# The whole game _Create value. Position it. Defend it._ --- The value you create shapes which positioning is credible. Your positioning shapes which barriers can form. Your barriers shape which creation is worth investing in. --- **Price captures value. It doesn't create it.** A team debates whether to match a competitor's price cut. The conversation assumes price is the lever. The [[Value stick]] reveals two directions: raise what customers will pay, or lower what suppliers need to accept. The second lever is underrated. Supplier relationships, operational design, and employment terms create and destroy value well before a customer engages. Then the less obvious path: making what you sell more valuable without changing it. Cheap petrol made cars more valuable. [[Complements]] work by shifting the value pool toward what you actually sell. --- **The most valuable customers are the ones who can't wait.** A feature request enters the backlog and ships six months later. Development took two weeks. A customer escalation sits in a queue for three days; the fix takes an hour. The pattern holds from factory floors to software backlogs. Somewhere between 0.05% and 5% of elapsed time is spent doing the actual work. Firms that compress this dead time capture the customers who will pay most for responsiveness, because those customers were already paying for the wait in ways that never appeared on an invoice. [[Speed]] is the hidden dimension of value. But speed in the wrong frame is still invisible. --- **A good business in the wrong frame is invisible.** In a vertical market every competitor covers roughly the same ground. You can't escape the category, but you can control which attributes buyers weigh you on. If the opposite of your choice sounds rational for someone else, you've made a [[Real choices|real choice]]. If it sounds absurd, you've described your situation. [[Heico]] and [[TransDigm]] both compound at 20%+ for decades in the same industry, one selling approved alternatives below OEM prices, the other holding sole-source premium. Mirror strategies, both valid. In bounded markets this plays out through [[Verticals]], depth before breadth, sequencing expansion so each move reinforces the last. Heico's positioning only compounds because the PMA approval process creates barriers competitors take years to clear. Positioning choices that can't be defended are temporary. --- **Positioning is harder when you're carrying baggage.** Most positioning advice assumes a clean slate. Turnarounds don't get that luxury. A £300/year product can't support the same motion as a £100k deal, and [[Economics vs playbooks|the economics come first]]. When the market remembers your old reputation, [[Legacy]] is usually more credible than reinvention. Reframe what you already have. [[Edges]] narrows the start to the competitor's most dissatisfied customers, closest to your happiest ones. These constraints define the work of [[Pragmatic GTM|pragmatic go-to-market]], where what you can credibly promise matters more than what you'd like to claim. And the customers you win at the edge build different switching costs than customers acquired fresh. --- **Competitors copy value. They struggle to copy the conditions that produced it.** An accounting platform competes with two alternatives. Customers accumulate years of transactions, reconciliation rules, and supplier payment templates. The deeper they embed, the higher the friction of leaving, and almost none of it is contractual. [[Switching costs]] build through depth. Vanguard's index funds were the simplest product in finance. Active managers saw the threat but couldn't respond without cannibalising fee income. [[Counter-positioning]] turns the incumbent's own logic into a cage. [[Process power]] takes decades. [[Danaher]]'s operating system, thousands of small improvements to how work gets done, can be observed but not replicated without walking the same path. Roy Thomson spent nine years running a single local newspaper before buying two hundred during the industry's decline. Proprietary understanding comes from sustained attention to a domain everyone else has written off. Danaher's process power protects existing value and shapes which acquisitions are worth making and which new value is worth creating. The loop closes. --- **The rarest move is giving value away.** Costco and Amazon pass scale economies through as lower prices. The loyalty this generates is itself the defence, and the scale it creates funds further price cuts. [[Nomad Partnership|Nick Sleep]] recognised the loop before most investors did. Creation becomes defence, feeding creation again. Without defence, creation runs in reverse. Between 1895 and 1955, roughly 1,400 automobile manufacturers launched in the United States. Three survived. Being right about the future doesn't protect you when capital floods in. [[Growth market traps]] is the pattern. Undefended creation attracts competition that destroys the returns that attracted it. --- Creation without positioning is invisible: the best product nobody chose. Positioning without power is temporary: a market leader anyone can copy. Power without creation is rent-seeking: a decaying monopoly charging for past innovation. The whole game is keeping all three connected. ---