Are you mistaking market familiarity for fit?

The best market for your offerings may no longer be the one you know best.

THINK ON IT: Are you mistaking market familiarity for fit? 

Even the best strategy eventually runs out of gas.

That’s the reality I wrote about in an earlier article—and it’s one that catches many leaders off guard. But here’s the part I didn’t say as loudly: often your strategy doesn’t stall because you stopped executing. It’s because your market stopped responding.

That’s a harder pill to swallow. You’ve invested in this market. You know its players, its pain points, its rhythms. You’ve earned credibility. But if you’re honest, some of that hard-earned comfort may be blinding you to a simple truth:

Familiarity is not the same as fit.

Fit is dynamic. It reflects current alignment between your offer and what your market urgently values—today. Not what it valued three years ago.

Familiarity, by contrast, is static. It’s the pull to keep doing what you know, even if it’s no longer creating strategic lift. This is how good businesses stall: not from lack of effort, but from loyalty to a market that no longer amplifies their growth.

Strategic leaders resist that pull. They regularly ask:

• Is this still the best market for us?

• Are we solving high-value problems?

• Do we still feel like the obvious choice?

They ask these questions before the answers become obvious—because by then, it may be too late to adapt without real cost.

Just because you’ve built traction in one place doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t, build even more in another—especially if that new market offers stronger economics, higher urgency, or better alignment with your evolving capabilities.

So how do you know if it’s time to make a shift? In the Act on It section below I offer practical steps to test your current market fit and to find a market that may value your offerings even more. (Premium Members only. Become a Premium Member. Paid subscribers get access to over 100 tools and how-tos on implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their own strategic capacity.)

"Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” — Andy Grove

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