This post grew out of my conversation with Marcia Riner on Profit With A Plan. You can listen to the whole episode a little further down.

We worked with an author who had one of the best-selling parenting books out there. They brought us in and said sales had just been dropping. They figured digital marketing was the answer, ads and organic, online specifically. So we asked what had actually happened to the business, and they couldn’t tell us.

As we dug in, we found it. His original marketing strategy (which wasn’t really one, it was an accident) was going on TV shows. He was on multiple times a month, sometimes national shows, and of course parents are going to watch this guy talk about how to manage their kid’s behavior and think, I gotta check this out.

No more TV appearances, no new sales.

It sounds crazy. How did you not see this was your main way of getting new readers? But they didn’t see it. He had fundamentally changed his business model and hadn’t replaced it with anything else.

What does it mean to be accidentally successful?

An accidentally successful business is one that has grown, sometimes for years, but the owner can’t clearly explain how it got here.

We kept running into this. People would bring us in to save them, usually with some new marketing technique or strategy they thought was going to turn things around. Some of these businesses had been around 15 or 20 years. And as we asked questions, we found out they couldn’t tell us how they had arrived at today. So we started asking ourselves, how does that happen? How can you be accidentally successful? (Well, there’s the phrase.)

They know the borders, right? Reputation, word of mouth, a couple of channels they’ve tried. It’s the middle they have trouble coloring in.

And look, that’s not a knock on anyone. You get into business because you’re good at something, you do what you’re supposed to do, and it works. But just because you can grow doesn’t mean you understood the levers that got you that growth. And when things are going well, it’s easy to say, see, it’s all working.

Why accidental success is so fragile

I like to think about it like baking. Everyone likes a cookie, right? If you don’t know that the brown sugar is what gives it that chewiness, and you just take it out, it changes how it comes out. And if you don’t put anything else in there to get the effect you want (even if it’s just testing it), something will fundamentally change and you just won’t know what it was.

That’s the fragility. The author took out the brown sugar.

It can go the other way too. One of our clients is a tutoring company. The founder was really good at tutoring, and now he has 150 tutors, so something was clearly working! But when we dug into their marketing, we found a bunch of six-figure legacy media contracts they were paying for. So I asked what those were getting them.

“Well, we don’t know. But it’s in our markets.”

Do people read these things? “I don’t know.”

No one should ever be scared of saying “I don’t know.” But it’s a big signal of accidental thinking. They had a bunch of extra ingredients in the bowl and no idea which ones were doing anything, because they were saying yes to so many ideas. It felt like that’s just what you do. So the first thing we did was spend a year (they had already paid for it) measuring all of it. Across those contracts, more than $100,000 worth, we could attribute one converted lead.

So we got rid of that stuff. The next year they spent less and got a 40% increase in leads.

Hear the full conversation with Marcia Riner on Profit With A Plan, where we got into all of this (and how to tell me apart from my twin brother).

How to find out what’s really driving your growth

Before you add the new thing or cut the old thing, find out what’s actually holding the cookie together. Honestly, it’s as simple as asking, probably. I know, I know. Asking feels like rocking the boat.

Here is where I would start:

• Ask what’s changed in the last two years. A change is usually what starts the conversation in the first place. Someone left, a channel dried up, or (like the author) something you did every month quietly stopped.
• Ask how people started hearing about you. Go back to the beginning and fill in the middle from the outsides.
• Ask your customers why they chose you. They’ll tell you what the differentiator was, whether you’ve met their expectations, and what message is actually getting through.
• Measure before you cut. If nobody can tell you what something is getting you, track it for a while (we gave those media contracts a full year) before you decide.

You don’t have to start with everyone. Find the people who are already in your fan club, the ones who have ordered 10 times or who you already trust. There’s a relationship there that hopefully allows for some honesty, and that helps a lot when you’re stepping out in a way that feels vulnerable.

I’ll reveal my own weakness here. I have been meaning to ask our clients midway through a project whether we’re meeting their expectations. Have I done it yet? No. Every time I think about it, I’m like, I can just keep working! So if this feels uncomfortable, I am right there with you.

And sometimes your customers will tell you something you didn’t expect. Maybe you like it, and maybe it’s not actually the business you’re trying to build. Either way, now you get to be intentional about it, so things aren’t just accidentally being communicated to the world.

Which kind of accidentally successful are you?

So this is my call to action: take the quiz. It’s short, and at the end it gives you a profile of where you might be at. There are three:

• The founder who built something with no real blueprint
• The business that has plateaued, and you’re not sure why
• The business where the whole thing runs on the founder personally

It’s also possible you get the result that says you’re a deliberate success and you actually know what’s going on in your business. That’s a great result too! Each profile comes with next steps to help you become more intentional.

Take the Accidentally Successful quiz

Whether you want to sell someday or just want a business that’s healthier to run, this matters. It’s going to be almost impossible to sell an accidentally successful business.

Takeaway: Before you change anything, find out what’s actually working. Ask your best customers, measure what nobody can explain, and don’t take out the brown sugar until you know what it does.