While you're comfortable in your ignorance, your competitors wake up every day studying you. They know your strengths because they're avoiding them. They know your weaknesses because they're exploiting them. I asked a leadership team their competitor's lead time. Silence. "Four weeks?" someone guessed. It had been four weeks for eight months—and they didn't know. That's not competition—that's getting mugged with your eyes closed.

The Pathetic Pantomime

You've been losing market share to this competitor for years and can't answer basic questions about how they operate. Their warranty claim rate? Nobody knew. Manufacturing costs? Nothing. But I guarantee they know everything about you—that's why they're winning.

Customer obsession failure is even worse. B2B companies study direct customers while ignoring end consumers who determine whether those customers succeed.

When selling shopping carts, grocery stores wanted five-year replacement cycles. We argued for three—wheels go bad, rust develops. They didn't care about $45 commodity items. So we interviewed actual shoppers. Found 82% had abandoned shopping trips because of bad carts. We calculated hundreds of thousands in lost revenue per store annually. Result? They started buying whole fleets rather than one cart at a time. Revenue exploded.

Competitor intelligence failure is equally devastating. You track their pricing and press releases—surface-level intelligence everyone has. Meanwhile, they know your real manufacturing costs and which customers are unhappy.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Todd Hagopian reveals Magnificent Obsession—systematic intelligence on customers and competitors at levels most organizations never attempt.

Customer Obsession: Go beyond B2B buyers to actual end users. Commission quick studies—150 interviews, few thousand dollars. Ask what frustrates them and what workarounds they've created.

Competitor Obsession: Dissect business models, not just products. Buy competitor products and tear down completely. One analysis revealed a competitor was vulnerable below 2,400 units monthly—we exploited it.

Critical boundary: 5% of capacity on intelligence, 95% on execution. The 30-Day Rule—intelligence to action in 30 days maximum.

Your Assignment

Schedule 10 end-user conversations this week. Then buy your top competitor's product and tear it apart.

Visit https://stagnationassassins.com and Declare WAR on Stagnation.

About The Podcaster

Todd Hagopian has led five corporate transformations generating $2B+ in shareholder value. Author of The Unfair Advantage (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV6QMWBX). Featured 30+ times on Forbes.com, Fox Business, and NPR.

I built a spreadsheet at 2 a.m. that revealed a company's darkest secret. 100 customer-product combinations generated 150% of their profit, while 1,700 combinations destroyed the other 50%. That's 5% creating all the value while 95% burned it down. Your P&L is lying because traditional accounting shows positive margins on products that are actually corporate cancer consuming your company from the inside out.

The Profit-Pulverizing Pandemic

Your division is losing $5 million a year. Yet every business review shows positive gross margins across the portfolio. Quality improving, customer satisfaction rising, market share stable—but bleeding money every day.

I pulled financial data and built what nobody had built before—not because they couldn't, but because they didn't want to see the answer. Individual profitability for every customer buying every product. By 8:30 a.m., the truth was devastating.

Here's why your accounting lies: traditional cost allocation was designed for mass production factories making one product. It's completely wrong when complexity varies dramatically. That "profitable" $1,000 transaction? Add setup costs, engineering support, quality inspections, inventory carrying costs, management time. True profit: negative $34,500. Your standard accounting showed 40% gross margin because it didn't allocate activity costs.

The value destroyers clustered predictably: small customers buying customized products, large customers buying commodities at brutal pricing, specialty configurations requiring engineering support exceeding gross margins by three to five times. Every one made sense in isolation—"strategic relationship," "protecting share," "maintaining full product line"—every excuse masking systematic value destruction.

Four Deadly Myths Keeping You Trapped

One: All revenue is good revenue. Wrong—revenue costing more to generate than it returns is organizational cancer. Two: Strategic customers will grow eventually. Customers trained to expect low prices never suddenly pay premium. Three: We need the full product line. No—customers want specific solutions, not breadth. Four: Market share matters most. Unprofitable market share is worse than no share.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Todd Hagopian reveals the 80/20 Matrix—two-dimensional analysis exposing what one-dimensional Pareto misses. Plot customer-product combinations, not just customers or products. Four quadrants emerge.

Quadrant One: Profit Engine—top 20% customers buying top 20% products. These generate 140-200% of profit. Give them everything.

Quadrant Four: Value Destroyers—bottom 80% customers buying bottom 80% products. These destroy 50-100% of profit. Implement 40-60% price increase immediately.

You'll also get 80/20 Squared: within your top 20%, the top 20% of that (4% of combinations) generates about 64% of total profit. Fifteen combinations out of 1,800 generated over half the company's profit.

Three-Wave Implementation transforms your portfolio in 90 days. Results: revenue down 23% year one, profit up 187%. Year two: revenue recovered, profit climbed higher.

Your Assignment

Build a rough 80/20 matrix this week. Identify obvious Quadrant 4 value destroyers everyone knows lose money but nobody will kill. Calculate what happens if you raise prices 50% tomorrow.

Transformation starts with strategic subtraction, not desperate addition.

Visit https://stagnationassassins.com and Declare WAR on Stagnation.

About The Podcaster

Todd Hagopian has led five corporate transformations generating $2B+ in shareholder value. Author of The Unfair Advantage (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV6QMWBX). Featured 30+ times on Forbes.com, Fox Business, and NPR.

While your competitors scatter effort across 100 activities like confetti at a failure festival, one mathematical formula creates nearly 600% advantage on what actually matters. Alexander Karelin went 13 years undefeated—not through better wrestling technique, but through systematic intensity. "None of them trained like I train every single day of my life," he said when questioned.

The Productivity Purgatory

You're running around like a caffeinated chipmunk, checking tasks, attending meetings, feeling furiously busy. Meanwhile, your focused competitor just captured your best customer because they understand the math of domination.

Most executives spread 40 hours across 100 different activities—24 minutes per activity per week. You're not working. You're pretending to work across everything while accomplishing nothing significant anywhere.

I've watched leadership teams celebrate working 60 hours while spending maybe eight hours on activities that actually drive transformation. That's not dedication—that's expensive distraction.

One manufacturing company's engineers invested 80% of technical hours on products generating less than 10% of profit. They were paying Gordon Ramsay to cook ramen noodles.

The work-life balance cult has convinced people that working more than 40 hours is unhealthy. So now we have armies efficiently doing the wrong things for exactly 40 hours. Congratulations—you've optimized irrelevance.

Stanford research proves productivity peaks at about 50 hours weekly. Beyond 55, you actually produce less than at 50. The 70-hour martyrs aren't heroes—they're producing negative returns while burning out teams.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Todd Hagopian reveals the Karelin Method formula: Volume × Efficiency × Focus = 5.76X productivity. Not additive—multiplicative. Small advantages compound exponentially.

Factor One: Strategic Work Volume. Go from 40 to 50 hours—25% more time, completely sustainable. Factor Two: Systematic Efficiency. 20% more output per hour through eliminating waste, AI, outsourcing, decision trees. Factor Three: Extreme Focus. Spend 80% of time on the 20% of activities driving all value—creating 4X multiplier.

The math: your competitor works 40 hours with 30% focus on critical activities—12 hours on what matters. You work 50 hours with 80% focus at 1.2X efficiency—48 effective hours. Four times the impact.

You'll also get Three Weapons: Morning War Room (15-minute standing meetings, decisions made immediately), Weekly Kill List (cross out priorities 8-9-10 in thick red ink), and Six-Week Battle Campaigns using the 3A Method delivering 52 improvements annually versus two to four from traditional approaches.

Critical boundary: 50 hours maximum. Beyond that, productivity declines and burnout accelerates.

Your Assignment

Track your hours this week. Measure what percentage goes to your top 20% activities. Launch one morning war room. Create your kill list.

When concentrated effort produces 4X results versus scattered exhaustion, you'll never spread energy like confetti again.

Visit https://stagnationassassins.com and Declare WAR on Stagnation.

About The Podcaster

Todd Hagopian has led five corporate transformations generating $2B+ in shareholder value. Author of The Unfair Advantage (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV6QMWBX). Featured 30+ times on Forbes.com, Fox Business, and NPR.