Seven bullets on a services page describe capacity, not a position. Removing two of them is the fastest positioning work available to a firm.

1. Jobs came back in 1997 and drew a two-by-two on a whiteboard. Apple was selling hundreds of products. He cut the line to four boxes – consumer and professional, desktop and portable – and told the room that deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. The company went from near-bankruptcy to the most valuable on earth. The first move was subtraction.

2. Drucker called it planned abandonment and nobody does it. The discipline of periodically asking, of every product and service, whether you would start it today knowing what you know. Almost every service line survives not because it earns its place but because nobody scheduled the meeting where it could be killed.

3. Rank by margin and by what happens next. Two columns. What each line earns per hour, and how often it leads to a larger second engagement. The line that scores badly on both is not a service. It is a habit with an invoice attached.

4. A long list reads as availability, not capability. The buyer scanning fourteen services does not think “comprehensive”. They think “agency”, and agencies are bought on price. Specialists are bought on judgment. The list is what moves you between those two categories.

5. The thing you are best at is usually somewhere in the middle. Nobody puts their strongest work first, because the strongest work feels obvious to the person doing it. Ask three clients which line they would hire you for and you will usually find it is not the one at the top.

6. Announce the removal. Do not just delete the page. Say what you stopped doing and why, in public. A firm that publicly narrows is signaling confidence and demand, and it is the single most efficient way to communicate a position without writing a positioning statement.

7. Refer the abandoned line to someone good. Every inquiry you now decline becomes a referral, and every referral is a relationship with a specialist who will send work back. Subtraction does not lose you the revenue. It converts it into a channel.

8. Expect the sunk-cost argument and ignore it. Someone will point out how much was invested in building that capability. That money is gone regardless of what you decide next, which is the entire reason the sunk-cost fallacy has a name.

9. Then check your own page honestly. If your services section lists seven bullets and your case studies all describe one thing, the page and the record are contradicting each other in front of every buyer. One of them is lying and the buyer will assume it is the flattering one.

The bottom line. Everybody knows the advice about focus and nobody applies it to their own list, because every line on it is somebody’s idea, somebody’s client, or somebody’s bad month. Removing two of them will do more for your positioning than the next twelve articles you publish.