The hardest call you will make Launching something new is exciting. Killing something that used to work is not. But holding onto a failing product line drains cash, distracts your team, and stops you doing the things that actually matter. I have watched people cling to products for years past their sell-by date. The reasons are always emotional: "We built this from nothing." "Our first customers loved it." "It might come back." It will not come back. And every month you wait, you lose money twice. Once on the product itself. Again on what you could have done instead. Whitbread announced this week they are closing all remaining Beefeater and Brewers Fayre restaurants. That is 3,800 jobs gone. The decision took years longer than it should have. Higher costs, changing customer habits, pressure on margins. The writing was on the wall. They finally read it. You do not need to wait until you are losing that much. A Decision Matrix helps you see the truth earlier. What a Decision Matrix actually does A Decision Matrix forces you to compare options against criteria that matter. Not feelings. Not history. Not what your co-founder thinks after two glasses of wine. You list your product lines down one side. You list your criteria across the top. Then you score each product against each criterion. Add up the scores. The numbers tell you what to cut. Simple in theory. Harder in practice because most people choose the wrong criteria or weight them badly. Choosing criteria that matter I have seen people use criteria like "brand fit" or "strategic alignment". Meaningless. You can make anything fit your brand if you try hard enough. Here are criteria that actually work: Gross margin percentage. Not revenue. Not sales volume. What do you keep after direct costs? A product doing £200,000 in revenue at 8% margin is worth less than one doing £50,000 at 45%. Trend over 12 months. Is the margin improving, stable, or declining? A product at 20% margin but dropping 3 points per quarter is heading somewhere bad. Resource drain. How much of your team's time does this product consume? Customer service hours, fulfilment complexity, supplier management. Measure it. I worked with someone last year whose "small" product line was eating 34% of their operations capacity for 11% of profit. Opportunity cost. What could you do with those resources instead? This one is harder to quantify but you must try. Even a rough estimate beats ignoring it. Customer concentration risk. If 60% of a product's revenue comes from two clients, that is not a product line. That is a fragile arrangement. Weighting the criteria Not all criteria are equal. You need to decide what matters most to your business right now. If you are cash-constrained, weight margin heavily. If you are trying to free up capacity for a new launch, weight resource drain. If you are building something to sell in three years, weight trend and risk. I usually suggest a 1-3 scale for weights. Anything more granular and you start kidding yourself about precision you do not have. Multiply each score by its weight. Add up the weighted scores. Rank your products. The Decision Matrix tool at alira.london handles this automatically if you want to skip the spreadsheet work. But the thinking is what matters, not the tool. Reading the results You will get a ranked list. The bottom third is where you look first. But do not cut blindly. The matrix shows you what the numbers say. You still need to check for things the numbers miss. Does the lowest-scoring product bring in customers who then buy your highest-margin products? That changes the calculation. Is there a seasonal pattern you have not accounted for? Check more than one year of data. Are you about to lose a key supplier anyway? Sometimes the decision makes itself. Making the cut Once you decide, move fast. Slow exits cost more than quick ones. Tell your team before you tell customers. Tell customers before you stop taking orders. Give people a timeline that is firm, not hopeful. If you have stock, sell it cheap. The goal is cash recovery, not margin protection. A product you are killing does not need to be profitable on the way out. It needs to be gone. What most people get wrong They wait for certainty. There is no certainty. The matrix gives you clarity, not guarantees. They cut the newest product instead of the weakest. Sunk cost fallacy in reverse. How long you have had something tells you nothing about whether you should keep it. They announce the cut but do not execute. Three months later the product is still limping along, still draining resources, still confusing customers. If you are going to cut, cut. The emotional bit I am not pretending this is easy. I have helped people close down products they spent years building. It feels like failure even when it is the right call. But keeping a dying product alive is not loyalty. It is avoidance. The people running their own thing who do well are the ones who face the numbers, make the call, and move on. You built something once. You can build something better with the resources you free up. What to do this week Monday or Tuesday: List every product or service line you offer. Include the ones you have stopped actively promoting but still technically sell. Pull the last 12 months of margin data for each. Wednesday or Thursday: Build a Decision Matrix with four criteria: gross margin, 12-month trend, resource drain, and opportunity cost. Weight them based on what matters most to your business right now. Score each product. The tool at alira.london can speed this up if you want structure. Friday: Look at your bottom-ranked product. Ask yourself honestly: if you were starting fresh today, would you launch this? If the answer is no, set a date to cut it. Write it down. Tell someone who will hold you to it.