Knowing When Something Doesn’t Fit
Knowing When Something Doesn’t Fit
WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 3 OF 4
Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers including Ryman and Signet. This series isn’t a career retrospective. It’s about the skills, instincts, and lessons from that world that still shape how I work today, and why they matter for the business owners I support.
One of the things buyers get asked most often, in my experience, is why they said no.
Not to a bad product. Not to something obviously wrong for the range. But to something that, on the surface, looked perfectly reasonable. Good quality. Competitive price. A supplier with a solid track record. And still, the answer was no.
The reason is almost always the same: it was right, but it wasn’t right for us. For now. For this customer. For this part of the range. The product itself wasn’t the problem. The fit was.
Learning to make that distinction clearly, and to trust it even when the pressure was on to say yes, is one of the most valuable things a buying career teaches you.
Good product, wrong fit – the most expensive mistake in buying
In buying, a trusted supplier relationship changes the texture of everything. When a product isn’t performing, a trusted supplier tells you eIn retail buying, ‘good product, wrong fit’ is one of the most common and most costly errors a team can make. It happens when the selection process focuses on the product in isolation rather than in context. Is it well made? Yes. Is it priced correctly? Yes. Will our customers want it, in this store, at this moment? That’s the question that gets skipped.
The consequences show up a few months later. Slow sales. High stock levels. Markdown pressure. The product takes up space that a better-fitting product could have occupied, and the margin takes a hit that could have been avoided. Not because the product was poor, but because it was chosen for the wrong context.
The discipline of evaluating fit over features, of asking ‘is this right for us?’ rather than just ‘is this good?’, is something that has to be actively maintained. There is always pressure to fill a gap, to take the available option, to move the process forward. Standing still long enough to properly assess fit requires confidence in the judgment and a willingness to be patient when patience feels uncomfortable.
When I walk away from something I like
Some of the decisions I’m most comfortable with in my buying career are the ones where I said no to something I genuinely liked.
Not products that were obviously wrong. But products that were interesting, well-presented, commercially attractive, and still not the right fit for what we needed. Walking away from those required a kind of discipline that got easier with practice but never became entirely comfortable. There’s always a part of you that wonders whether you made the right call.
In retail, I walked away from products I liked all the time. Not because they were wrong, but because they were wrong for us, for now. That judgment is one of the most valuable things buying taught me.
What made it easier was having a clear picture of what ‘right fit’ actually looked like. Not a vague sense that something wasn’t quite right, but a specific understanding of the customer, the range gap, the context into which a product needed to fit. The clearer that picture was, the more confident the no became
Fit over features in business support
The same principle applies, with striking consistency, to the work I do now.
When a business owner is looking for a Virtual Expert, the temptation is to focus on the capability list. Can they do social media? Bookkeeping? Executive assistant work? Those are the features. They matter, but they don’t determine fit.
Fit is about something more specific: whether this person, with this particular style of working, will actually mesh well with this business owner, at this stage of their business. Whether their pace matches the pace of the business. Whether their communication style will work in a remote relationship with limited briefing time. Whether they’ll ask the right questions or wait to be told what to do.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
It’s worth naming this directly, because there are now platforms that use AI to match businesses with freelance support based on skills, availability, and budget. They’re efficient. They remove friction from the process. And they are, almost entirely, feature-matching rather than fit-matching.
They can tell you who can do the work. They can’t tell you who will work well with you. That judgment – the quieter, more contextual, more human assessment of fit – is something that still requires a conversation. And it’s one of the reasons the matching conversation matters as much as it does.
A Virtual Expert who is talented, experienced, and highly capable can still be the wrong fit for a particular business. And a wrong fit, even with the best intentions on both sides, tends to produce frustration rather than results. The hours get spent. The tasks get done. But the relationship never quite settles, and the business owner ends the arrangement without being entirely sure what went wrong.
What went wrong, almost always, is that the fit wasn’t properly assessed at the start.
Why the right fit protects everyone
Getting fit right at the outset isn’t just good for the client. It’s good for the Virtual Expert, and it’s good for the working relationship between them.
A well-matched arrangement allows a Virtual Expert to do their best work. They understand the business, they understand the owner’s priorities, and they can contribute with genuine confidence rather than constantly second-guessing whether they’re approaching things the right way. That confidence is good for the work and good for the relationship.
A poorly matched arrangement does the opposite. It creates friction that nobody wanted and that drains energy from both sides. No amount of goodwill on either side fully compensates for a fundamental mismatch in working style or expectation.
This is why the conversation I have with business owners before any matching happens matters so much. Not because I’m trying to complicate a simple process, but because taking the time to understand the context, the business, and what ‘right fit’ actually looks like in this specific situation is what makes everything that follows more likely to work.
A Final Thought
Buying taught me to trust the no as much as the yes.
Not every good thing is the right thing. Not every capable person is the right person for every role. Fit matters more than features, and knowing when something doesn’t fit, even when it looks good on paper, is a skill worth developing.
For business owners making decisions about support, the question worth asking isn’t just ‘can they do the work?’ It’s ‘will this actually work, for us, right now?’ Those are different questions. And the second one is the one that matters most.
If you’d like to think through what the right fit for your business might actually look like, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy. I’m always happy to explore it with you
I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.
Next in the series: The Weight of the Decision.
What Retail Taught Me About Business
What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.
- The Art of the Brief
- Relationships are the Real Margin
- Knowing when Something doesn’t fit
- The Weight of the Decision
