Writing the position down, and testing it

Four sentences

Kelverin's position, as Zohdy and Wassef finally wrote it, is four sentences. Every one carries a number, and every one carries a refusal.

1. We make workwear — coveralls and multi-pocket trousers — from 12,000 pieces a style and 6,000 a colour.
2. We quote woven casual bottoms only at 15,000 pieces a colour or above.
3. We do not quote hospitality tunics, aprons or ladies woven blouses.
4. We hold 12% of line capacity uncommitted at sixty days out for workwear repeats, which is how we have shipped 89% of workwear orders complete on the date confirmed at order, over four years.

That is the whole thing. It is forty times shorter than a capability pack, and it can be said in a lift. Unlike the pack, it can be checked. Every clause in it can be shown to be false, and that is what makes it worth saying.

The rest of this lesson is the three tests it had to pass.

Test one: how many of last year's decisions would it have changed?

A position that would not have changed anything is not a position. It is a description of what you were doing anyway, and it will change nothing next year either.

Wassef ran the four sentences against every one of the 109 enquiries Kelverin answered in the year.

44 of 109 answers, or 40.4%, would have been different. That is a position.

For contrast, run the sentence most factories actually have. We are a quality-focused manufacturer serving international brands, offering flexibility and competitive pricing. Run it over the same 109 enquiries and it changes 0 of them. There is no enquiry it can refuse and no date it can commit to. It is not a weak position. It is not a position at all, and the test says so in one number.

Test two: does it survive the worst month?

Lesson 5's worst month had 111 idle line-days and a refused five-pocket enquiry worth USD 3,360 of contribution. Kelverin's monthly fixed cost is USD 214,000.

refusal held in the worst month     USD 3,360
monthly fixed cost                  USD 214,000
cost of holding the position        1.6% of one month's fixed cost

1.6% is affordable in a bad month. So sentence 2 can be held, and Kelverin can announce it.

Now test a refusal it did not make, to see the test working in the other direction. Suppose sentence 2 had read we do not quote woven casual bottoms at all. That refuses the contested five-pocket business too: USD 155,520 a year, USD 12,960 a month, 6.1% of the monthly fixed cost. In a month at 38.4% idle, no owner holds that. By March the position would have an exception in it, and everybody would know the rest of it was negotiable.

The refusals in a position are the ones that survive your worst month, and no others. The threshold in sentence 2 is not a compromise. It is where the arithmetic put the line.

Test three: could a competitor write the same sentence?

The last test is the cheapest, and it kills more drafts than the other two together.

A position is a sentence your competitor cannot copy without changing what they do. A description is a sentence they can copy by editing a document. The test takes ten seconds a clause. It is also the reason sentence 1 alone is not the position: it needed the minimums attached to it before it said anything.

Notice what this rules out. Every claim in the middle of a capability pack fails it — certifications, machine counts, export markets, years in business. A competitor either has them or can buy them. That is the imitation clock from lesson 2, arriving at the sales document. A claim with a short clock cannot carry a position, however true it is.

Reviewing it, and the question that does the work

A position is reviewed once a year. It is not revisited whenever a month is quiet. And the review question is not the comfortable one.

The comfortable question is should we leave this category. It is answered by everything already sunk into it: the machines, the buyer relationships, the years. The useful question turns it round: if we were not in this category today, knowing what we now know, would we enter it? Take Kelverin's hospitality tunics, at USD 96.52 a line-day against a factory average of USD 258.25. Nobody would have argued for entering. The only argument for staying was that it was already there, which is not an argument at all.

What it costs, and what it buys

The last thing to say is the honest one, and it is why most factories never do this.

Kelverin's position costs it money on day one. It gives up USD 33,310 of contribution, after the quoting time it releases. It refuses 34.9% of its enquiry book. And if none of the freed capacity converts, it leaves 24.3% of the factory idle. Every one of those is real. None of them is hypothetical.

What it buys is one thing. It buys the right to be the obvious answer to a specific question: who makes workwear well, from a size we can place, and ships it on the date they confirmed? There are not many factories that can be described in one sentence, and a buyer with that problem will find the ones that can.

The alternative is not neutral. A factory that quotes everything is the obvious answer to nothing. So it is never shortlisted for a reason. It is included as a third quote. And a third quote is compared on the only thing left when nothing else separates it, which is price. On price, somebody is always cheaper, in a place you have never visited, for reasons that have nothing to do with how well you make anything.

Act as a hostile reviewer of a factory's position statement. Here is my draft: [YOUR SENTENCES]. Here is last year's enquiry book, one line each: [DATE, BUYER, CATEGORY, PIECES, SMALLEST COLOUR, LEAD TIME ASKED, QUOTED OR DECLINED, WON OR LOST]. Here is my worst month of the last three years: [MONTH, CAPACITY UNITS AVAILABLE, CAPACITY UNITS USED, MONTHLY FIXED COST]. Run three tests, and report each one as a number before you comment on it. TEST ONE, the change test: how many of last year's enquiries would my draft have refused outright, how many would it have answered differently, and what percentage of the book is that? If the answer is under 10%, say the draft is a description rather than a position, and stop being polite about it. TEST TWO, the worst-month test: name every clause that would have had to refuse work in my worst month, total the contribution it refuses, and give that as a percentage of one month's fixed cost. Tell me which clauses I could not have held, and rewrite those to the point where the arithmetic says I could. TEST THREE, the copy test: for each clause, say whether a competitor could write the identical sentence without changing what they actually do. Mark each one POSITION or DESCRIPTION. Rewrite every description into a clause carrying a number and a refusal, or tell me it should be deleted. Finish with the total cost of holding this position for a year, and the single sentence a buyer would remember. Do not soften anything.