Behind the door is his father’s old office as detailed in this article from last June. Dick Kempthorn ran the dealership on Cleveland Avenue from 1965 until he died in 2019, at 92. When the Volvo complex got renovated a few years later, the crew built the new interior walls around that office on purpose. Nobody wanted to touch it.

“Everybody treats this like a museum,” Eric said.

He wanted Huang, the new owner, and Huang’s two sons to understand his father as much as they understood the dealership. Then he told them the part every longtime customer already knows. Dick Kempthorn did business the old-fashioned way, on a handshake. One family alone has bought a hundred cars there.

On August 17, Kempthorn Motors was sold to Great Lakes Auto Group. After 88 years and three generations, Eric Kempthorn didn’t announce the sale like a loss. He talked about legacy, choosing a buyer who “shares our family values,” and making sure the name, the staff, and the story would all still be standing after the sale, even without a Kempthorn behind the counter.

The scale of Great Lakes presented the best opportunity to grow the Kempthorn Legacy, and it’s employees.

The same week, a few miles away, the Canton Repository ran a different kind of story. Jessie Newlon, 33, is co-owner of Gold’N Krisp Potato Chips. She started riding shotgun on the delivery route with her sister at fifteen and officially as an employee five years later. She learned production on the floor under her dad. And somewhere along the way her role turned to the financial and administrative side. Somewhere after that she became a co-owner alongside her mom and both sisters.

Sixty-five years and four generations of making one perfect thing.

Two Stark County business featured in the same week. With two different decisions about what to do with the business their parents and grandparents built. One sold. One is still all in the family. Neither is the model, and both are worth paying attention to.

Gold’N Krisp got where it is by roles sorting themselves out, in real time, over two decades. Delivery route. Production floor. Books. Ownership. Nobody handed Jessie Newlon a title. She grew into one, and so did her sisters, until four women each held a distinct, named piece of a business that used to be one man’s.

Kempthorn got where it is by asking a harder question early and answering it honestly: what actually needs to survive here, the family’s ownership or the family’s legacy? They chose Great Lakes specifically because it would keep the name, keep the staff, and has the resources to keep almost ninety years of history intact.

Different decisions. Same discipline underneath both of them.

That’s the part worth sitting with if you’re running a business right now. Clarity doesn’t tell you whether to keep the business in the family or sell it. It just makes sure that whichever way you go, you go on purpose. It’s about whether anyone inside the business could tell you right now what’s actually being protected and what isn’t. The name. The building. The relationships. The paycheck. The mission. Pick two people in your business and ask them separately. If you get two different answers, you don’t have a succession problem yet. You have a clarity problem that will become one, whichever direction you eventually go.

Dick Kempthorn’s advice to his kids, according to the family, was simpler than any of this: if you want something done, do it now. Jessie Newlon has her grandfather’s version of the same line tattooed on her arm, “do it now.”

Neither family waited for a plan to arrive from somewhere else. They just kept getting clear, out loud, with each other, one decision at a time. That’s the whole method. It’s not more complicated than that, and it’s not easier either.

What have you recognized, is worth protecting in your business, and what have you just never gotten around to deciding?

I’d done everything right. I gave my source everything it needed. Make, model, specs. It came back confident. SATA. So I bought SATA.

I cloned the old drive. Installed the new one. The case slid back in place. It booted clean. Everything that could go wrong went right.

And then nothing worked.

Shortcuts were missing. Programs wouldn’t load. It took one click in File Explorer to understand what had happened: the drive I’d disconnected to install the new one was my data drive. Not the OS drive. Not the one filling up. My C: drive was an M.2 stick tucked behind the motherboard. Right advice, but wrong drive.

The execution was clean. The diagnosis was wrong.

I’ve been in enough organizations to know what that moment feels like at scale. The campaign that launched on time and landed flat. The restructure that ran smoothly and solved nothing. The new software that got adopted and didn’t fix the problem. Everyone did their job. The thing still didn’t work.

Bad advice isn’t neutral. It’s worse than no advice.

No advice leaves you uncertain. Uncertain people ask more questions. They slow down. They look around. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it’s honest. It keeps you in the problem longer.

Bad advice closes the loop prematurely. It feels like clarity. You have a diagnosis, a plan, a part on the way. You stop asking questions because the question feels answered. And the better you are at execution, the deeper you get before you realize the premise was wrong.

The most dangerous moment isn’t when things go badly. It’s when everything goes right and nothing works.

The hard question, and the one that rarely gets asked, isn’t “what’s the solution?” It’s “are we solving the right problem?”

That question requires something most advice-giving skips. It requires sitting with the problem long enough to understand it. Not pattern-matching to a familiar answer. Not reaching for the closest available solution. Actually asking: what’s really going on here?

For me, it took pulling the service manual. Slowing down after the pivot didn’t work. Reading the actual specs of the machine in front of me. That’s when I found the extra SATA port I didn’t know existed. And realized the work I’d written off as wasted was actually done. The clone was good. It would boot from the new location. The false start wasn’t a failure. It just wasn’t useful yet.

The fix came. But only after I stopped executing and started diagnosing.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working inside organizations that were stuck: most execution problems are diagnosis problems in disguise. The plan is fine. The team is capable. The effort is real. But somewhere upstream, someone answered a question nobody fully asked.

What you actually need — before the plan, before the solution, before the confident advice — is someone willing to ask whether you’re working on the right drive.

It came from a consulting firm. Cost real money. Arrived with a presentation, a framework, and maybe a roadmap. The recommendations were probably reasonable. Some of them were genuinely good.

None of it was ever implemented.

Part of my onboarding at one point in my career was being handed exactly that binder. It was how I was supposed to learn what a system could do. Not what it did. No plan behind it. No resources dedicated to it. Just pages of what was possible from someone who had already moved on to the next engagement.

I’ve thought about that binder a lot since.

Not because it was unusual, but because it wasn’t.

There’s a version of help that feels like help but is actually designed to keep you dependent on the helper.

The manager who answers every question directly, immediately, and completely feels like a resource. What they’re actually doing is making sure the team never has to think without them. Every answer creates the next question. The manager stays indispensable. The team stops growing.

The consulting firm that delivers recommendations without implementation has the same dynamic, whether they intend it or not. The binder creates the follow-on engagement. The client has pages but not progress. The next conversation starts with “we could help you implement this.”

It feels like service. It’s actually a grip.

The alternative is harder to sell because it looks like less in the short term.

The leader who delegates outcomes instead of tasks gives the team a problem to solve, not an answer to execute. It’s messier. It takes longer. The team makes mistakes they wouldn’t have made with tighter control. But they also develop the confidence to move without being told. Eventually they stop needing the same level of guidance.

That’s the goal. Not to make yourself unnecessary forever. To make yourself unnecessary for this problem.

A good thinking partner works the same way. They help you define what you’re actually solving for. They work through it with you, not for you. And when you’ve found the answer, they stop. Not because the relationship is over. Because the work is done.

I think about this in two distinct ways in my own practice.

Advisory is available when you need a perspective above the weeds. You define the problem. We work toward clarity together. You move forward on your own. That’s not a standing meeting or an ongoing retainer. It’s a conversation when you need one.

A project is different. I’m filling a role you don’t currently have for a specific, defined engagement with a clear outcome. When the outcome is achieved, the engagement ends.

In both cases the goal is the same. You leave better than you arrived. Clearer. More confident. Still independent.

That doesn't mean the relationship ends. It means if we work together again, it's because I helped. Not because I made myself hard to leave.

The dusty binder is a symptom of help that was never designed to end.

The question worth asking before you engage a consultant or advisor is how do they talk about success? If the answer is a deliverable, be careful. If the answer is your progress, you are in the right room.

So the operations and servicing teams got to work. They spent months rebuilding the entire document library. New naming structure. New keywords. New workflow. Carefully designed, thoroughly tested, properly documented. And fully converted. By the time they finished, they had something genuinely good. A real solution to a real problem.

Then they rolled it out.

And the loan officers kept their desk files.

What followed got diagnosed as a change management problem. Communication wasn’t sufficient. Training fell short. The front line was resistant to new ways of working. All of that became the story.

None of it was wrong, exactly. But it wasn’t the real problem either.

Nobody had asked the loan officers how they worked. Nobody sat with them long enough to understand what they reached for during a loan, how they moved through a file, what they needed to find and when. The project had been built entirely from the ops and servicing perspective because that’s who supposedly owned the problem. Their better system would be better for everyone.

The case was never made to everyone who had to change.

In many ways, things were worse than before. At least before the months spent on the project, everyone knew where the files were. Now there were two systems, neither of them complete, and a front line that had learned not to trust the next initiative.

When leaders tell me they have a communication problem, I listen carefully.

Communication is almost always part of it. But it’s also a very safe thing to say out loud. A leader can acknowledge poor communication without putting the decision itself on the table. The plan was right, the path was right, but we just didn’t bring people along soon enough or clearly enough. Fix the communication and move on.

It’s a convenient place to stop. And stopping there has a cost.

Think about deciding where to meet your spouse for dinner without asking her. You pick the place, show up at six, and she isn’t there. You call. She didn’t know. That’s a communication problem, and it’s easy to fix.

But say you tell her. And she still doesn’t want to go.

Now the communication problem has been solved and the resistance didn’t go away. Which means it was never really a communication problem. You picked a restaurant for yourself and expected her to want what you wanted. The case wasn’t made. It was assumed.

That’s what happened at the bank. The ops team solved their problem, communicated the solution, and called it change management when the front line didn’t follow. The harder question never got asked. Did we build a case that works for the people whose daily work we’re asking to change? There wasn’t a good answer, so the conversation stopped somewhere safer.

Most change efforts that stall aren’t stalling because of poor communication.

They’re stalling because the case was built for the people already convinced. The people in the room when the decision got made, who lived with the problem long enough to feel the solution as obvious. By the time anyone notices the disconnect, the project is months in, the budget is committed, and re-examining the case feels like going backward.

So the diagnosis becomes communication. Or training. Or culture. Anything that leaves the original decision intact.

The people who aren’t moving are often the first clear feedback the effort ever got. They’re not obstacles. They’re information.

The question worth asking before you launch is whether you’ve made a case that works for everyone who has to say yes. The time to ask it is before the months of work, before the rollout, before the communication plan.

Most teams ask how to communicate the decision. Fewer ask whether they’ve earned the right to make it.

Those are different questions. The first one is easier. The second one is the work.

There’s a moment most leaders recognize, usually too late.

Production is slipping. The project is behind. People are quieter than they used to be. More mistakes. Fewer conversations. A kind of low-grade tension that wasn’t there two months ago.

The instinct is to push harder. Call more meetings. Ask people to dig in.

But the problem isn’t effort. It never was.

The Real Failure Mode

Most organizations launch change initiatives the same way: they identify the work then assign it to capable people. And then ask those people to carry it alongside everything they were already doing.

The day job doesn’t pause. The project gets added on top. And somewhere in the gap between intention and execution, both start to suffer.

It’s not a capability problem. The people are talented. They know what needs to be done. Nobody made room for them to do it.

This is the pattern I see most often in organizations navigating complex change. Three things tend to show up together.

First, no dedicated capacity. Everyone is expected to manage their regular responsibilities and the additive project work simultaneously. The assumption is that good people can absorb both. They can, for a while. But not indefinitely, and not without cost.

Second, no clear prioritization. When leaders don’t name what matters most, individuals fill the vacuum with their own judgment. Everyone is working hard. Nobody is working on the same thing. Alignment quietly erodes.

Third, no headroom. Most teams are already operating at or near full capacity before the initiative starts. There is no slack or dry powder. No room for the unexpected, which change always produces.

The result is predictable. Production slips. The project slips. People start to burn out. And the organization concludes, incorrectly, that the problem was communication or methodology.

So they add to the playbook, not capacity.

What Different Looks Like

I know what the alternative looks like because I lived it.

Years ago, I was managing a loan servicing unit at a regional bank when a major merger was announced. The combined organization would be significantly larger, and the integration was going to be one of the most complex operational efforts either institution had ever attempted.

Leadership made a decision I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Rather than asking functional leaders to manage the integration alongside their existing responsibilities, they created dedicated integration teams with manager roles within each major operational area. They pulled people out of production and pointed them full time at the project.

I was one of them. I left my day job running the loan servicing unit to focus entirely on the loan integration.

It was the right call.

Because integration work is real work. It requires sustained attention, clear decision-making, and the ability to escalate and resolve issues without competing priorities pulling you in two directions at once. When you’re trying to run a unit and integrate a bank at the same time, neither gets your full attention. When the integration is your only job, everything changes.

The merger succeeded. The combined loan portfolio grew by 60%. Not only because the team was exceptional, though they were. Because the conditions were right.

The Question Worth Asking

Before your next initiative, before you build the plan and assign the work and set the timeline, ask one question.

Have we actually made room for this?

Not in theory. Not on a project plan. In practice. In people’s calendars. In how priorities are set and communicated. In whether the teams carrying this work have any capacity left to carry it.

If the answer is no, the plan isn’t the problem.

The conditions are.

And conditions are something you can fix, before things slip, before people burn out, and before the initiative becomes another story about why change is hard.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Last week we asked all the right questions using our Clarity Card, a simple tool to help leaders pause, refocus, and move forward with intention. Here are five quick checks I use with SMB owners and other leaders to cut through the fog and get started with the first thing first.

1. Are priorities clear? (Three max)

We’ve all heard the saying: “If everything’s a priority, nothing is.”

It’s the first prompt on the Card and one of the first questions we ask leaders during a Clarity Sprint discovery session. “What business goal does this advance?” Notice, the question is proactive, not reactive. “Goal” not “problem.”

The reason we ask is that teams should limit their focus to three core outcomes. Then, write them down. Share them. Protect them.

Productivity starts with constraint.

2. Do people understand their roles?

Confusion isn’t just inefficient. It’s exhausting.

Make sure everyone knows what they own, what they support, and what they can ignore. It’s also in this role clarity that people understand the WIIFM (What’s in it For Me?), a key driver for building the desire for change.

Clear roles reduce friction, build trust, and power change.

3. Are timelines realistic?

Urgency is fine. Fantasy isn’t.

If your calendar is built on best-case scenarios, you’re setting your team up to fail. Build in breathing room. Ask your team, “what do we need to stop doing to make space for this objective?”

4. Have risks been named?

You can’t manage what you won’t name.

Call out the dependencies and the “if this breaks, we’re stuck” moments.

Naming and planning for risk is leadership. It’s not resistance or pessimism.

5. Is there a communication plan?

Don’t assume people will “just know.”

Decide how updates flow, who shares what, and when. Who needs occasional updates? Who needs more frequent communication?

It doesn’t need to be complicated. Even a simple rhythm—weekly check-ins, shared notes, one point of contact—can change everything.

Final Thought

You don’t need a multi-day retreat to find clarity. But you do need a moment of pause—and someone who knows how to guide it.

That’s what our Clarity Sprint is built for: a focused, high-impact workshop that helps small teams name what matters, align around it, and move forward with confidence. All in just 90 minutes.

If your organization is navigating change, planning for next year, or just trying to finish strong, let’s talk. I work with businesses, nonprofits, and civic groups to turn complexity into clear next steps.

Not sure where your team stands—or where to begin? Take our no-obligation readiness assessment. A few multiple-choice questions can put you on the road to clarity. And confidence

Ready to move from swirl to structure?

Book a Clarity Sprint or grab the printable Clarity Card on our LinkedIn page. Let’s help your team finish strong.

Book a Call

Using a quarterly planner (Full Focus, by the way) forces me to evaluate every goal each quarter and decide which are achievable and still make sense in a dynamic world.

In my quarterly reviews, I ask the same questions over and over and encourage my clients to do the same.

I’ve pulled the five prompts I use for goal-setting and prioritizing, along with a quick checklist, together into the Clarity Card for quick reference. Here are the five prompts and why they matter.

Prompt #1: Which business objective does this advance?

Ask this question first for two reasons. First, it ensures that the time, money, and resources spent accomplishing this goal are aligned with your highest-level objectives. This calls back to the famous Drucker quote:

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Second, by framing the question as ‘what goal’ instead of ‘what problem,’ you drive toward objectives instead of chasing symptoms. For example, how many times have you been part of a meeting to talk about a problem that started with ‘communication’ being named as the culprit? But, it’s rarely the true challenge. Overwhelm, misalignment, change fatigue, and shifting priorities all can feel like communication problems.

Prompt #2: What does success look like in one sentence?

We use this question to get crystal clear on the definition of success. Like a SMART goal, or other framework, the best outcomes start with the clarity of a single sentence aligned to a business objective.

Prompt #3: Who needs to be aligned for this to work?

Answering the first two questions without this one is just noise. This is where we identify everyone involved in the effort, along with their needs, motivations, and their influence. A full consideration of this prompt creates a list of what’s in it for everyone and how to make sure that they get it.

Prompt #4: What is the next smallest step we can take?

We’ve all seen posts about the power of compounding change or eating an elephant one bite at a time. Even with the well-known clichés, how many times have you been part of something that became so large that it not only never finished, but it also lost any sense of its original purpose? Zombie Projects are real and they feed on your time and money.

Asking this question, and then asking it again and again, keeps the effort manageable and aligned and unlocks value with each iteration.

Prompt #5: What do we need to stop doing in order to make space?

This brings us back to Zucker and closes the circle. Prioritization is as much about knowing what not to do as what to do first. Especially when your focus and resources are limited.

Need an extra hand sorting through your priorities?

Whether you need an hour or an expert on speed dial, we’re offering our popular Clarity Bundle at a discounted rate during the fourth quarter. Visit hersherconsulting.com and end 2025 with clarity and start 2026 with renewed focus:

• Strategic Office Hour: Designed for leaders who want targeted help with real-world challenges: prioritization, stakeholder prep, meeting strategy, or just untangling the fog.

• Clarity Sprint: Helps small teams name the real need, define success in plain language, and take the next smallest step—with calm, strategic momentum.

• Retained Advisory and Retained Advisory Plus: for SMB leaders heading into year-end with too much on their plate and not enough strategic bandwidth, the Q4 Retainer Sprint offers calm, consistent guidance—on demand and without the complexity of a full engagement.