You said yes once. It’s a product line now.

Variety gets added one customer at a time and paid for all at once, in lead times, quoting errors, and the attention of the people you can least spare.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for You said yes once. It’s a product line now.

A customer asks for something slightly different. The margin is fine, the relationship matters, and the extra work is a couple of hours. Nobody writes it down as a decision. Two years later the catalogue has forty variants, eleven of which sold once, and the quoting process takes a week because somebody has to check what is actually possible. The interesting question is not whether to say yes to exceptions. It is why the arithmetic at the moment of decision is so reliably wrong, and in which direction. The decision…

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