Earlier this week, I joined a webinar with entrepreneur and business coach Linda Maslechko as part of the She’s Next Hackathon 2025 empowered by Visa.

The theme was resilience, but not in the vague sense of ‘keep going’ or ‘be tough’. We talked about resilience where it really lives—in the structure of your business model. 

Too often, resilience gets reduced to mindset. Of course, mindset matters. But real resilience shows up in pricing. In your revenue mix. In your margin logic. It’s in how you make money—and how quickly you can shift when that logic stops working. 

At Reinvantage, we’ve had to learn this lesson ourselves. We’ve reinvented our company multiple times—first during the Covid-19 pandemic, and most recently again this year. Not because we failed, but because the world kept moving. Standing still would have been riskier than changing. We updated what we offer, who we serve, how we deliver. Today, we’re running several models in parallel and testing them as we go. That’s not chaos—it’s resilience in practice. 

Discipline is rare

What strikes me, working with founders across Europe, is how rarely this kind of discipline is applied. Most spend endless hours polishing today’s offer. They tweak the landing page, adjust copy, optimise the funnel. But they don’t ask: what will matter to our customers tomorrow? Or, even more crucially: What have customers stopped hoping for, because no one has solved it well enough yet? 

The truth is simple: you don’t decide how valuable your product is. Your customer does. Your job isn’t to declare the value—it’s to discover it. That discovery requires regular questioning: what are we overlooking, what are we giving away for free, where is demand forming quietly at the edges? If you don’t ask, your model begins to decay—silently, invisibly—until it’s too late. 

I call this the extraction gap. It’s what happens when you create something valuable, but you can’t capture that value in a repeatable, scalable way. It’s not always a pricing issue. More often, it’s a model problem. The person who benefits isn’t the person who pays. Or the way you’re charging doesn’t reflect how people actually experience the value. I’ve seen brilliant tools praised by users but ignored by buyers. Admiration doesn’t pay the bills. Transactions do. 

Business model sprints

Founders fall into predictable traps. Some treat the business model like a sacred text—once written in a pitch deck, never to be touched. Others copy-paste what worked for someone else, without pressure-testing whether it fits their own context. Both are mistakes. A business model is not a fixed plan. It’s a prototype. A living system. 

What I recommend instead is running business model sprints—just like product sprints. Every quarter, sit down with your team and ask: what feels fragile? Where are we leaking money, time, or trust? What are we giving away that people might actually pay for? Invite your team, your customers, even your investors into the process. The earlier you spot the cracks, the more resilient you become. 

And here’s the hardest truth: reinvention usually starts with letting go. It’s not about erasing your past. It’s about stopping the things that no longer serve you, no matter how attached you are to them. Ask yourself: what are we still doing only because it once worked? That’s where your next opportunity hides. 

Business models are not static blueprints. They are living systems. The companies that thrive aren’t the ones who polish what they already have—they are the ones who treat their model as something to be tested, stretched, and, when necessary, reinvented. 

Because resilience isn’t about holding on. It’s about knowing when—and how—to let go. 

Photo: Dreamstime.