In this episode, Michelle walks through why those knee-jerk, “spaghetti against the wall” responses rarely solve anything—and how to stop making them.
Too many entrepreneurs jump to solutions before they’ve even defined the real problem. “Customers aren’t buying, so should I lower my prices?” Sound familiar? In this episode, Michelle walks through why those knee-jerk, “spaghetti against the wall” responses rarely solve anything—and how to stop making them.
One of Michelle’s favorites - the Five Whys framework can uncover the root cause behind what’s really going on in your business and why slowing down to ask better questions will get you further than any reactive fix. Plus, Michelle breaks down the three categories most problems fall into: a forced market shift, an internal model shift, or a personal need for change—and how each one requires a different kind of response.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years I've done this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy.
On this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly follow someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
And in every episode of this show, I tackle a real question I'm hearing from real entrepreneurs. And today, I'm going to tackle actually the root of a question that I hear all the time.
And that question is, this is happening, so should I do this in response?
And yeah, that's not a specific question yet because I am aggregating questions that I get 25 times a week. And we can insert scenarios into that question, right? Customers are balking at my pricing, so should I offer something at a lower price point?
Hey, this thing used to sell and it's now not selling, so should I make something else or what should I do? That sort of thing, where they are saying to me, hey, this is happening, I've noticed this trend in my business, so here's the response I've come up with. What do you think about it?
And well, every time I hear that question, I say, I have no idea if you should do that or not. Because here's what's happening when they make that suggestion to me. They're making a knee-jerk, I tend to call it a spaghetti response.
And I call it a spaghetti response because they're throwing spaghetti against the wall. Somebody tells me, hey, customers are balking at my pricing, so should I offer something at a lower price point? Immediately jumping to the conclusion that you should have to lower your prices because customers are balking at your pricing, that is the equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall.
I have no idea. There could be 50,000 other reasons that are underneath the surface of why customers are balking at your pricing. And so, sure, you could try to lower your price point.
Maybe that's correct, maybe that's not correct. But it's not going to be a sustainable answer and it's not going to be the right answer. So even if it works, it may be that you could have corrected something else and never had to lower your pricing.
So we don't want to jump right away to scenarios. Never come to me and say, hey, this is happening in my business, so I think I'm going to do this. Well, you can come to me, but I'm going to immediately say, okay, let's slow down, ask some different questions first.
Because, listen, it's the name of the show. I'm all about sequence over strategy. And so when you come to me with a question like that, I am going to find, and I'm going to encourage you to find, a better response.
And let's ask some questions in the correct sequence so that you are not jumping to the immediate conclusion of what kind of spaghetti do you want to throw against the wall in order to solve this thing. How do we do that? When you have a question like this, and I'm going to fully acknowledge, like, this is annoying.
Of course you want to just jump to solutions. But we slow down in this world, and we slow down to make sure that you are asking and answering the correct questions, because the five minutes it takes to do that is going to get you so much further than all these reactionary responses.
So when you have a question like this, and you're tempted to just jump at that solution, it's not going to answer the problem, and it's going to be what I call an answer to a first Why problem.
And when I say first Why problem, that's a reference to the five Whys framework of problem solving.
I'm going to describe that briefly here, but you may have heard me talk about this many times, because I'm a very big fan of this framework. And the five Whys framework tells us that to actually figure out what is going on, to actually find the root cause of a problem, which we would want in these scenarios, before we make a big change, before we change our pricing, change our customers, announce a new product, we better make sure we're actually solving a root cause of something, right?
So the idea is that to solve a root cause of a problem, you have to ask why something is happening five times before you actually get to the solution. And when you only ask it once, you basically get a band-aid solution. So when you say, why are customers not buying my product, and you say, I think the price is too expensive, the price is too high, you don't want to just assume that and change the price.
You want to say, well, why is the price too high? And then maybe your answer might be, oh, my customers have shifted a little bit. They seem to be a little less advanced than they used to be.
Okay, that's interesting, right? Why are your customers less advanced than they used to be? Why are they more beginners?
Well, because I changed how I market. Okay, that makes sense then, you've changed how you market, so you're getting a different customer in your funnel, and they might have a different price sensitivity to your previous customers. See how we're getting somewhere now?
Why did you change your marketing? Well, because I thought it was a good idea. Okay, that's an answer that would be typical, but that would show you that an arbitrary change you've made in your business, because you felt like changing your marketing, has actually shifted a bunch of things.
It shifted your model to the point where you've attracted new customers who are more price sensitive, and so now you're worried about lowering your pricing. Okay, you could lower your pricing, or you could say, gosh, I'm going to go back and fix my marketing and get my old customer base back, because they were okay with the price. So you see how you don't want to be so reactionary?
You want to ask why five times. I mean, sometimes three or four times is enough, but you want to get to that root cause, and when you come with me, when you ask one of these questions for me, that's what I'm going to respond with. I'm going to be like, okay, let's ask why a few times and figure out what is actually going on here.
Maybe we arrive at the conclusion that you've arrived at. Maybe that's right, but right now, if you're only asking why once, and you're just throwing some solutions out there, the odds that you have arrived at the correct problem, they're pretty low. So that's where we're going to start today, is figuring out what these questions are rooted in and where you might want some of your whys to lead you.
Where do they come from? Because there's some factor out there that is causing these things to happen, right? Which in turn is causing you to ask the questions and come up with the spaghetti responses.
So in general, we can start to categorize places that these things come from. What are the root causes of some of these shifts that end up simmering up on top of the surface? And there are three of them, and I want to talk about those today.
Because again, I kind of want to expose them to your consciousness so that you can better diagnose what's going on. You can better answer your five whys, and you can figure out, oh wait, one of these three things is happening. And so if I know that, then I know how to respond to it better.
So what are the three things that may be at the foundation, that may be at the root of a lot of these questions once you get down to your fifth why? What are the three things that may have kind of started the reaction chain to get you to the point where having to contemplate why are my customers no longer buying something? Or why are my customers all of a sudden so price sensitive?
Why do my customers not want this thing that they've wanted for years? There's three of them. Let me go over them.
And first I'm going to name them, then I'm going to define them for you.
First one is what I call a forced market shift.
Situation two is an internal model shift.
Situation three, change needed. These are generic terms. So let's go through and let's define them and talk about what these actually mean.
The first one, and they're in order by the way of kind of how dramatically they impact you and how quickly you need to address them. The first one, a forced market shift. This is when the market is dictating a change to you, meaning something has changed in your market.
There's been some sort of market correction, some sort of market shock. Something has happened where all of a sudden your market is acting differently than they have before. This is an external thing.
You have no control over it. It's just happening to everybody in the market, but it's causing everybody in the market to act differently. And so if you can identify that you have a forced market shift, that there's been some sort of market shock, then you know how to start thinking about this because now you know that there are new external factors that are impacting you that weren't there before.
And so again, if we ask, what should I do about pricing? What should I do about products? Your answer can change dramatically if you know that something has fundamentally changed with how your market behaves.
You're probably gonna have a really different answer than if you thought you might just have screwed something up, right? Or if your customers all of a sudden just got annoying. Like those are very different things if you've had a market shock.
So that's number one, forced market shift. Something externally has happened to change the behavior of your market that you're gonna need to respond to.
Number two, internal model shift. This is where you internally, we have the word internal here, have shifted something either on purpose or unconsciously in your model that has changed, again, how the pieces of your business interact with each other. And this is usually a case where over time, you've kind of made your products better or you've tweaked your marketing. And in doing so, you've actually shifted who should be attracted to those things or who you are attracting.
And that has like changed the balance of your business. And you may not even know this. You may have just subtly done it over time until all of a sudden there's a point where it is causing havoc in your business.
But it is good to know, hey, I have actually changed some things over time. And so the reason that I am now confronted with this question is because I've shifted some stuff. So I should go back and actually look at what has shifted, learn from that and figure out how to fix it.
And then the third situation is change needed. This one, relatively self-explanatory. You've decided you wanna change something about your business.
This is the beauty of being a solo business owner is you get to decide this stuff. You can decide, I no longer wanna do one-on-one stuff. I no longer wanna do whatever, fill in the blank, right?
But if you want a change, you can't just decide willy-nilly, oh, I'm gonna do this. Like you have to understand how that's gonna have implications down the line with your business. And so the three, again, are a forced market shift.
Externally, something has happened in your market that is causing your customers, your market to act differently. It is having impact on your business. This one tends to be the most dramatic and it tends to make you have to react quickly because the whole market has changed.
So you need to see that and you need to react.
Second is internal model shift. And this just means that you, either consciously or unconsciously, have changed something in your business model.
And as you have changed that, it has shifted how the different components of your business work together. And so they're no longer working well together. And so your market is exactly the same.
You have just kind of screwed yourself up and you have to kind of go back and say, gosh, what did we shift that caused this change and do we want to shift it back or do we want to make another change that will get it back into alignment? And this is kind of a medium situation, right? It's not a forced market shift where maybe overnight your market has changed completely, but something's going wrong.
And so you need to address it relatively quickly if you want to preserve your profit and your sustainability and everything that we want out of your business.
And then the third is change needed. And this is just, you want to change something.
This tends to be the least time sensitive because it's just an internal desire to change something about your business. However, personal situations change all the time, health situations change, family situations change. And so it's not like this is always just, oh, personal preference, I kind of want to do something different.
Like sometimes there's something really impacting your life that is causing you to need the change. And so while this one tends to be the least time sensitive, it certainly can be time sensitive and it can be really stressful on you if you're burning out of your business, even though you can physically keep going, none of us want to be operating in that space.
So those are the three situations, forced market shift, internal model shift, and change needed.
And when you can drill down using the five whys and you can catch yourself and say, hey, you know, because people are balking at the price, I better lower my prices. When you can stop having that immediate response and instead you can use your five whys and you can figure out, hey, which one of these three situations am I in? Then we can start building a more productive response, right?
Because we may find that if it's a forced market shift, there've been a big market shock. We may find that maybe that market shock caused people to not have money, in which case maybe you do need to lower prices. Or maybe that market shock caused people to value different things or caused them to look elsewhere.
It could be a whole bunch of things that could change your perception, change your diagnosis of why people are now balking at your price. Same thing for an internal model shift, right? You could be asking yourself, gosh, my customers just don't really seem to be interested in my product anymore.
What's up with that?
You know, for five years they've loved my product and now all of a sudden nobody seems to care. Well, you may go through the five whys and what you might find, and this is more common than you would think.
I see this very often, is that over time you've thought that you were improving and making your product better, and you were, but when you did that, you may have improved your product too much and the customers that you've already been, always been marketing to, well, the product might be too advanced for them now.
Because over the course of three, four, five years, you've gotten so much better at solving problems that you are now offering an advanced solution when maybe you used to be offering a beginner solution or an intermediate solution, and you may not even realize that you have done that.
And again, this is really common, so you may have improved your product to the point that the customers you were always marketing to are no longer interested, because now the product is above their heads. That's really normal, shockingly normal, right, and so again, the question is not a knee-jerk response, the best question becomes, gosh, what should I do, right, should I go find new customers who want my new product, or should I bring my product back down to the level of customers that I have?
That's the kind of internal model shift that we see, and again, that's not answered if you just jump to conclusions right away. Same thing with change needed, right? If you decide that you are frustrated by working all one-on-one, and you're going to start offering $27 info products, it's a dramatic change, and so your immediate solution is, oh, I'm tired of one-on-one, I'm just going to throw out some $27 info products.
Okay, okay, that would be one solution, but if we drill down and we really understand that you're just looking for this change, we can center what is the most important change, and the most important change here may be, hey, I'm burned out, I can't be on Zoom all day long anymore.
Okay, well, there are solutions to that that don't involve selling $27 info products, because going from one-on-one services to $27 info products, that's going to blow your whole marketing mind.
Right, you have a completely different marketing approach to do that, and so you don't want to jump to those conclusions, you want to recognize, hey, the reason that I am just waking up every day desperate to sell $27 info products is not because I have a huge desire to sell $27 info products.
It's because I have a desire to change from doing one-on-one business, because I can't be on Zoom every day, and once we recognize that, then most of the time we discover you actually want nothing to do with selling $27 info products either, because it's a pain in a whole different other way.
But there's probably an intermediate thing, an intermediate solution that gets you to what you actually need in terms of that change, and until we ask the five whys, until we drill down to where is this spaghetti idea coming from, where is this desperation to throw some info products against the wall and see if they will change your life, where's that coming from?
It's coming because you internally need a change, it's not coming because your customers stopped buying the product. It's not coming because there's a market shock. It's coming because you are sick of delivering your product, and so you're going to completely overcrack and do something that sounds like such a relief to get yourself out of that.
But as we know, when you respond that way, it's probably not going to go well because you're in a mindset of overcorrecting, and so instead, again, we want to take a first step of identifying what situation am I actually in.
When you find yourself a little frustrated with your results for some reason, and you start being tempted with all these ideas - I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, just stop.
And instead think back to this episode and go to your five whys, and step one, drill down, figure out is this a forced market shift that I'm experiencing, is this an internal model shift that has happened even if I didn't notice it, or is this just me wanting to do things differently?
All three of those are legitimate and happen all the time, but you need to know which one it is, because once we know which one it is, then we can start building you back up, and that's the goal, right?
Once we know the foundation of the problem, once we know the root cause of the problem, we are set up to better understand the range of options we have to solve it, and that's when we can get into the three business growth dials.
If you're familiar with some of that work, and we have episodes about these, I always talk about the three dials in your business, which is your product mix, your customer mix, and your marketing mix, and we use those to solve these problems. We use those to figure out what your options are, but if we can understand where the problem is rooted, then once we get the dials out, we're in so much better of a position to make sure that we are finding a sustainable solution and really finding you those options that you want.
So to kind of sum up what we have talked about today, here is what I see people tend to do. Some situation happens in their business, people stop buying their thing and they can't figure out why, people are balking at the prices, and your immediate solution is to throw some spaghetti against the wall. Oh my gosh, okay, this is happening, I'm going to do this.
What I'm inviting you to do is to catch yourself when you do that and stop, and instead remember that that is a first level why, when you are throwing a solution out there that is a first why answer, and I want you to go down to the fifth why.
I want you to start asking why, why, why, why, why, and when you do that, you are going to arrive at a point where you are going to identify the root cause of this thing. And the root cause is going to be that there is a forced market shift, something changed in the market, there is an internal model shift, something changed in your model, maybe you knew it did or maybe you didn't, but something about your model has changed, or you are frustrated and you are desiring to make a change because your model is no longer working for you.
99% of the cases come down to one of those three root causes, and when we can identify those three root causes, now we can go to the three business growth tiles, we can start looking at your product mix, your marketing mix, your customer mix, and make some great options and great choices for you.
We can surface what your options are, and so instead of knee-jerk changing your pricing, instead of knee-jerk creating a new product, instead of knee-jerk pumping out YouTube videos that are pitching $27 info products, we can take a beat, get out the growth tiles and figure out what are the really good options. And what are the best options within the good options, and what is your path forward.
That's how you find sustainable solutions to this stuff, my friends, is drilling down and taking a minute when you find yourself freaking out a little bit and thinking about solutions. Instead, let's take a minute, ask a couple questions, get it down to the root cause, then build it back up.
All right, that is what I have for you today. As always, thank you for being here today. If this episode helped you, I would be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that it might help, or if you left a review.
Those reviews really help us and expose the show to more people who could use it. So if you are getting value out of this, we so appreciate a share or a review because it just helps get the word out to everybody else. And as always, you can visit me on LinkedIn or on my website at themichellewarner.com.
In the meantime, I will see you back here in a couple of weeks.