Every hour spent trimming costs is an hour not spent looking sideways — and sideways is where the growth actually is.
That’s not a metaphor problem. It’s a proximity problem. The expertise that built your business is the same expertise blocking you from seeing what it’s already become.
You know your customers, your supply chain, your capabilities better than anyone. That closeness is exactly why you can’t see the adjacent market sitting one degree away from what you already do.
■ THE PROXIMITY PROBLEM
When growth stalls, the reflex is almost always the same: look at the P&L, find what can be trimmed, and act on it. It’s the default move because it’s measurable — it produces a number, and the number shows up in a quarter.
That reflex isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just aimed entirely inward, at the business you already understand, and it has nothing to say about the business sitting one degree away that you’ve never had reason to examine. Your expertise, your incentives, and your reporting structure are all built to look inward at margin — not outward at adjacency. The closer you stand to your own operation, the harder that operation is to see from outside it.
This is the mechanism behind what the Wurzer Adjacency Framework calls the strategic blind spot: it isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s a distance problem. You are, quite literally, standing too close to your own business to see the shape of what it’s become.
■ WHY THE P&L CAN’T FIND IT
Trimming the expense line is an internal audit. It examines what you’re already doing and asks how to do it for less — a valuable exercise, but a narrow one.
Finding the adjacent market is an external audit. It examines what you’re already touching — customers, capabilities, relationships, operational byproduct — and asks what else it’s worth to someone who isn’t currently paying you for it.
Those are different exercises, aimed in different directions, using different muscles. Most leadership teams are well practiced at the first one and have never formally run the second — not because they lack the discipline, but because nothing in a standard P&L review is built to surface it.
■ THE PATTERN THAT KEEPS REPEATING
Every downturn produces the same reflex, across every industry: leadership turns inward, toward the numbers it already controls, because that’s where the certainty is. Cost-cutting is comfortable precisely because it’s measurable — you know exactly what you saved, and you know it immediately.
The adjacent market never announces itself the same way. It doesn’t show up as a line item that’s too high. It shows up as a capability, a relationship, or a piece of operational byproduct that was never priced in the first place — invisible not because it’s hidden, but because nobody inside the business is positioned to see it as separate from the core offer it supports.
Same move, every cycle: the business that eventually captures the adjacency is almost never the one that cut deepest. It’s the one that stopped, for long enough, to look sideways instead of down.
■ A SIMPLE FRAMEWORK
- List the capabilities, relationships, or data your business already has that exist purely to support your core offer — not the offer itself.
- For each one, ask who else would pay for that capability on its own, separate from the product or service it currently supports.
- Identify the internal voice most likely to say “that’s not our business” when you raise it — that reflex is usually protecting the core, not evaluating the adjacency on its merits.
- Run this as a standing exercise, not a one-time workshop. Proximity doesn’t resolve itself; it has to be actively corrected for, on a recurring basis.
■ CLOSING INSIGHT + CTA
A leaner P&L will always be there to chase. It’s measurable, it’s familiar, and it will never stop feeling like the responsible move.
But the growth most businesses are missing isn’t underneath them in the cost structure. It’s beside them, one degree away, in the market their own expertise has made invisible.
I track signals like this every week and translate them into specific adjacent revenue opportunities — calibrated to your sector, assets, and competitive position.
→ Run AMOS free at limitlesssolutionsconsulting.com/amos/ — free for privately held businesses in the $5M–$75M revenue range — and find out what this means for you specifically.
Warren Wurzer, CEO | Limitless Solutions Consulting
@warrenwurzer | limitlesssolutionsconsulting.com
