improve-business

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: improve-business
description: 'Guided journey from a stalled, plateaued business to one with an honest diagnosis, a working operating rhythm, and offers repriced to real value. Orchestrates eight skills phase by phase - good-strategy-bad-strategy, traction-eos, high-output-management, team-topologies, drive-motivation, lean-analytics, negotiation, monetizing-innovation - asking the user questions at every decision point and recording results in the project docs/ folder (STRATEGY.md, OPERATIONS.md, METRICS.md, IMPROVE-BUSINESS-PLAN.md) so the journey resumes across sessions. Use when the user wants to fix a business that has plateaued, diagnose why growth stalled, tighten strategy and execution, re-motivate a team, or says ''revenue is flat and I do not know why''. Starting from scratch with no customers: use create-business. Once the fundamentals work and the goal is expansion: use grow-business. When the product itself drags the business down: use improve-app. For one framework in isolation, invoke that skill directly.'
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: wondelai
  version: "1.0.1"
---

# Improve a Business

An interactive, resumable journey for a business that already runs but has stopped moving — real revenue, real customers, a flat line. Across eight phases it works the layers in order (strategy, execution, management, structure, motivation, metrics, margin, pricing), diagnosing before treating rather than chasing one tactic at a time. The agent asks before every decision and records each choice in `docs/` so the turnaround survives across sessions.

## Core Principle

**A plateau is a diagnosis failure: diagnose before treating, and work the layers in order — strategy, execution, management, structure, motivation, metrics, margin, pricing.** Poking one tactic at a time never breaks a plateau because the constraints compound. This skill sequences the phases, asks the decision questions, and records what was decided; the constituent skills carry the actual method — invoke them rather than improvising their frameworks.

## Journey Map

| Phase | Skill | Question it answers | Artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | good-strategy-bad-strategy | What single challenge is capping the business? | Creates docs/STRATEGY.md — GATE |
| 2 | traction-eos | How do we execute the strategy every week? | Creates docs/OPERATIONS.md |
| 3 | high-output-management | How does the operator multiply the team, not bottleneck it? | Extends docs/OPERATIONS.md |
| 4 | team-topologies | Is the org structure itself the constraint? | Extends docs/OPERATIONS.md |
| 5 | drive-motivation | Why has the team quietly checked out? | Extends docs/OPERATIONS.md |
| 6 | lean-analytics | Which one number tells us the truth? | Creates docs/METRICS.md |
| 7 | negotiation | Where are we leaking margin, and what do customers truly value? | Extends docs/CUSTOMER.md |
| 8 | monetizing-innovation | Are we charging for the value we deliver? | Extends docs/OFFER.md |

## Operating Rules

1. **Resume first.** Before anything else, read `docs/IMPROVE-BUSINESS-PLAN.md` and every artifact in the Journey Map. If the tracker exists, summarize the journey state in 3-5 lines and ask which phase to enter. Done when the user has confirmed an entry point. A journey with a tracker is resumed, never restarted.
2. **Intake on first run only.** No tracker: run the Intake below, then create `docs/IMPROVE-BUSINESS-PLAN.md` with every phase statused `pending | in-progress | awaiting-evidence | done | deferred: reason | skipped: reason`. Done when the tracker exists and the user has confirmed the phase plan.
3. **Phase entry.** Announce: what the phase does, the decision it forces, the artifact it produces, rough effort. Offer proceed / skip / defer — phases marked GATE may be deferred, never skipped. Mark the phase `in-progress` on proceed. Done when the user chose.
4. **Skill invocation and fallback.** Load the phase's skill and use it: each phase's Invoke line names the skill by slug —