A working guide for leaders who are done with innovation theatre and want the harder, more useful thing: a structured way to redesign the business before the market forces the choice.
Reading time · 8 minutes
Most organisations don't have a business model problem. They have an attachment problem — to a model that once worked. Reinvention gets talked about in strategy offsites and quietly declined the following Monday, because the day-to-day is still, just about, working.
This guide is for the leaders who don't want to wait for it to stop working. It sets out a seven-move approach to business model reinvention that treats the model itself — not the org chart, not the tech stack, not the culture programme — as the primary unit of change.
It draws on the same frame Andrew uses in keynotes and intensives with executive teams reinventing under real pressure: innovation theatre out, strategic redesign in.
Most reinvention stalls because leaders redesign the org chart before they've written down the model in a single line: who pays, for what, why now, and what the business promises to keep true. Until that sentence exists, every workshop is decorating a model no one has agreed on.
The promise is what customers, staff and capital actually buy. The plumbing is how you deliver it — channels, tech stack, org, unit economics. Reinvention breaks when leaders defend plumbing as if it were promise. List both, on one page, and mark which is negotiable.
Customers, capital, regulation, tech and geopolitics move on their own timelines. A reinvention grounded only in internal frustration ships a better version of yesterday. Write down the two or three outside shifts that make the current model less relevant three years out — specifically, not in TED-talk abstractions.
Every serious business model change eats a piece of the current one. If leadership can't say — on record — which product, channel, margin or customer segment they will let shrink, the reinvention will quietly optimise around it and nothing structural will change.
Reinvented models are almost never right the first time; they're right the third time. Frame the new model as a testable hypothesis with three or four load-bearing assumptions (willingness to pay, cost to serve, distribution, retention) and design the cheapest experiments that would falsify each.
A new business model that sits on the old operating model reverts within eighteen months. Reinvention is finished when incentives, decision rights, capital allocation and hiring criteria have been rewritten to match — not just when the strategy deck has been updated.
Staff, customers and boards will accept a new business model if they can see the through-line to what the company already stood for. Reinvention isn't announcing a new company; it's showing why the old one was always heading here.
Growth requires disproportionately more capital, headcount or discounting than it used to.
The best people in your industry stop applying, or start leaving for adjacent categories.
Your customers are quietly re-scoping what they buy from you, even as revenue holds.
New entrants are meeting the same customer need with a different economic shape.
Your own strategy deck could be delivered by three of your competitors without editing.
The board conversation has shifted from ambition to defence — without anyone naming it.
Andrew works with leadership teams on business model reinvention through strategic engagements, intensives and keynotes — grounded in the seven moves above.