CASE 11 · THE DISCIPLINE OF NOT KNOWING YET
Testing whether a professional-development business could enter a new corporate market shows that a feasibility study is only useful if it is allowed to disappoint.
How a professional-development business tested a corporate market entry, and why a feasibility study is only useful if it is allowed to disappoint.
The situation in brief.
Professional development
Executive coaching and personal development
A new corporate training market
There is an uncomfortable question at the start of almost every new commercial opportunity: not how enthusiastic is everyone, not whether the idea sounds attractive, but what evidence there actually is. A professional-development business asked for a test of whether its executive coaching and personal-development expertise could translate into a corporate training offer, sold to companies for their employees and potentially through a new partnership. On paper the logic was compelling: the expertise existed, corporate training is a substantial market, and larger organisations meant potentially larger contracts.
A plausible opportunity is not a validated one. The brief mattered: it was not to prove that the idea worked, but to test it, listen and report honestly on what was found. That meant deliberately not forcing appointments just to be able to report that appointments had happened, because doing so would have contaminated the evidence the exercise was supposed to gather.
The first lesson arrived before any genuine decision-maker had been reached. Reaching the right person inside a target company was itself a significant obstacle — far more than it had been for the existing executive-facing offer, which relied on relationships and referral. That could have been written up as failure. It was read differently: the difficulty of reaching the buyer was itself market information.
A market can contain plenty of theoretically suitable customers and still be commercially difficult to penetrate, because the buyer might sit in HR, in learning and development, or in general management, and the person answering the phone is rarely the person who owns the need. A transferable product does not automatically mean a transferable route to market.
It would have been possible to push harder for meetings simply so the test looked productive. Manufacturing encouraging signals would have made the final recommendation less useful.
Not whether demand for this kind of training exists — of course it does — but whether this proposition could compete, who to target, what it would cost to reach them, and whether the economics could justify a new activity.
The initial test ran on a modest, occasional time allocation. New-business work depends on continuity; every gap meant starting again almost from zero.
“There is no market” and “this level of activity was insufficient to find out” are different findings, and confusing them is a genuine risk.
The central governance tension was that leadership needed to control the cost of uncertainty without starving the test of the resources required to reduce that uncertainty. A small experiment protects cash, but below a certain threshold it can stop being a meaningful experiment at all. Fragment the activity too heavily and the organisation may conclude the market rejected an offer when what it actually tested was an execution model too weak to generate an answer.
There was no responsible way to turn a short, constrained test into a confident forecast. The useful answer was conditional: there appeared to be enough logic to justify a more credible test, but the evidence did not justify pretending the market had already been proven. The recommendation was neither to continue as before nor to walk away. It was that a credible test would need meaningfully more sustained activity and supporting commercial material than the initial format had provided.
Giving that answer is harder than it sounds, particularly when everyone in the room has reasons to want a clean positive result. If the person assessing an opportunity benefits from recommending it, every encouraging conversation risks becoming proof and every gap becomes a reason for more investment, until the exercise stops testing the idea and starts defending it.
A feasibility study earns its value not by creating confidence, but by improving the quality of a decision made under real uncertainty. Sometimes the evidence strengthens a case, sometimes it weakens one, and sometimes — honestly, and without spin — it reveals that the test itself was not big enough to answer the question.
That is still valuable. “We don’t know yet” is information, and the governance question it leaves leadership with is not “do we believe in this”, but whether they are prepared to invest what finding out would genuinely require.
Leadership teams reading this case study often continue exploring related business challenges, industries and executive perspectives.
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