Kill Your Company (and Stay Relevant Long-Term)

"Kill Your Company" is a workshop where a leadership team deliberately imagines how a competitor, or an entirely new kind of player, could put their business under real threat, then uses that threat to decide where they actually need to innovate.

Most industrial SMEs and hidden champions hold a strong, profitable position in a narrow niche. That's exactly what makes it easy to stop asking how it could end. A glass manufacturer supplying lab equipment isn't losing sleep over AI disruption, and doesn't need to be. But the underlying risk, not seeing a real threat coming until it's too late, applies to them just as much as to any tech company. That's what this workshop is for: not predicting the future, but pressure-testing the present.

This article walks through how we run the "Kill Your Company" workshop, and how leaders can take it further to build a habit of looking outside the company for innovation, including through venture clienting.

Where this came from

A client of ours, the market leader in a small, profitable niche, felt no urgency to explore venture clienting. We knew disruption was possible, even without an obvious competitor in sight. So we ran a workshop to make the risk visible instead of theoretical: what we now call a "Kill Your Company" workshop.

The exercise surfaced a real, specific threat the client hadn't recognized before. That's what changed the conversation, not from "why would we need external innovation" but to "where exactly is our gap, and who could close it." Here is our version of the workshop, and how it helps a company find its innovation gaps and start closing them.

Running the Workshop

What do we believe drives our success

The workshop opens with a question, not a lecture: what do we believe our success is really built on? Every participant writes down their own answer, individually, before anyone speaks. Sales might say it's the product. Product management might say it's the customer relationship. Nobody is entirely wrong, but everyone has a blind spot, and this is usually the first insight of the day: the company may be defending the wrong thing.

We use silent, individual brainstorming throughout the workshop. It gives every participant equal input, before group discussion lets the loudest voices in the room, by seniority, role, or personality, dominate. Running the session outside the usual meeting room, somewhere new, helps too. Small changes like this push people toward “out-of-the-box” thinking.

What could kill us

Now the real question: what could kill the company? Kodak and Nokia are useful openers here, both were market leaders who didn't see the shift coming until it was too late. A short look at cases like these helps participants shift into a different mindset before turning to their own business.

Each participant then writes down, individually, how an unknown competitor could beat the company:

1. What could substitute our product or service? Smartphones replaced Nokia's core business. Streaming replaced Blockbuster's video rental model. In the hearing aid industry, consumer electronics brands like Apple and Samsung have started building basic hearing support into everyday earbuds, a real threat to a niche that used to belong entirely to specialized manufacturers.
2. How could our customers' needs change? Are we missing a problem they already have? The smartphone didn't just replace the phone, it also killed the standalone digital camera, because people no longer wanted to carry two devices.
3. Are there external forces that could hurt us? Think of the PESTLE framework: political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental. A regulatory change, like capping the sale of combustion engine vehicles, can end a business model overnight, no competitor required.

How would we defend our position

Stopping at the threat would be careless. The next step is deciding how to defend the position, and the answer is sometimes close to home: BMW, facing pressure to modernize in-car entertainment, partnered with a Swiss gaming startup rather than building the capability alone. That's a smaller, more realistic model than Nokia trying to out-build the iPhone: a focused partnership, in one specific area, with a startup that already had the answer.

What's actually feasible

We now know, in theory, how to defend the company's position. Time to come back to reality: what can genuinely be built in-house, and where are the real gaps that need outside help?

Entering Venture Clienting

If the workshop pushed people beyond new technology in the existing market, toward new business models and platforms too, the conclusion is usually the same: some of these gaps need to be closed from the outside.

This is where venture clienting earns its place, and it's worth being explicit about why. Building the answer in-house means betting your own team's time, focus, and reputation on an idea that might turn out to target the wrong problem entirely, exactly the kind of wasted cycle that let Kodak and Nokia miss what was coming while they were busy elsewhere. A startup working in that space has usually already made those expensive early mistakes, with someone else's money, and arrived at something that works with real customers. Venture clienting lets the company benefit from that validation instead of repeating the startup's learning curve internally. The risk of chasing the wrong thing moves from the company to the startup, where it already happened once.

As a final step, prioritize the innovation areas where a startup is most likely to already have the answer.

From here, there are two ways to move into practice:

• Work with the workshop sponsor to define requirements and start scouting external startups directly.
• Turn it into an internal innovation challenge: employees submit ideas, requirements, and any startups they already know of that could help. You can even run several problems from the workshop as a competition, with the winning idea getting the budget to pilot with the right provider.

The second option does double duty: it also starts building a habit of looking outward for innovation. Employees and middle managers often stay quiet about problems they see, not out of indifference, but because a failed project can feel like a real risk to their standing. Top management has to make its backing visible, and recognize the people who take the risk. Middle managers matter most here: they connect leadership and employees, and both sides trust them.

One of the best pieces of advice I've heard on this: change happens in the calendar, not all at once, but step by step, day to day.

If this article made you want to pressure-test your own company's survival, get in touch. I'd be glad to facilitate a workshop that could become the foundation for your next wave of innovation.

A note on the name: I called this workshop "Kill Your Company" before realizing the term wasn't new, Lisa Bodell described a similar format in her 2012 book "Kill the Company." My version grew independently out of real client work, shaped specifically around what MedTech and diagnostics companies need, but the credit for the name belongs with her.

Contact us to schedule your "Kill Your Company Workshop"