Do you know what your customers need?

We have officially entered the end of week three of UnPause, and I have a surprising revelation to share:

I was wrong.

When I set out to do this work, I assumed—based on conversations with mentors and friends, and my own experience—that UnPause did not need to focus on doing strategic planning.

My thinking was that most businesses already have a plan. What they need is a shot in the arm. Someone to help them dust it off, create clarity around it, and actually put it into motion.

In other words, they didn’t need another plan. They needed to press play.

Turns out, I made an assumption about what my customers needed before I had any customers.

Whoops.

In the past three weeks, each new client has asked me for some version of the same thing: Can you help us with strategic planning?

So I pivoted.

I started designing a strategic planning session that felt uniquely UnPause—less sitting around a conference table wordsmithing a mission statement and more honest conversation, clear choices, and movement. Different enough to feel fresh, but not so “creative” that a room full of executives wondered what they had gotten themselves into.

Yesterday, I facilitated the first one.

I haven’t received the formal survey responses yet, but the feedback in the room was overwhelmingly positive. People were engaged. We had the conversations we needed to have. We made decisions. And we left with clarity about where the organization is going next.

So, apparently, UnPause has a new service: strategic planning retreats.

Now, you might reasonably point out that UnPause is three weeks old. Pivoting at this stage is not exactly the same thing as Ford deciding to stop making cars.

Fair.

But I think there’s a lesson here that applies whether you’ve been in business for 21 days or 21 years:

Don’t assume you know what your customers need. Get close enough to them to find out.

It’s easy to fall in love with the thing we’ve decided to sell. We build the service, create the website, perfect the pitch, and then go looking for people who need exactly what we’ve created.

But customers have a funny way of telling you what they actually want.

Think about the neighborhood restaurant that opens imagining itself as a dinner destination, only to discover that its lunch counter is packed every day. The owner can keep pouring energy into convincing people to come for dinner—or pay attention to what customers are already telling them and build on what’s working.

The same thing happens in professional services. And, apparently, in three-week-old consulting businesses.

Of course, my sample size is small. There are plenty of businesses that already have a strong strategic plan and need help putting it into motion. That’s still work I believe deeply in.

But I’ve learned something important very early in this experiment: UnPause can’t be so committed to its own plan that it misses what the market is saying.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what I tell my clients.

Strategy should give you direction, not blinders.

Have a plan. Know where you’re going. But stay curious enough to notice when your customers are pointing you toward an opportunity you didn’t see coming.

Sometimes putting strategy in motion means pressing play.

And sometimes it means being willing to change the track.