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Picture this: Jean-Claude Van Damme, two Volvo trucks reversing slowly in opposite directions, and one extremely committed Belgian doing the full splits between them at sunrise (Enya playing softly in the background).
It is, objectively, one of the greatest advertisements ever made. It is also, accidentally, the most accurate visual representation of what happens to a business that has never made a clear strategic choice.
Michael Porter called it straddling. In his now-legendary 1996 Harvard Business Review article "What Is Strategy?", he described it as what happens when a company tries to match a competitor's position without abandoning its own, ending up neither here nor there, unable to command premium pricing and too complicated to compete on cost. He was writing about manufacturing businesses at the time. He could have been writing about almost every founder-led company at the growth edge in 2026.
The splits: impressive to attempt, deeply uncomfortable to sustain, and at a certain scale… genuinely expensive to maintain.
You probably know exactly what this looks like.
The consultancy that started with a clear niche, then gradually added adjacent services to chase new revenue, until nobody, including the founder, could articulate what it actually specialised in anymore.
The founder who built a personal brand, then a studio, then tried to merge them, then separated them, then quietly merged them again because it was easier than deciding.
The business with three different value propositions depending on which sales person picks up the phone, because the leadership team never sat down and agreed on what the company actually is.
The rebrand that cost $80,000, looked incredible for about six months, and then somehow the same friction came back, because the visual identity changed but the foundation underneath it didn't.
None of these are failure stories. They're growth stories that hit the ceiling you hit when the foundation hasn't kept pace with the ambition. The company kept moving. The clarity didn't.
Why straddling is so seductive.
The thing about a straddled strategy is that it usually starts with two genuinely good options. That's the trap. You're not choosing between something smart and something stupid. You're choosing between two things that both seem to work, and the temptation to do both is almost irresistible, especially for visionary founders who can see clearly how either path could succeed.
So you hedge. You keep both doors open. You tell yourself you'll decide properly once you have more data, more revenue, more time.
And in the meantime you split your energy, your team's focus, your marketing message, and your positioning down the middle, and try to be excellent on both sides of the split simultaneously.
The result is not two strong positions. It's one diluted one.
The cost compounds with scale.
At startup stage a straddled strategy is inefficient. Annoying, yes. Fixable, yes. But survivable.
At $10M-$50M it becomes exponentially more expensive, and here's why. Every decision you make at scale gets made against your strategic foundation, or what passes for one. The more unclear that foundation, the more cognitive load every decision carries. Your leadership team relitigates the same questions repeatedly because there's no shared reference point to make the answer obvious. Your marketing spends more to reach an audience it can't quite define. Your sales cycle lengthens because your value proposition shifts depending on who's in the room. Your best hires leave faster because they can't see clearly where the company is going.
The organisational drag of a straddled strategy doesn't add up linearly. It compounds. And the longer it goes unaddressed, the more expensive the clarity becomes to find.
The move is not to pick the safer option.
This is the part people get wrong. When I talk about clarity and strategic foundation, founders sometimes assume I mean simplification, as in, cut the interesting parts, pick the most legible version of yourself, make it easy for people to put you in a box.
That's not it.
The move is to get ruthlessly clear about what is most true, and then go all in on that. Not the most palatable version. Not the most familiar version. The truest one. The one that, when you say it out loud, your body relaxes a little because it finally matches what you've known for years.
The businesses that scale fastest are almost never the ones with the most sophisticated strategies. They're the ones that got clear earliest about what they are, and stopped spending energy pretending to be anything else.
Porter's insight wasn't that you have to choose the right strategy. It was that you have to actually choose. The straddling is what kills you. The choice, almost any clear choice, is what sets you free.
One last thing.
The Van Damme ad, if you haven't watched it, is genuinely worth four minutes of your life. The man is fully committed. There is not a single moment of doubt on his face. He made a choice, found his position, and held it with extraordinary precision between two moving vehicles.
That's the goal, really. Minus the trucks. Ideally indoors.
If you're reading this and feeling a little Jean-Claude right now, like you're holding two directions simultaneously and it's getting harder to maintain, that's exactly the conversation we exist to have. Book a discovery session with Co.Creative. We'll help you find your position, name it precisely, and build the foundation underneath it that makes everything else possible.
