LVMH sold Marc Jacobs last week. The headline number was around $850 million dollars. The strategic number was thirty years.

That’s how long the partnership ran. Marc Jacobs joined Louis Vuitton in 1997 and helped turn a luggage house into a cultural machine. The Stephen Sprouse graffiti bags, the Murakami monogram, runway-as-theatre. Teaching luxury how to speak pop culture. And by every measure that matters in fashion history, it succeeded.

Something changed in the last decade. The brand that built the playbook fell into the gap the playbook itself created. Heritage houses moved upmarket. Fast fashion attacked from below. The designer middle, once a powerful commercial zone, became a precarious place to operate. The signal was visible for years. LVMH tried a sale in 2025 and it failed. The 2026 deal landed quietly, framed as portfolio streamlining.

Why did it take so long?

Businesses tell themselves stories about persistence. That holding on is loyalty. The founder, the partner, the product, the line, the office, the relationship, whatever the asset, earned its place once, and that makes letting go a kind of betrayal. We don’t examine it, because it sounds like virtue. We built this together, we owe it to ourselves to keep going.

Holding past the right moment is as bad as never getting started. The business looks fine from the outside but the founder knows, somewhere under the surface, that the energy required to maintain the asset is no longer producing returns that justify it. The cost isn’t a line item, but what strategic moves aren’t made because capital is tied up elsewhere?

Commentary on the Marc Jacobs sale treats it as a loss. LVMH gave up. The luxury sector is weakening. The designer middle is dead. I think there is a more honest reading. LVMH did what many founders won’t, at a scale that should embarrass smaller businesses for failing to do it sooner. They named an asset that had stopped working for the business, priced it, and then redirected the capital and the attention. That’s a story of a strategic move.

For businesses, it can feel like a loss before it feels like clarity. There is no celebratory moment when a business lets something go. There is no announcement that says: we held this past the point of value, and we have decided to stop. The market reads the sale as weakness. And so most founders don’t make the call. They hold. They iterate. They invest a little more, hoping the next quarter will reverse the curve. LVMH had years of evidence that Marc Jacobs no longer fit the portfolio strategy. They acted slowly, but they acted.

The smaller version of this decision sits on most founders’ desks right now. The product line that’s not pulling its weight. The service offering that no longer matches the market. The client relationship that costs more than it returns. The role inside the business the founder keeps because letting it go feels like losing history. Each of these is an asset held past the moment of utility, and each of them costs more than the founder is willing to calculate.

It’s not about whether you can continue, most founders can. But what is continuing preventing? What new bet you would place if the old one weren’t holding you back? What energy would return to the business if it weren’t being spent on something you already know, somewhere underneath it all, is no longer serving the business?

Persistence is the easier story to tell. Letting go is the harder move to make. It’s also, more often than most founders are willing to admit, the strategic one.

Three Digital Consulting is a strategic advisory practice for founders and managing partners of established B2B services firms. The TDC Intelligence Note is a monthly horizon scan, the signals for founders and leadership teams on what's shifting, and what to act on.

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Not the headlines, but what it really means for your business.

The engineers who trained their replacements

In April, Microsoft extended its first voluntary retirement programme in 51 years to roughly 9,000 longtime employees. Within 24 hours, Meta announced the elimination of 8,000 positions. That’s 10% of its global workforce, alongside 6,000 open roles left unfilled. The stated reason from both companies, within 24 hours of each other: run more efficiently, offset AI investment.

More than 73,000 tech jobs have gone in the first four months of 2026 alone. Nearly half explicitly attributed by employers to AI and automation.

Inside Meta, the employees whose jobs were eliminated spent the previous months having their keystrokes, mouse movements, and daily tasks captured. To train the AI agents that now do their work. They weren’t underperformers. They were the people who built the product.

The signal was visible for years. Most kept doing what they were doing because the pay was good and the pressure had not yet arrived. By the time it did, the retirement package or the abrupt notification was all that was left. Not their choice. Just their outcome.

This is not a technology story. It is a business model story.

The engineers at Meta weren’t replaced because they were bad at their jobs. They were replaced because their value was priced as time. What they could produce in a day, a sprint, a quarter. When something else could produce the same thing cheaper, the model failed.

If you are a founder or leader, you might think, so what? I’m not a software engineer. But if the value of your business is currently priced as what you can do in a day - as in hours, day rates, or time delivered - you are facing the same problem. Different industry, different timeline, same logic.

The mirror

I talk to founders regularly. Law firms, IFA practices, recruitment, marketing, consultancies, advisory businesses and SaaS leadership teams.

The conversations I’m having right now sound like this: Rates are lower than they were. Clients are more price sensitive. Sales cycles take longer to close. The market for professional time is moving. Not dramatically, not in a way that feels like a crisis yet, but it is noticeable.

Most of the response I hear is the same: Yes things are down, but we’re managing. The assumption is that things will recover. Keep the head down, take on clients or work that is available, and wait for the market to turn.

That is not a strategy. It is drift with good intentions. Waiting for improvement IS a decision. If the market recovers, nothing had to change. And if it doesn’t, the pressure eventually forces you to respond. But by then, the options are narrower and the timing is no longer yours.

The real question is not: how should you manage rates trending downward?

It is why is this business structured so that its value is measured in units of time, in a market where real data is showing the price of time is going down?

That is a different question.

It’s not just about getting more customers

The instinct when this pattern gets named is to jump to a solution. Get more customers. Raise prices. Productise a service. Servicise a product. Build a membership. Those are all legitimate directions and for some businesses, they’re exactly right.

But the model question is upstream of any of those answers. Before this, there’s a more fundamental question: what is the actual value my business delivers, and is it captured in how my business is structured and priced?

You’ve already seen this pattern in everyday life. ChatGPT costs more than it did a year ago. Prime Video now charges extra for content that used to be included. The model felt settled: pay once, get access. Until it wasn’t. Now price is anchored to what you actually consume. Founders and leaders are subject to the same logic. The players are different, but the direction is the same.

Time for money is just one model, but it’s the default. Many businesses offer it without ever consciously choosing it. It’s just how business works, so it’s how your business got built. What matters isn't whether retainers are better than day rates. The question is: does the model need to change to protect current and future revenue?

The window

Those who are examining this question seriously are usually doing it from a position of relative strength. Their business is working. The revenue is there. The pressure is real, but not yet acute. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the condition in which genuine examination is possible.

The ones navigating the same pressures from a position of fewer options tend to have arrived at the conversation later. Like the Meta example, pressure and external levers have already started making decisions for them. The signal was visible earlier, but they did not respond.

The window to ask the model question is when the business is still running well enough that the answer doesn’t have to be an emergency response.

What TDC does

Three Digital Consulting works with established B2B founders and leadership teams at inflection points that matter. Stalled growth, compressed margins, exit approaching, model creaking under its own success.

Founded by Alicia Crowther, TDC finds the real constraint underneath the visible problem and helps founders move while the signal is still a signal, not pressure that’s already making the decisions for them.

Most advisors arrive when the pain is undeniable. We work best when the window to decide is still wide. Strategic Advisory Retainer — from £3,000/month. Engagements by conversation first.

Final thoughts

What are you seeing in your business right now that you haven't done anything about yet?

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