The standard advice for this situation is to build an airtight business case. Get the numbers right, show the contribution per hour, quantify the complexity cost, put it in a deck, and present it calmly. Reason will prevail.
It will not, and it is worth understanding why before you spend three weeks on the deck. The founder is not disagreeing with your arithmetic. They are disagreeing with what the arithmetic implies about a decision they made, often the decision that created the company. A better number does not answer that, and a more precise one can make it worse, because precision reads as insistence.
What actually works is treating this as a process problem rather than a persuasion problem. Find out which of the four kinds of attachment you are facing, since they need different handling, then change the decision so it stops being a referendum on the founder’s judgment. The analysis still has to be right. It just does not do the work you were hoping it would do.
The wider method these decisions sit inside, the grid, the exposure estimate, and the migration plan, is in the guide on how to cut a product line without losing revenue. What follows is only the part that involves another person’s feelings about a product.
Why doesn’t the business case work?
Because you are presenting evidence in an argument the founder is not having. Your case says this product loses money. What they hear is that a choice they made, and possibly the choice that built the business, was wrong, and that the people who arrived later can see it plainly enough to put it on a slide.
Notice what happens next in almost every one of these meetings. The founder does not attack your numbers. They introduce a fact your numbers cannot contain: a customer who has bought it since 1994, a competitor who tried to copy it, a distributor who only stocks the line because of it. Every one of those may be true, and none of them can be refuted in the room, which is exactly why it gets said.
There is a second reason worth naming, because it is the one people miss. In most founder-led businesses the product in question was not a mistake at the time. It was correct for the market that existed when it was launched, and what changed was the market, the cost base, or the customer mix. A case built as though the product was always a bad idea is not only tactless, it is factually wrong, and the founder knows it.
So the deck does not fail on quality. It fails because it puts one person in a position where agreeing means conceding something about themselves in front of the people who work for them. Almost nobody does that on the spot, and the ones who do tend to reverse it within a month.
The founder is not disagreeing with your arithmetic. They are disagreeing with what it implies about a decision they made.
What kind of attachment are you dealing with?
Four kinds, and the difference matters more than anything in your analysis, because each one has a different exit. Work out which you are facing before you say a word about cutting anything.
The first is the origin product, the thing the company was founded to make. The second is a promise, made personally to a customer who is still buying. The third is a proof, a product that exists to demonstrate that something can be done or that some belief about the industry is right. The fourth is a memorial, attached to a person: an engineer who developed it, a partner who is gone, a father whose name is on the building.
The way to find out which you are facing is to listen to the sentence the founder uses when they defend it. Talk about how the company started points at the first. A named customer points at the second. A claim about what the industry gets wrong points at the third. A named person, or a quieter refusal with no argument attached, points at the fourth.
These look identical on a report and behave nothing alike. The origin product can often be preserved in a smaller form. The promise can be kept by other means. The proof can be transferred to a product that proves the same thing more cheaply. The memorial is the one to be most careful with, and sometimes the correct answer is to leave it alone and find your savings elsewhere.
How do you handle the origin product?
Separate the history from the manufacturing. What the founder wants to keep is almost never the tooling, the changeovers, or the inventory. It is the continuity, the fact that the thing the company started with still exists in some form.
That opens options the cut-or-keep framing hides. Make it to order with a long lead time and a minimum quantity. Keep one configuration instead of eleven. License it to the supplier who already makes the components. Keep it as a product you build for the customers who ask rather than one you carry, forecast, stock, and schedule around.
Expect to hear a version of this back: if we only build it to order, we are not really making it anymore. That objection is worth taking seriously rather than arguing with, and the answer is usually that the product remains available, listed, and buildable, which is what continuity means to a customer who asks for it.
Each of those removes almost all the cost while leaving the answer to the only question the founder actually cares about, which is whether the company still makes the thing it was built to make. Very often that ends the argument in one conversation, after months of failing to win it with contribution figures.
How do you handle a promise to a customer?
Go to the customer. This is the one category where the fastest route runs straight past the founder, and it works because the promise was about the customer’s problem, not about the part number.
Ask the customer what they actually need now. In my experience a fair number of these promises are being honored to companies that have redesigned around something else, been acquired, or would happily accept a substitute if someone helped them qualify it. The obligation is real and the product may no longer be how you meet it.
Bring the founder with you when you can. A founder who hears directly from the customer that a substitute would be fine is not being overruled by a spreadsheet, and the conversation tends to end there. A founder who is told about that call second hand has been given a report they can question, and they usually will.
When the customer does still need it, you have learned something worth knowing, and the answer is usually to price it properly rather than to kill it. A founder who promised a customer they would always be able to get this part rarely promised the price would never change, and a promise being kept at a price that reflects what it costs is a different conversation from a promise being subsidized indefinitely.
How do you handle a product that proves a belief?
Ask what it proves, then ask whether anything else could prove it. These products exist to make a point about the industry, and the point often outlives the product that was built to demonstrate it.
I have some sympathy for this category, because the beliefs are sometimes right and the industry is sometimes wrong. At Whirlpool, the orthodoxy in side-by-side refrigeration was that nobody would buy one without a water and ice dispenser in the door. A quality unit without the dispenser went onto retail floors at $899 and customers bought it. Everyone had been certain, and everyone had been wrong.
Ask what it would take to consider the point proven. Some founders have never been asked, and the question is received as a serious engagement with the idea rather than an attack on it. An answer such as two more years or one more major account converts an open-ended commitment into something with an end, which is most of what you needed.
The distinction to draw is between a proof still being tested and a proof already delivered. A product that demonstrated something years ago has done its job, and keeping it in production is a monument rather than an argument. A product still in the middle of proving something deserves a defined period and a result that would count as proof, which is a far better conversation than cut or keep.
How do you handle one attached to a person?
Slowly, and possibly not at all. If a product carries someone’s name or memory, the cost of removing it is not confined to the product, and no complexity saving is worth a rupture with the person who owns the business.
Take it off the critical path instead. Move it off the constrained equipment, cut its variants down to one, build it in a single annual run, and stop letting it drive scheduling decisions for everything else. A product that no longer costs you capacity is a product you can afford to be sentimental about.
And if it still costs real money after all that, say so once, in private, with the number, and then leave it. Some businesses carry a product for reasons that are not financial, and doing it knowingly is defensible. The failure is carrying it while pretending the reason is commercial.
A product that no longer costs you capacity is a product you can afford to be sentimental about.
What sequence actually works?
Change the process before you present anything, so the decision stops being a verdict on the founder and starts being the output of rules everyone agreed to in advance.
- Agree the rules first. Before any list exists, get agreement on the criteria: what earns a place, what gets repriced, what gets retired. Rules are easy to agree in the abstract and impossible to argue with later.
- Run the whole line, not the one product. A screen applied to everything produces a list. A screen applied to one product is an accusation with arithmetic attached.
- Bring options, never a binary. Every candidate arrives with four possible outcomes: keep, reprice, simplify, retire. Founders who will not agree to kill a product will often agree to make it to order.
- Let the customers speak. Where the defense rests on a customer, go and ask that customer, and bring back what they said rather than what you predicted.
- Set the default to retire. Products on the list are retired on a date unless someone defends them in writing with a named customer and a number. The burden moves to whoever wants to keep it.
- Give the founder the final call, and the credit. They sign the decision. Publicly, this was their portfolio decision, because that is both true and the thing that makes it stick.
Step one is the whole trick. Once the criteria exist, the conversation moves from whether this product is special to whether it meets the standard, and nobody has to be wrong about anything.
What if the founder still says no?
Take the no and take the cost off the table separately. You will not always win this, and treating every refusal as a fight to be continued is how people lose the standing to win the next four.
Get what you can without the retirement. Fewer variants, higher price, a longer lead time, a slot off the constraint, no more specials. Most of the damage a protected product does comes from how it is made and scheduled rather than from its existence, and those changes are usually available even when the cut is not.
Then write down what it costs, once a year, without commentary. A number that appears every year in the same place stops being an argument and becomes a fact of the business, and facts of the business get revisited when conditions change. I have seen products survive three of those reviews and get retired without discussion in the fourth.
Most of the damage a protected product does comes from how it is made and scheduled, not from its existence.
So the question is not how to win the argument about the founder’s product. It is how to arrange the decision so that nobody has to lose one, and the answer is rules agreed before the list, options instead of a binary, and the founder’s own signature on the result.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books: The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
One question to answer before your next attempt: which of the four attachments is this, and have you ever asked the founder directly what they would need to still be true for the product to go? If you have not, that conversation is worth more than another week on the analysis. Tell me what they said through the contact page and I will tell you what I would try next.