You've got a spreadsheet with three competitors on it, and you check it every Monday morning — their pricing, their new hires, their latest campaign. Here's the uncomfortable truth: none of those three businesses are the reason your growth has stalled. The business quietly eating your market isn't in your category at all. It's solving your customer's underlying problem in a completely different way, and you've never once opened a spreadsheet on it.

This is the question behind most stalled growth strategies: why isn't my business growing when I'm still beating the competitors I track? The answer, more often than not, is that you're winning a race nobody outside your industry is watching.

Every strategic planning session I've sat in over 40 years starts the same way: a list of named competitors, their strengths, their weaknesses, a plan to out-position them. It feels rigorous. It's also almost always looking in the wrong direction. Michael Porter's Five Forces framework — still one of the most cited strategy models in business — puts "threat of substitutes" on equal footing with direct rivalry, and yet most SME strategy sessions spend 90% of their time on rivalry and almost none on substitution. Harvard Business Review's summary of Porter's model is worth fifteen minutes of any owner's time for this reason alone.

Substitution doesn't announce itself with a press release. It shows up as a slow leak: fewer referrals, longer sales cycles, customers who "went a different direction" that you can't quite name. Blockbuster didn't lose to a better video store. Kodak didn't lose to a better film company. The businesses that blindside SMEs are almost never wearing the uniform they expect.

I run every coaching client through a simple quarterly exercise called the Adjacent Threat Scan. It takes ninety minutes and it consistently surfaces the risk — and the opportunity — that the competitor spreadsheet never catches.

1. Map the job, not the category. Write down the actual job your customer is hiring you to do — not "we sell X," but the underlying outcome they want. Then list every other way that job could plausibly get done, including ways that didn't exist five years ago.

2. Track the adjacent movers. Identify three businesses outside your category that are growing fast and touching your customer's world in some way — a new platform, a new supplier model, a new DIY option. Ask what happens to your revenue if any one of them decides your customer is next.

3. Run the "skip us entirely" test. For your next ten lost or stalled deals, ask not "who did they choose instead" but "did they solve the problem without hiring anyone like us at all." That answer tells you more about your real competitive position than any rival's pricing page.

This is the same discipline that sits underneath the Simple-Growth System™: strategy built on where the market is actually moving, not where the org chart of "known competitors" says it's moving.

“Kevin D'Ambros-Smith presented on the Icehouse Owner Manager Programme and he was brilliant. He presented his key takeaways from 40 years in business and it was the most notes I have ever taken from any speaker.”

— Steve Holloway, Founder, Between Two Beers Podcast (Winner, Best Business Podcast, NZ Podcast Awards)

Most owners, if you asked them, would agree this is true in principle. Almost none of them run the scan. Not because it's hard — because it requires stepping outside the day-to-day long enough to see the shape of your own industry from the outside, and that is precisely the vantage point a founder buried in operations doesn't have. This is the real value of an outside strategic partner: not motivation, not templates, but a second set of eyes that isn't inside your industry's assumptions.

If your strategy sessions are still built entirely around the three competitors you already know, you're planning for last year's threat.