For an owner considering a new service or product line inside an existing business.
01Write two promises
Describe what existing customers depend on and what the proposed new line would promise. Name where the promises compete for people, equipment, attention or access. A spare hour in a calendar is not necessarily usable capacity if that person must remain available for unpredictable core work.
Separate what is known about existing demand from what is guessed about the new line. Steve Blank’s experiment method calls for tests matched to specific business-model assumptions.1 An existing customer list can make access easier; it does not establish that those customers want the additional offering or that the business can deliver both promises together.
02Make the subsidy visible
List the work the core business would contribute: management attention, administrative setup, selling time, support, facilities or technical maintenance. State who currently owns each resource and what work would move, wait or stop. Use estimates where necessary and identify the assumption behind them. Invisible transfers make a new line look healthier than it is.
Keep an identifiable record of the new line’s work and decisions, even if it begins inside the existing organization. The aim is to understand the experiment, not to prescribe a legal or accounting structure. Ask the appropriate professionals about the actual entity, contracting and reporting implications before making those commitments.
What the new line borrows
| Area | Question |
|---|---|
| People and attention | Which core task loses capacity, and who agrees? |
| Customers and reputation | Which promise might change or become confusing? |
| Systems and support | Who handles access, exceptions and ongoing care? |
| Learning and limits | What would justify expansion, and what stops the test? |
03Appoint an owner with a bounded mandate
The new line needs someone accountable for its next decision and enough authority to run the agreed test. The core business needs someone able to say when a shared resource is no longer available. If both roles belong to the same owner, write the tradeoff down rather than relying on private mental juggling.
Agree which promises the test can make and who can approve exceptions. A pilot can become a standing service through a sequence of small, well-intended commitments. An end date, capacity boundary and customer communication plan help prevent that drift. Do not quietly leave pilot customers dependent on a service nobody has agreed to sustain.
04An illustrative boundary
Imagine a business exploring a reporting service alongside installation work. The same technical lead would review both. A bounded test might cover one defined reporting task, reserve explicit review capacity and prohibit commitments that interfere with accepted installation work. The team would track both the new task and the effect on existing obligations.
If the new work appears attractive only because urgent installation reviews are delayed, the experiment has revealed a real cost. The next choice could be a narrower scope, additional capacity, a partner or stopping. None is automatically correct. The ledger allows the owner to compare them without disguising the tradeoff.
05Review the combined business
At the decision date, examine customer response, delivery effort, repeatability and the consequences for the core. Distinguish genuine shared capability from work that happens to use the same person. Record what would need to change before the test could expand.
The strongest objection is that excessive separation can prevent sensible experimentation. Keep the record small: one page and the operational evidence needed to judge it. Do not build a bureaucracy around an idea. Use the worksheet to expose the commitments that would otherwise disappear into the day-to-day workload and decide what the business can responsibly support next.
A core-and-new-line ledger
Keep this to the resources and promises the experiment actually touches.
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Sources and limits
Source pages checked 10 October 2026 UTC. The worksheets are editorial aids; they have not been validated as predictive assessments.
- Steve Blank · Why Build, Measure, Learn isn’t just throwing things against the wall. 6 May 2015; checked 10 October 2026. Author’s methodological essay. Supports explicit hypotheses and experiments, including ideas inside established companies. It does not validate an opportunity or predict success.
Our interest
Heritage is taking first conversations about paid advisory work on growth. This guide is not an offer from Heritage. You can use this guide and its worksheet independently, without engaging Heritage.
Service work, The Read included, is a separate relationship: if we become interested in buying a business we are working with, we stop that work and tell the owner plainly before any purchase discussion begins.
This article is educational. It is not individual legal, tax or investment advice, an offer or a promise of results.
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