The point
I am going to say something here that costs me money and I am going to say it anyway.
You do not need a breakthrough.
Not a new product. Not a technology leap. Not a reinvention, not a rebrand, not the elusive high-tech thing somebody keeps telling you is coming. I have spent a considerable part of my working life dismantling that particular myth in front of rooms full of very capable people, and I will dismantle it again here, because it is the single most expensive belief an owner can hold: the belief that the growth you want is waiting on something you do not yet have.
It is not. It is waiting behind something you never removed.
Here is what a friction factor is, in the plainest language I can find. The product is good. The price is fair. The need is real. And the client walks anyway — not because they did not want what you sell, but because something in the experience of buying it pushed back against them. The form / the wait / the wording / the hoop / the hold music / the silence. They did not resist the outcome. They resisted the friction. And every friction factor, without exception, is a reason to say no that you supplied yourself.
Ask my own question of your own business, and ask it out loud: what rubs your clients the wrong way?
A form asking for eleven pieces of information when four would have done. A telephone number that rings into a menu at the precise moment somebody had decided to buy. A quote that takes four days when the decision was live on Tuesday. Terms written by a lawyer, for a lawyer, handed to a person who is neither. A payment page that demands an account be created before it will consent to take money. A department that has no idea what the department next to it is doing to the same client on the same day.
And here is what makes friction the most expensive category of loss in commerce, and I want you to feel the arithmetic rather than merely follow it.
You have already paid for every bit of it. The advertising that brought them. The reputation that persuaded them. The years of work that earned the right to be considered at all. Every dollar of it already spent, already gone, already irrecoverable by the time somebody meets your form — and then your own process throws the buyer away. This is the only loss in business where you pay the full acquisition cost and complete the transaction yourself, in the wrong direction, at your own expense.
Nobody writes to tell you they gave up. They simply stop. And the absence looks exactly like ordinary market conditions.
Now the mechanism, and it is the reason a small removal returns so much more than its size suggests. Your business is one interdependent machine. Every part touches the next. Friction at a single contact point does not stay at that point — it drags on everything downstream of it, and everything downstream of that. Most businesses run full of friction, waste, blind spots and underutilised levers, all interlocking, all quietly costing. Which is why a small breakthrough produces a disproportionate upside: free the one contact point that binds the most, and the whole machine returns the gain, multiplied.
Friction hides in four places, and they are the four moments of every relationship you have:
Before the purchase. During the purchase. After the purchase. And instead of the purchase — the thing they did rather than buy from you, which you will never see and which is where most of the money went.
Walk your own buying experience the way a client walks it. Mark every place it catches. Then take the catch out — do not smooth it, do not explain it, do not apologise for it. Take it out.
Remove what rubs, and the demand you already earned finally reaches you.
If you have already bought from your own business as a stranger this year, from a phone that is not yours, and you have the list of what caught — this strategy is a re-run and you should spend it elsewhere. If you have never done it: this is the cheapest hour available to you in the whole ninety-seven.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Improving the clumsy step instead of deleting it.
Every improvement keeps the step. And the step was the problem. This is precisely why friction never actually goes away in most businesses — a great deal of energy gets spent making an unnecessary obstacle more pleasant, better worded, faster, more attractively designed, and it is still an obstacle.
Look at what the evidence actually says. Expedia deleted one confusing field. Electronic Arts removed the promotional banner. The Weather Channel took out the distractions competing for the eye. Three of the largest documented conversion gains anywhere are three subtractions — and not one of them is an improvement.
Watch, too, for the control that was added after a single incident. Something went wrong once, years ago, and a step was introduced to make sure it never happened again. That step has since cost you a hundred times what the incident cost, and nobody has ever priced it.
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 |
|---|---|
| The Honda and Acura dealer — my own client | The service department and the sales department were operating as though they had nothing to do with one another, on the same clients, on the same days. Every person sitting in that waiting room was a pre-qualified buyer nobody was treating as one — and the service experience itself was full of friction, from getting there to getting home. He removed the friction and closed the gap between the two departments: concierge pickup, an app to summon it, leasing added to the offer. He became the number-two Honda and Acura dealer in the entire country, with no new advertising budget and no new risk. |
| The immigration practice — my own client | Two firms, same market, same law, same demand. One waited passively for referrals and folded. Mine went where the community actually gathered and removed every friction in reach — late opening hours, dinner provided, vans to bring people in, kiosks where they already were. It tripled in size three years running, went from a one-million-dollar practice to tens of millions with offices across the region, and then licensed the methodology itself. |
| Expedia | Found one confusing optional field on the checkout that was quietly causing payments to fail. Deleting that single field was reported to produce roughly $12 million in additional annual profit. One removal. |
| Hyundai | In the 2008 crisis it saw that what had frozen the market was not price — it was fear. So it moved the fear instead of the price: buy the car, lose your income, bring it back. Its sales rose about 8% in a year the industry fell 21%. |
| The Weather Channel | Clarified the subscription page, removed the distractions competing for the eye, and concentrated everything on one action. Trial subscriptions rose 225% without buying a single visitor. |
| TruckersReport | Pushed the whole landing page to its ceiling at once — clarified the value, rebuilt the flow, sharpened the headline, added the proof. Conversions rose 79.3%, and not from one magic word: from a coordinated redesign in which each improvement multiplied the others. |
| Electronic Arts | Tested the SimCity preorder page without the promotional banner. The version with no offer produced 43.4% more revenue, because the incentive was distracting buyers who had already decided. |
| Warby Parker | Identified that the thing blocking online eyewear was the fear of choosing frames blind. Rather than discount, it shipped five frames to your door, free, to try in your own mirror — and removed the fear instead of the price. |
| The 2008 Obama campaign | Tested the signup page and found a warm family image with a softer Learn More beat Sign Up, lifting signups about 40%. The first yes should be light enough to begin a relationship, not so heavy it prevents one. |
The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.
The challenge
Go through your own enquiry and purchase process as a stranger, from a phone that is not your usual one, using an address nobody in your company recognises. Do not tell your team. Do not smooth the path.
Write down every single moment where you had to wait, repeat yourself, hunt for something, guess, or decide without enough information in front of you.
Then delete two of them. Not improve — delete.
Then do the second half, and it is the half that finds the friction you cannot see from inside: send a short message to five people who enquired and never bought, and ask one question — what stopped you? You have already paid for every one of those people. The answers are the only free research in business.
The AI layer · second pass
Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.