Most growth plans are a list of ways to be better than the leader. That keeps you on their ground, where their scale decides the outcome. The alternative is to find the one move they cannot afford to make, and put your weight exactly there.
The model came out of reading how asymmetric contests actually resolve, and it has one unusual property: it ends with the buyer rather than the competitor. That last move is where most challengers lose, and it is the one nobody writes about.
The fortress
Map the leader's strength precisely, then leave it alone. Everything that follows depends on knowing exactly what you are not going to attack.
The dependency
Find what the leader's success now rests on. Revenue, forecast, compensation and share price all sit on something, and that something was chosen years ago.
The fragility
Locate where that dependency is exposed. The question is not whether the leader is strong, but whether the thing holding them up is still safe.
The motivation
Work out who has more at stake. The side with more to lose fights harder, and that settles contests more often than the product does.
The economics
Choose ground where every defensive move costs the leader more than it costs you. A discount that sets a precedent across their base is not the same as your discount on one deal.
The fork
Force the choice they cannot afford to make. A real fork has no cheap answer: responding damages them, and so does standing still.
The customer
Confirm the buyer will actually move. Six moves can be right and the deal still will not close, because inertia defeats more challengers than incumbents do.
Run in order. The sequence is the strategy, and the last move is the one that decides whether any of it mattered.
Why it ends at the customer
A challenger can expose the leader's dependency, find the fragility, and build an offer the leader cannot match without damaging itself. All of that is competitive strategy, and all of it can be right while the deal still does not close.
What stops it is rarely the incumbent. It is a buyer with no line in the budget for what you sell, a sponsor whose personal downside is larger than their upside, and a procurement process built to compare things that look like the last thing they bought. The pieces below are each a version of that problem.
Which of the seven is your deal actually stuck on?
Most teams assume the problem is the competitor. More often it is the last move, and the evidence for that is already sitting in your own closed-deal data. The first read is free.
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