply served people the way we would have wanted to be served.
And we never let it sit still. Every year we added something. New events, new activities, a better evening programme, a service nobody had thought to ask for yet. The price held. The experience got better every single season. People came back because they knew next year would be cooler than the last. That is how a student bus trip became an iconic name with a cult following, and a formula nobody could copy, though plenty tried.
One busload became more than ten thousand paying customers. And I want to be honest about the part that matters. We did not engineer it as a strategy. We stumbled into the best position a company can hold, then kept it alive by instinct, and the understanding of why it worked arrived years later, long after the doing.
That is the strange thing about positioning. You can get it perfectly right and have no idea how. Which means you can also lose it perfectly slowly, and never feel the moment it goes.
Call it Positioning Debt. It is the fourth of the four debts, and the quietest. The others announce themselves eventually. This one feels like loyalty the entire time you are running it up.
Here is how it works. Something you do makes you successful. A way of describing yourself, a kind of customer, a place in the market. Then the market moves. The company grows. What your partners need from you changes. But the story you tell about yourself stays exactly where it was, because it worked, and because changing it feels like betraying the thing that made you.
There is a word I keep coming back to for this. Mummification. Sticking with the self-image that made you successful is the mummification of your own business. Beautifully preserved. Perfectly intact. And no longer alive.
A ship in a bottle is a lovely thing. It is also a ship that will never sail again.
The best answer I know to this did not come from a book. It came from a man who did it himself.
In the 1980s, Intel was a memory-chip company. That was not just what Intel sold. It was what Intel was. Its identity. And memory was being crushed by Japanese competitors.
Andy Grove tells the story of sitting with Gordon Moore, the two of them running the company, watching it bleed. He asked Moore a question. If the board threw us out and brought in a new chief executive tomorrow, what would that person do? Moore did not hesitate. He would get us out of the memory business. And Grove said: then why don’t we walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves?
They did. Intel walked away from the thing that built it and became a microprocessor company. One of the great acts of a company refusing to be mummified.
I trust Grove on this more than I trust most people who write about it, for one reason. He did it. He did not theorise the pivot from a safe distance. He lived it, with the company on the line.
That is a distinction worth holding onto. Virtues, not values. A value is a word on a wall. A virtue is a thing you actually do when it costs you something. And the first virtue, the one all the others lean on, is courage. Without it, the rest are easy, or they are worth nothing at all. Re-positioning is not a clever idea. It is an act of nerve.
But there is a wrong way to do it, and it is the most common way of all.
Most companies that chase a new position pay for it by spending the trust that built them. They drop the channel that carried them. They go direct to the customer they used to serve through partners. They tell the people who staked their own name on theirs that the rules have changed now.
In a trust business, that is the most expensive mistake you can make. Because your real position was never the story you told about yourself. It was the story other people told about you when you were not in the room. You did not write that. You earned it, over years, with hundreds of small consistent acts.
Burn it, and it is gone. That is a one-way door. You do not win that trust back with a campaign. You win it back with years, if at all.
There is another one-way door in positioning, and it is quieter. Some choices redefine what you are the moment you make them. Put a shopping cart on your website, and the day the first person fills it and checks out, you are a webshop. One icon, one door, no way back. In B2C that is exactly right. In B2B, where your whole worth is being the partner who curates, advises, and makes the installer win, it can be deadly. The cart looks like a feature. It is a repositioning.
So both things are true at once, and holding them together is the whole skill. You must move your position as the world moves. And you must never burn the people who made you in order to become who you are next. Re-position, yes. Betray, no. Carry the trust with you.
I learned this the slow way, which seems to be the only way I learn anything.
Skikot, I got right by accident, and spent years not understanding it. Much later, with the businesses we build now, the market shifted, and what our partners needed from us shifted with it. This time I could see it while it was happening.
So we moved. Quietly. Not with a loud announcement that we had reinvented ourselves, because that would have been a lie, and it would have told every partner who trusted the old us that the ground had moved under them. We evolved, alongside the market and alongside the people we build with, until the new position simply felt like who we had always been.
That is the difference between an evolution and a rupture. An evolution keeps faith with the people who got you here. A rupture spends them. From the outside, the market cannot always tell the two apart. The people who carry you always can.
I am a builder. Not a flipper. I build things meant to last, not things meant to be flipped. That is not a promise never to change. It is the opposite. The things built to last are exactly the ones that have to keep evolving, quietly and honestly, without ever burning the trust that holds them up.
That is Positioning Debt. The slow, comfortable drift of becoming the wrong version of yourself, dressed up as loyalty. The cure is not to stay the same. It is to move with courage, and to bring everyone who trusts you along.
So try this on Monday. Two questions.
One: the story you tell about your company, is it still the story your partners tell about you? If they have drifted apart, that gap is your positioning debt.
Two: name one thing you still do because it worked years ago, not because it works now. Change that one thing. That is where you start paying it down.
That is the last of the four. Management, Technology, Decision, Positioning. You run them up quietly, on the inside, for years, and it is tempting to believe they stay there.
They never do. Every one of them reaches the customer in the end, added up into a single thing they feel and cannot name. Next Friday, the fifth debt. The only one your customer actually sees.
w. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.