I split our company in two. It was a mistake.

The wrong way for us to add services to the mix.

A few months ago, I split Accoil in two. Accoil, the product — self-serve, product-led. Accoil Advisors, the consulting arm — sales-led, with its own site and its own pricing.

To me, the logic felt clean: I’ve spent years in consulting, and you can’t sell advisory work off a product page. It needs its own identity, or so I thought. Separating the two would de-conflict the buying decision: are you buying a product, or buying help? Two clear doors. Pick the one that fits.

I made the call to split the company in two. Now I realize that was a mistake.

I thought two brands would make us simpler to sell. It did the opposite.

Accoil the product kept pulling new signups. Customers were still using the product — not booking consulting. That demand forced us to split our time between what were, in essence, two different businesses.

Leading with advisory boxed us in. My bet was that we’d go to market as advisory and fall back to the product if a prospect wasn’t ready for consulting work. I expected two bites at the same apple: even a “no” on consulting would leave the product on the table. Instead, a “no” on consulting became a “no” on Accoil entirely. I didn’t get the second bite. I got the door closed.

Having two websites confused people. Internally, it made sense to me, but from the outside, prospects found both and asked, “Which one am I talking to, and why?”

There’s a Jeff Bezos idea I keep coming back to: one-way doors and two-way doors. Some decisions you can’t walk back. This one we could, so we did.

I’ve been reflecting on why this happened, why I made the decision I did. I think there’s a real lesson underneath all of this.

My mind kept drifting to how we show up, how we work, what shape we take, and what we need to get out of things. It’s all about us. I took my eye off the only thing that matters: the outcome the customer is chasing, and the value they’re getting from working with us.

You’ve probably heard the old adage: “Nobody buys a drill, they buy the hole in the wall.” But they’re not really buying the hole, either. They’re buying the screw to hang a picture — and what they’re really buying is a picture on the wall that makes them feel good about their wedding, their kids, something that happened in their life.

Or the Clayton Christensen study of people buying milkshakes at McDonald’s. People were buying them for breakfast, and everyone scratched their heads wondering why. It turned out they wanted something to last the drive from home to work — something to keep them a little full and give them something to do.

Nobody hires a product just to hire a product, or a consultant just to hire a consultant. They’re hiring for an outcome. The product, the advisory, and the onboarding are all just vehicles — and I started mistaking the vehicle for the value.

So we’re back to one brand: Accoil.com.

The implementation work and the consulting work don’t disappear, and they don’t sit under the product. They sit alongside it. Paid if you need it — because customers keep asking the same three questions:

• Help me see where my data actually is.

• If it’s broken, how can I fix it?

• Once I fix it, what can I do with it?

It turns out it’s not a separate business. It’s the same job.

One brand, one business, makes the question simple: do you have this problem, and can we help you solve it? Everything else comes second.

Having two brands made things feel busy. One brand makes us feel useful.

Useful and valuable is where we need to be to build a business. It’s easy to lose sight of that — easy to get stuck in the minutiae.

This renewed focus on the customer, their problems, and the solutions that fit them feels good — and simpler. It’s also made customer conversations much easier — it’s all about them again.

And that’s where the focus needs to stay.

Go get ‘em,

Peter