About

Companies rarely die at the Merge Point.

They get absorbed. Acquired. Folded into someone else's roadmap. From the outside it can even look like a win.

The postmortem always names something specific — a missed number, a churn problem, a market that shifted. But the specific thing is usually downstream of something older and quieter: the business outgrew the way it was run, and by the time that became obvious, the range of available options had already narrowed.

I tend to see it early.

Some of it I've lived inside. Some of it I've watched happen to companies run by people I know well. Either way the tell is the same — and it isn't foresight. I work in the systems where it surfaces first. Reporting stops reconciling. Definitions drift between teams. The same question starts getting three different answers. It shows up in the data long before it shows up in the results, and by the time it reaches the executive team it's already a quarter old.

I've also seen it go the other way.

The difference was never budget or tooling. It was whether leadership could hear something uncomfortable without it becoming personal — whether there was enough trust in the room to talk honestly about how the business was actually running.

Where that trust existed, the conversation happened early and the company kept its options. Where it didn't, everyone kept optimizing around the problem until the problem became the story.

That's why this work starts with a conversation, not a work plan.

A diagnosis is only worth something if it can be said out loud, and heard.

I started Merge Point Group to do that work for more than one company at a time.