Most business models look great in a calm market. The real test comes when rivals copy your offer, costs climb, customers tighten budgets, a platform changes the rules, or your own operations hit their limits. Strategy That Sticks is a practical guide to designing models that keep functioning under pressure - by exposing fragile assumptions and rebuilding the parts that fail first.
Kian Harvelle shows you how to examine business model design through the forces that break it: revenue logic that depends on optimistic pricing, cost discipline that collapses when volume grows, customer selection that quietly increases cost-to-serve, and channel strategy that hands control to partners or platforms. You will learn pressure testing methods to map dependencies, run realistic scenarios, and spot model fragility before it becomes a crisis. Along the way, the book connects the commercial story to the operational reality: operating limits, variability, quality, and the incentives that push teams into decisions that feel rational locally but weaken the system overall.
This book is for founders, executives, product leaders, commercial teams, and operators who want a resilient strategy without empty slogans. It will help you make cleaner trade-offs, protect pricing integrity, strengthen unit economics, reduce dangerous dependencies, and adapt without losing the core of what makes your business worth running. It is not a promise of outcomes or a set of universal answers; it is a framework for building a model that stays honest when the market stops cooperating.