The product you should have killed six months ago I worked with someone last year who had been running a subscription box business for three years. One of their product lines accounted for 40% of revenue but consumed 70% of their time and nearly all of their customer service headaches. They knew something was wrong. They had known for eighteen months. But they kept it going because it was their original product. It felt like giving up. This is more common than people admit. You build something, it works for a while, then slowly it stops working. The market shifts. Costs rise. Competitors appear. And you keep pushing because walking away feels like failure. It is not failure. It is resource allocation. And if you get it wrong, it will take everything else down with it. The numbers that tell you the truth Sentiment lies. Numbers do not. The clearest signal I look for is contribution margin trend over 12 months. Not revenue. Revenue can stay flat whilst your costs climb and your actual profit on each unit sold quietly disappears. If your contribution margin has dropped by more than 15% year on year and you cannot point to a specific, fixable cause, you have a structural problem. The second signal is customer acquisition cost relative to lifetime value. When I first started working with clients through ALIRA., I noticed that people often tracked these numbers but rarely compared them over time. A product line where CAC is creeping towards 60% of LTV is a product line on borrowed time. The third signal is opportunity cost. This one is harder to measure but impossible to ignore. What else could your team be doing? What products are you not launching? What customers are you not serving? I spoke to someone recently who had a legacy consulting package that brought in £4,000 a month. Sounds decent. But it required 25 hours of her time. She was billing herself out at £160 an hour for work she could have charged £400 an hour elsewhere. The product was not just underperforming. It was actively costing her £6,000 a month in foregone income. Why people hold on too long Three reasons, usually. First, sunk cost. You have invested so much that walking away feels like wasting everything you put in. But the money is already spent. The question is only what you do from here. Second, identity. If you built your business around a particular product, killing it can feel like killing part of yourself. I understand this. But your business is not your identity. Your ability to adapt is. Third, optimism without evidence. You believe next quarter will be different. You have a new marketing plan. A new supplier. A new feature. Maybe. But if you have said this three quarters in a row and the numbers have not moved, you are not being optimistic. You are being stubborn. The Harvey Nichols situation this week is a reminder that even iconic brands reach a point where the numbers no longer support the story. Mike Ashley's Frasers Group bought them out of administration. That is what happens when you hold on past the point of viability. Someone else makes the decision for you, and you get a fraction of what you might have saved. The decision framework I actually use When I sit down with someone trying to figure out whether to kill a product, I use a simple test. Three questions. One: if you were starting your business today, with everything you now know, would you launch this product? Not "would you be glad you had it" but "would you actively choose to build it from scratch?" If the answer is no, that tells you something. Two: what would have to change for this product to become your best performer again? Write it down. Be specific. Then ask: is that change realistic in the next six months? If the answer requires the market to shift, a competitor to disappear, or costs to drop by 30%, you are hoping, not planning. Three: if you freed up all the resources currently going into this product, what would you do with them? If you have a clear, better use, you have your answer. I have a Decision Matrix tool at alira.london that helps structure this kind of thinking. It forces you to weight the factors rather than letting emotion dominate. Useful when you are too close to the problem. How to actually exit Once you decide, move quickly. Lingering kills morale and burns cash. If you have existing customers, communicate directly. Tell them the timeline. Offer alternatives if you have them. Do not apologise excessively. People respect clarity more than guilt. If you have inventory, decide now whether to liquidate, repurpose, or write off. Do not let it sit in a warehouse costing you storage fees whilst you avoid the decision. If you have staff dedicated to that product line, have the conversation early. Either redeploy them or let them go with proper notice. Dragging it out helps no one. The Japanese business culture has been in the news this week for being slow to adopt AI, partly due to risk aversion and a reluctance to abandon established processes. There is a lesson there. Caution has its place. But excessive caution in the face of clear evidence is just a slower form of failure. What to do this week Run the numbers on your weakest product line. Calculate contribution margin, CAC to LTV ratio, and hours spent per pound of profit. Write them down. Compare to your best performer. Answer the three questions honestly. Would you launch it today? What would have to change? What else could you do with those resources? If you need structure, use the Decision Matrix at alira.london. Set a decision deadline. Pick a date within 30 days. Commit to making a call by then. Not "reassessing" or "monitoring". A decision. Yes or no.