$150M services pipeline
And a team already building and getting resultsDECISION
Services to offset commoditized devices
Coronary Co.’s leaders could see it coming. Their best products were sliding toward commodities, and protecting growth meant building new businesses, not better versions of the old ones. They made the call. They stood up a team, generated ideas, and launched a pilot.
REASONABLE RESISTANCE
Sunk costs and skepticism
A year later, the pilot had no customers, no results, and no path forward. And they kept funding it.
This is what sunk cost does to good teams. The more you put into something, the harder it gets to stop, because stopping means admitting the year and the budget are already gone. So they kept going, sure it just needed a little more time. From the outside it looked like commitment. It was the thing holding everything in place.
ACTION
Stop the pilot. Start again
Instead of trying to make it work, leadership asked the team to understand why it failed. When the answer was clear and beyond their control, Leadership shut it down.
That took three months. It freed up budget and people. It did not answer the real question: nobody knew which new businesses were worth building.
Over the next six months, MileZero worked alongside the team to build that answer from scratch, and to test every idea against real customers before any money went behind it.
- Interviewed 30 stakeholders across three continents, and surfaced 300 important and unsatisfied Jobs to be Done
- Narrowed those to 12 opportunities worth pursuing
- Built concepts and pressure-tested them in 50 more interviews, killing the weak ones early
- Wrote fundable plans for the strongest businesses
RESULT
A $150M pipeline in nine months
Nine months after the reset, the team had a portfolio that beat its five-year, $150M goal.
- Two new businesses funded and moving into build-and-test, worth $150M in combined potential
- 12 more opportunities queued for the next funding round, with a three-to-five-year plan behind them
- 80 stakeholder interviews underneath it all, so every call rested on evidence, not opinion
- Other business units asking for the same approach once they saw it work
CAPABILITY KEPT
A team building and ready to do it again
They kept a way to build a pipeline from nothing. Talk to customers first. Test before you fund. Cut the losers early, before the money sunk into them makes it impossible to stop. Next time growth stalls, they can run this themselves.
This could be your story.
Why wait? Let’s have a conversation (not a sales pitch) that gets your decision moving and producing results.