Hope Is Not a Strategy

I was on a call with a business owner the other day. Good guy. Works hard. Cares about his team. We were talking about growth, specifically, where the next round of revenue was going to come from.

I asked him a simple question: “How are you going to get more sales?”

He paused. Then he said, with complete sincerity: “Hope.”

He wasn’t joking. And I appreciated the honesty because I think that’s true of most leaders, they just dress it up in fancier language.

But here’s the thing: hope doesn’t just show up in one department, it shows up everywhere. And you won’t find it unless you’re willing to wade in and look.

Your Business Is a Collection of Verbs

Every business, no matter how complex, can be broken down into a set of core actions. Simple statements about what you do. Think of them as the verbs of your business:

We find the right people. We demonstrate our value. We connect with right-fit clients. We deliver exceptional service. We develop our team. We retain our best customers.

Those verbs are the building blocks of your entire operation. Each one represents a step in the process that keeps your business alive and growing. And each one should have a real mechanism behind it.

But in a lot of businesses, one or more of those verbs has been quietly replaced by a different word: hope.

Hope Is the Verb That Isn’t One

Hope shows up when there’s a gap between what you say you do and what you actually have a mechanism to do. It fills the space where a plan should be. And it’s comfortable there, because nobody likes to admit that critical parts of their business are running on fumes and good intentions.

In hiring, “We find the right people” sounds great. But is there a defined profile for who the right people are? A sourcing strategy? A structured interview process? Or are you posting a job, crossing your fingers, and hoping the right résumé floats to the top?

Suddenly, “We find the right people” becomes “We hope the right hires apply.” And it doesn’t stop there. Hope hides in every corner of an organization. 

“We retain our best customers” → “We hope customers stay”

“We develop our team” →  “We hope people figure it out”

“We deliver exceptional service” →  “We hope it’s good enough”

“We demonstrate our value” →  “We hope it resonates” 

Hope is the verb your business uses when it doesn’t actually have a verb.

Why It’s Hard to See

The tricky part is that hope doesn’t look like a problem from the outside. Things are still getting done. Revenue is still coming in. People are still showing up. It all feels like it’s working—until it doesn’t.

Hope works just often enough to keep you from questioning it. You hire someone great? “See, the process works.” A big client renews? “Our retention is solid.” A deal closes? “Sales is fine.”

But those aren’t outcomes of a well-designed system. They’re lucky breaks. And the problem with lucky breaks is that they’re not repeatable, not scalable, and not something you can manage. You can’t improve a process that doesn’t exist. You can’t measure and refine hope.

Replacing Hope with a Mechanism

The good news is that turning hope into strategy isn’t some massive overhaul. It’s usually a matter of getting specific. Sit down and break your business into its core verbs. 

Then, for each one, ask yourself: Is this actually a verb in our business, or is it hope?

Answer questions like:

What specifically needs to happen? Not the outcome, the actions.

Who owns it? If everybody owns it, nobody owns it. Put a name next to it.

How will we know it’s working? What’s the leading indicator? What do we measure before we get to the lagging result?

What’s the cadence? How often do we review this and adjust? If the answer is “when something goes wrong,” that’s reactive, not strategic.

Most businesses I work with find at least two or three core verbs that are running on hope. Get specific by defining exactly what needs to happen for every hope in your business and you’ve just replaced wishful thinking with something you can actually manage.

Hope Is Human. Strategy Is the Job.

Let me be clear: I’m not anti-hope. Hope is beautiful. You need to believe things can get better to have any reason to get out of bed and build something.

But hope without a mechanism is just daydreaming, and as a leader, your job isn’t to hope your business works. Your job is to build the systems and processes that make it work.

So take an hour this week. Break your business down into its verbs. Find out where hope is doing the work that a real plan should be doing, and start replacing it.

Hope is a wonderful thing to carry in your heart. It’s a terrible strategy.