The 97 › Strategy 31 › Week 9
The point
A meaningful share of the people who wanted to buy from you this year did not, and the reason was neither price nor competition. It was something in your own process that made it slightly too hard.
Friction factors are the most under-examined losses in business because they are invisible from inside. Nobody writes to tell you they gave up. They simply stop, and the absence looks exactly like ordinary market conditions.
A form asking for eleven pieces of information when four would do. A phone number that rings into a menu at the moment somebody has decided to buy. A quote that takes four days when the decision was live on Tuesday. Terms written by a lawyer for a lawyer. A payment page that demands an account before it will take money.
Here is what makes friction so expensive: you have already paid for all of it. The advertising that brought them, the reputation that persuaded them, the years of work that earned their trust — every penny already spent by the time somebody meets your form. It is the only category of loss where you pay the full acquisition cost and then throw the buyer away yourself.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Improving the clumsy step rather than deleting it. Every improvement keeps the step, and the step was the problem — which is why friction never actually goes away in most businesses.
The test: What happens if this simply does not exist? If the honest answer is 'somebody senior wanted the data once', it is not a step, it is a habit.
| Who | What happened |
|---|---|
| Risk reversal | Jay's own answer to the largest friction of all — the buyer carrying the entire risk of the thing not working while the seller, who knows the actual failure rate, carries none. |
| The eleven-field form | Cut to three. The other eight get asked later by a human who now has a reason to call. |
| Account before payment | Removed entirely; the account is created silently from the payment details. |
| The four-day quote | Replaced with a number on the phone, given as a range with a caveat. |
| Terms written for lawyers | Rewritten for the person signing. Objection handling dropped because the objections stopped being manufactured. |
| A menu at the buying moment | The most expensive automation in most businesses is the one answering the phone. |
| Parking | Genuinely. A clinic that validated parking measurably outperformed one that did not, in the same street. |
| The step added after one incident | Something went wrong once. The control has since cost a hundred times what the incident cost. |
This week
Go through your own enquiry and purchase process as a stranger, from a phone you do not normally use. Write down every moment where you had to wait, repeat yourself, hunt for something, or decide without enough information.
Then delete two of them. Not improve — delete.
Watch completion for a fortnight. Deletion is the only improvement that costs nothing, takes an afternoon and starts paying immediately.