Research Project
The Business Initiative Study
Organizations have been investing more time, effort and money in growth, transformation, marketing, technology and strategic initiatives than ever before. Yet many initiatives still become fragmented, inefficient, difficult to sustain or simply unsuccessful.
This study seeks to understand:
• why business initiatives fail to achieve their intended outcomes,
• how business initiatives deteriorate over time,
• where operational and commercial friction emerge,
• and what structural patterns may contribute to long-term underperformance.
Participants are invited to reflect on:
• stalled or struggling initiatives,
• operational friction and complexity,
• revenue-system inefficiencies,
• commercial performance challenges,
• and organizational breakdowns affecting growth and execution.
Participants may receive:
• anonymized aggregate findings,
• executive summary reports,
• emerging trend analysis,
• future benchmarking insights related to organizational performance and commercialization challenges.
Estimated completion time: 8-10 minutes.
ABOUT THE STUDY
Reducing the Business Failure Rate
Reliable sources report that:
• 25% of all new businesses fail within 1 year
• 50% of all new businesses fail within 5 years
• 70% of PE-funded businesses fail in 15 months
• 60% of VC-funded businesses fail within 2 years
• And 80% of all corporate growth and transformation initiatives fail to achieve their objectives
This "business failure rate" has persisted - in fact, grown - despite all the available tools and explanations.
This study seeks to understand why many initiatives fragment, stall, or deteriorate despite capable leadership, sophisticated planning, and substantial organizational investment.
Understand hidden causes
Benchmark initiative performance
Improve business outcomes
OUR SERVICES
About the Business Initiative Study
Why Are We Doing This Study?
Over the past 40+ years, LeadGen.com has worked with many hundreds of organizations facing growth challenges, stalled initiatives, operational friction, commercialization failures, and execution breakdowns.
Across multiple engagements, we observed recurring structural patterns in how business initiatives either fail to launch successfully, lose momentum after initial progress, or deteriorate over time - even when organizations invest heavily in strategy, technology, process improvement, and transformation efforts.
Through detailed analyses of this data, we developed a hypothesis that helps explain many of the failures, while also providing a practical architecture for initiative success.
While this model has been refined and applied successfully in hundreds of real-world cases, this study is designed to determine whether these recurring structural patterns appear consistently across organizations, and whether they materially explain why some initiatives fail to launch successfully, fragment during execution, and/or produce persistent underperformance despite substantial investment and effort.
The goal is not to confirm the validity of the model, but to better understand whether these structural conditions broadly contribute to successful commercialization and sustainable execution when they're present — or to launch-failure, organizational drift, and long-term underperformance when they're not.
Case Analysis Deep Dive
If you would like to submit your case for a detailed analysis, please contact the research team at [email protected].
Results Reporting
Results from the study will be available here when they're released.
FAQS
Is there any cost to participate in this study?
No. There is no cost for participating in the study. The results and high-level analyses from the study will be made available to participants for free, as well.
WIll my information be kept confidential?
Yes. No identifying information will be released to either the public, or to other participants.
Who should participate in this study?
This study is intended for founders, executives, operational leaders, commercialization leaders, consultants, transformation teams, and professionals involved in launching, managing, scaling, or repairing business initiatives.
WORKING HYPOTHESIS
Commercialization Drift
Many business failures are blamed on execution issues, market conditions, leadership gaps, funding shortfalls, or competitive forces.
This study explores whether potentially controllable structural conditions influence the degree to which business initiatives maintain objective alignment and achieve sustained success, or experience Commercialization Drift — the natural and progressive loss of strategic alignment across products, markets, customer needs, messaging, and execution discipline over time despite substantial investment and effort.
