The assumption nobody questioned

Last week, I wrote about the Fabian Society and how inherited intellectual frameworks quietly become the norm, ideas that made sense in one era carried forward into another as though the context never changed. The same thing happens inside businesses every day. It’s just harder to see when you’re inside the one doing it.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard in almost every organisation I’ve ever worked with. In boardrooms and back offices, in startups and in businesses that have been running for thirty years.

“That’s the way we do things around here.”

It sounds like a cultural statement. It isn’t. It’s a financial one. And in most cases, nobody has stopped to question it.

Assumptions don’t start as assumptions.

Every assumption your business is running on was once a decision. Someone looked at the market, the numbers, and the people in the room, and made a call. That call was probably right. The pricing model suited the clients you were chasing. The clients you were chasing suited the reputation you’d built. The work you took suited the team you had.

The problem isn’t that the decision was wrong. The problem is that the decision aged and nobody noticed.

The conditions changed. The logic didn’t.

Markets shift. The clients who once found you are now finding someone else, or finding you in a different way. Your cost base looks nothing like it did five years ago. The founder’s network — which drove a lot of early business — has matured, moved on, or stopped referring in the same way. But the business’s operating logic often hasn’t kept pace with any of it.

This is what I’ve come to think of as the validity gap. The business isn’t failing to execute. It’s executing well against a premise that no longer holds. Strategy problems get a lot of attention. Validity problems rarely do, because they’re harder to name and uncomfortable to admit.

The pricing model you’re running isn’t wrong. It’s just designed for a version of your business that no longer exists.

Why the question never gets asked

Questioning an assumption rarely feels like a strategic exercise. It feels like questioning a decision. And questioning a decision usually feels like questioning the person who made it — especially when that person is still in the room, or is you.

There’s a particular awkwardness to inherited assumptions in owner-managed businesses. The founder made the call. The call became policy. The policy became culture. By the time anyone thinks to ask whether it still holds, it’s carrying the weight of the whole origin story. Pushing back on the pricing model feels like pushing back on the decade of work that built it.

So the conversation doesn’t happen. The assumption survives. And the gap between the premise and the reality quietly widens.

What it costs

I’ve sat across from business owners who were working harder than ever and growing slower than they expected. Not because their execution was poor — it wasn’t because they were still priced for a market that had moved, still taking clients who no longer represented their best work, still running a service mix that reflected the business they used to be.

The assumption audit didn’t reveal anything catastrophic. It revealed something more mundane and more expensive: a business doing the right things in service of the wrong frame.

Where to start

Pick one assumption your business is running on — about your pricing, your ideal client, or the work worth taking — and ask a single question: when did you last test whether the conditions that made this sensible still exist?

Not “is this working?” Working and valid aren’t the same thing. A pricing model can generate revenue while systematically undervaluing what you do. A client profile can keep you busy while pulling you away from the work you’re actually built for.

The audit doesn’t need to be formal. It needs to be honest.

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

Need a speaker who’ll bring a fresh perspective? Reach me at info@fuelledfitandfiredup.com.

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