Most mid-market CEOs trying to drive growth often reach for one of three levers: they add a new revenue channel, they raise prices, or they bolt on an adjacent service. Of course, each one of those levers is reasonable to pull, but none of them changes the underlying logic of how the company makes money. That logic, which is the business model itself, gets treated as a fixed input.

What feels interesting to me is that this conversation simply does not happen often enough in mid-market boardrooms. Business model innovation tends to get framed as something startups do (indeed, the idea for this piece came to me at a Harvard Business School event when I was listening to a VC panel) or something disruptors impose from outside the industry. Incumbents are supposed to defend the model, not redesign it. So the company hires more sales reps, launches a new SKU, raises rates by four percent, and waits for growth to return.

After looking into the research, I found that there’s a useful framework for working on this, and it is worth running through even as an intellectual exercise.

In 2015, Marc de Jong and Menno van Dijk published a McKinsey Quarterly piece called "Disrupting beliefs: A new approach to business-model innovation."

Their argument is that incumbents struggle to innovate on the business model because It is held in place by a set of long-held beliefs about how value gets created in the industry. And until those beliefs are surfaced, named, and tested, the business model feels like it can’t be changed.

The process they propose has five steps.

1. Outline the dominant business model.

2. Dissect the most important long-held belief into the notions that hold it up.

3. Turn one of those notions on its head.

4. Sanity-test the reframe by checking whether the same move has worked in another industry.

5. Translate the reframe into a new business model.

The process is fairly simply, but it’s also surprisingly hard, because the work begins with naming things that nobody in the industry has bothered to name.

What This Looks Like in Practice

It’s a bit easier to understand this exercise with an example. Take an industrial services firm doing $100M in revenue. There are often three parts to the dominant model. The company sells the technician's time. It bills against an upfront quote. Customers pay after the work is done.

In applying the framework, the first step then is to outline that model, and the second is to dissect the belief that holds it together. The belief here is that customers buy labor. The notions that support the belief are familiar to anyone who has worked in the industry: quality is measured in time-on-site; risk lives with the contractor and not the customer; margin comes from utilization.

The third step is to turn one of those notions on its head. We know from research that customers do not actually buy labor. They buy the certainty that the equipment runs, or that the manufacturing line does not go down, or that someone competent shows up before the failure becomes a crisis. The thing on the invoice is hours. But the thing the customer values is uptime. (Or, perhaps in your business, something else you’ve noticed.)

The fourth step, then, is the sanity test. This reframe has already been run in adjacent industries, which is the first sign that it’s more than a theory. Rolls-Royce stopped selling jet engines and started selling thrust by the hour through its TotalCare program. Hilti stopped selling power tools and started selling tool fleet management as a subscription, with replacement, repair, and theft coverage included.

The fifth and final step is to translate. The new business model here is some version of subscription uptime, performance retainers, or shared-risk contracts. The contractor absorbs more of the cost of equipment failure in exchange for higher base fees and a share of the savings when failures decline. The exact form varies. The point is that once the underlying belief flips, the model usually suggests itself.

The implication is not that every industrial firm should sell uptime instead of labor. It’s that most CEOs have never tried the exercise on their own industry. They have inherited a model and treated the inheritance as fact. McKinsey's contribution is to make the inheritance visible.

Two Days of Disciplined Thinking

The work to do this is essentially two days of disciplined naming. Outline the model. Name the belief. Find the notion most exposed to reframing. Borrow a reframe that has worked elsewhere. And translate. The result may not even be a new business model at all. It might simply be the recognition that a new business model is possible.

That recognition is the door. Most companies never walk through it because they never see the door. The five-step framework opens it.