The office is empty this week in the particular way it is only empty between Christmas and New Year's. I came in anyway, mostly for the heat and the good chair, and made a list of everything that got pushed out of 2019.
It is not a short list. It is also, and this is the uncomfortable part, not a new list. Three things on it are the same three things I wrote in the same notebook last December, two hundred pages back, in slightly more optimistic handwriting.
The pricing question. The portfolio question. The naming question nobody will say out loud in a room with the founder in it.
None of those expire on the thirty-first.
Deferred brand decisions do not sit quietly while you ignore them, they accrue, and the interest gets paid in confusion at every touchpoint you build on top of the thing you never settled.
Take the pricing question, since it is the one everybody postpones first. A year ago it was a conversation about whether the premium tier was priced like a premium product. Twelve months later it is a conversation about that, plus the two discount programs sales invented to work around it, plus a retailer who now believes the real price is the discounted one. The original question did not get harder. It just got more expensive to answer, because more things are resting on the wrong answer.
The portfolio question compounds the same way. You launch a sub-brand as a favor to a good customer, and it is small enough to ignore. Then it has a website. Then it has its own trade show booth and a manager whose bonus depends on it. Patagonia is admired for a lot of reasons, but the underrated one is a willingness to kill product lines that do not earn their place, and the reason they can do that is they never let a line sit unexamined for four years.
The naming question is the worst of them, because names are the cheapest thing to change on day one and the most expensive thing to change on day nine hundred. Every company I have worked with that carries a bad internal codename into market carries it forever. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The codename always wins.
So the year-end exercise is not the list. Everybody has the list. The exercise is picking exactly one item off it and deciding, in January, while it is still cheap.
The original question did not get harder. It just got more expensive to answer, because more things are resting on the wrong answer.
I will be at the sticky-floored bar in Southeast on New Year's Eve, singing something well above my range, badly and with total commitment. The host will call me baby. That, at least, is one decision I did not postpone.