A founder calling a consultant after a rough quarter almost always believes the business needs a new direction. Nicholas Mukhtar, whose Fort Lauderdale firm Tera Strategies advises family offices, corporate executives and business owners, treats that belief as a hypothesis to test rather than a conclusion to act on. Global growth is projected at 3.1% for 2026, below the historical average of 3.6%, a backdrop that has made boards more willing to question whether their existing plan still fits.
About 73% of leaders report a shift toward heavier scenario planning at the board level, a trend that Mosaic’s 2026 analysis of corporate planning links to rising economic uncertainty. That same uncertainty, per Mukhtar’s diagnostic approach, pushes leaders toward changes that aren’t always warranted.
Question One: Can the Problem Fit in One Sentence?
Mukhtar’s first question asks whether a leader can describe the underlying problem precisely, not the quarter’s numbers or a vague sense that competitors are moving faster. A founder who can say sales cycles lengthened by a specific percentage over two quarters has a defined problem worth solving. One who can only say “things feel off” doesn’t yet have anything to work with.
One example Mukhtar cites: a founder who reports the sales cycle lengthened by 40% over two quarters while the enterprise win rate fell 18 points has a workable, specific problem. A founder who only senses that competitors are catching up does not.
Disciplined questioning, often 30 to 60 minutes of it, tends to surface a problem definition the leader already knew but hadn’t stated out loud, according to Mukhtar’s client work.
Questions Two and Three: Capability, Judgment and Data
The second question separates a capability gap, something the company genuinely lacks, from a judgment gap, where the tools already exist but aren’t being used well; founders often misdiagnose one as the other. The third asks whether the business has actually changed or whether only the leader’s read of it has shifted, a distinction Mukhtar checks against trailing metrics rather than instinct.
Roughly one in three “we need a new direction” conversations, in Mukhtar’s experience, turn out to be a leader reacting to a feeling that hasn’t shown up in the data yet. That ratio holds up, by his account, across both ordinary business cycles and acute crisis moments, which is part of why he applies the same three questions regardless of how urgent a founder’s initial call sounds.
