The death of a condiment Gentleman's Relish is gone. After 196 years, the anchovy spread made in 1828 finally stopped production. I read about it the same morning I was looking at news about OpenAI pausing their UK data centre investment over energy costs and regulation, and something clicked. Both are about knowing when to stop. But here's what struck me: Gentleman's Relish didn't die because it was a bad product. Simpson's in London still keeps it on the menu. People who love it actually love it. It died because falling sales made it unsustainable to manufacture. The maker, Patum Peperium, looked at the numbers and made a choice. That choice probably took a lot longer to make than it should have. I've sat across tables from people running their own thing who've been holding onto product lines exactly like this. Not because the product is broken or the market has changed fundamentally, but because letting it go feels like failure. Letting it go feels like admitting something. Why we hang on too long There's a specific kind of pain in killing a product line. You built it. You know its history. You know the customer who orders it every month. You remember when it was profitable. So you keep adjusting, keep tweaking, keep hoping the market will shift back. The problem is that hope is not a strategy. And I say this as someone who genuinely believes in persistence. What I've learned from working with small teams and people building their own thing is that there's a difference between persistence and stubbornness. Persistence is pushing through when the fundamentals are sound but the timing is off. Stubbornness is pushing through when the fundamentals are broken and you're just waiting for a miracle. With Gentleman's Relish, the fundamentals were broken. The product was fine. The market wasn't interested anymore. Those are two different problems, and you can't solve a market problem by making the product better. The signals you're missing Most people running small operations don't have sophisticated sales analytics. They have gut feel, a spreadsheet, and maybe some accounting software. That's actually enough to see the truth if you're willing to look at it. Here's what I see happening: someone notices sales are down 15% year on year. They think, maybe we need to rebrand it. Maybe we need to promote it more. Maybe we need to lower the price. So they spend 6 months and some money doing one of those things. Sales tick up 3% because of the novelty. Then they flat-line again. So they try something else. Meanwhile, they're spending operational time and mental energy on a product that's on its way out. That time could have gone to something with actual growth potential. I worked with a client last year who was running a small manufacturing business. They had four product lines. One of them was consistently the most labour-intensive, had the lowest margins, and lost them money about one quarter in three. But it was their first product. It was what got them started. So they kept it. When we looked at the data properly, it was clear: if they killed that line and reallocated the labour to the other three, they'd increase profit by 28% without losing a single customer. They'd just lose a product that almost nobody was buying profitably anyway. It took them three months to pull the trigger. Three months of knowing the right answer and not doing it. How to actually make this decision Don't make it on emotion. I know that's obvious. But I mean actually don't. Separate the product from your identity. This is hard. Most people can't do it alone. Look at three numbers. First: what's the actual margin on this product, including all the labour that goes into it? Not the gross margin. The real, fully loaded margin. Second: what's the trend over 24 months? Not one bad quarter. The actual direction. Third: what would you do with the resources if you killed it? If the margin is below 15%, the trend is down, and you have a better use for those resources, you should kill it. Not think about it. Not plan to kill it next year. Kill it. The psychological barrier is real, but it's not rational. You're not losing money by continuing to make something unprofitable. You're losing money by not stopping. What actually happens when you do it The customers who really need it will find alternatives or come to you asking you to reconsider. Simpson's presumably has a supplier now or makes their own. The customers who were barely using it will never notice. Your team will have clearer focus. They'll work on things that actually matter. And you'll stop wasting mental energy on a losing battle. There's also something psychologically useful about admitting something isn't working. It builds decision-making muscle. The next hard call gets easier because you've proven to yourself that you can make it. What to do this week Pull your last 24 months of sales data. List every product line or major service you offer. Calculate the real margin on each one, including labour. Don't estimate. Calculate it. If you're not sure how to do this, your accountant can do it in an hour. Then look at the trend line on the three slowest sellers. If any of them are below 15% margin and trending down, write down what you'd do with that time and money instead. Just write it down. You don't have to decide yet. But at least you'll know what you're actually choosing by keeping it alive. If you want to think this through properly, ALIRA's Decision Matrix tool is built exactly for this kind of choice. It forces you to separate emotion from data.