Ryan DeissCo-Founder & CEO, The Scalable Company

Common Business Success Story: Addition by Subtraction.

7 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:13

In this monologue, the speaker argues that many businesses contain a core of high‑margin, profitable operations surrounded by low‑margin, unprofitable activities. To achieve sustainable success, leaders must "flee to the margin" by shedding low‑margin clients, unpopular but easy‑to‑sell products, and even entire product lines, despite the pain of angering customers, losing revenue, and laying off staff. The speaker cites Steve Jobs' return to Apple as a prime example, where Jobs eliminated roughly three‑quarters of Apple’s product lineup to focus on high‑margin, strategically valuable offerings. The overall message is that cutting the most beloved but low‑margin parts of a business is essential for long‑term profitability, even though it is difficult and often unpopular.

Chapters

I've never really seen a business that had to be burned completely to the ground, but I've seen businesses that large chunks of it had to be burned to the ground. Mm-hmm. In any successful business where there's a degree of success somewhere, like there are plenty of unsuccessful successful companies where they're, they're generating revenue, but they're unprofitable. There is a successful business in there somewhere. And what you want to do is you want to flee to the margin. And somewhere in that business, there's a good business surrounded by a lot of bad business. And so if you could just pull away the low-margin stuff, then yeah, you got to burn around the bad bits. And what that will often mean is you might have to get rid of 2/3 of your clients, you have to anger a bunch of people, you might have to shutter whole product lines, you might have to lay off tons of folks. And like, it happens, and it's, it's no fun. When Steve Jobs stepped back into Apple, I think they shuttered like 3/4 of their products, because they just weren't But we need to keep it because look, everybody really likes it. And even the team would be like, oh, but we can't get rid of that. Everybody likes it and it's so easy to sell and it's so fun to fulfill. Those are the ones that very often you have to kill the most. You're basically trading all of your margin away for what is effectively a bad business model.