My VP had it on the kill list. IBM software, $500K a year, sitting unused. The logic was clean - nobody's using it, cut it, move on.

I took one more look before we pulled the trigger.

What I found mapped directly onto a business need we were building toward, the "We've Got It" program. That $500K line item became a multi-million dollar revenue maker. Same asset. Same cost. Two people looking at the same thing.

Two completely different calls.

The difference was one more look. That's where Kill Park Blossom came from, not a methodology someone handed me, but the moment I almost signed off on destroying something I hadn't understood yet.

Three categories. Kill: stop it, pull the resources, move on. Park: defer deliberately, because now isn't the moment and you've made that call consciously. Blossom: activate it now.

The Blossom list isn't called the "invest" list. Not "prioritize." Blossom. The word is intentional. It asks you to picture something dormant becoming something alive. You can't know what's dormant until you look.

Before you can sort anything correctly, you have to do the step most people skip: discovery. Not a kickoff meeting or a systems audit. Finding the levers, the handful of things that actually drive the business, not the things that are supposed to.

At Finish Line, I found two. Inventory turns, where a small shift had massive top-line impact. And DC touches, where every trip through the distribution center before product reached a store cost real money nobody had calculated.

I didn't find those levers by being smart. I found them by finding the Cranks, the people buried in operations who already knew. Without them, I'm sorting by gut. That's opinions with a whiteboard, not a methodology.

The kill was harder years later, on a different platform. The team had built client-facing functionality for walking people through the software during implementation. They'd spent real time on it. They were attached to it.

Nobody used it. Cumbersome, unlike anything else in the market, and not in a good way. The market had moved on. The feature hadn't.

I put a bullet in it. It upset a lot of people.

Kill takes courage. The people attached to the thing will always have reasons to keep it. Killing it feels like saying none of that counts. That's not what it means, but it's how it lands. Hold the line when the room pushes back, and it will.

Park is the category that sounds straightforward and isn't.

When something works and makes money, the right call is usually to leave it alone. That's real. But Park is also where value gets buried under low expectations.

At Finish Line, the in-house allocation system was the example. Nobody in IT wanted to touch it: old, had history, it works, don't break it.

I took a look. The buyers and planners lived in that tool, not because it was good, but because they'd bent themselves around it so thoroughly it had become how they thought about their jobs. A full rewrite, matched to how allocators worked, plus a prepack calculator they'd never had.

Year one: over a million dollars added to the bottom line.

That wasn't a Park. That was a Blossom wearing Park's clothes, the most dangerous category in the framework, because the Park label is what kills it before anyone looks.

The rule I carry now: Park means you looked and decided to wait. Not "I don't want to deal with this." One is strategy. The other is avoidance dressed up as strategy, invisible until you're explaining why a million dollars sat on the table for three years.

The framework is simple. Kill the dead weight, defer what can wait, activate what's hiding in plain sight.

Calling it right is not simple.

The first 90 days, everyone wants you to move. Stakeholders want signals, boards want momentum, and the pressure to sort fast, and visibly, is real.

That pressure is exactly why you need a sequence, not a gut check.

One: find your cranks. The people constrained by the systems they use, doing the job in spite of the tools, not because of them.

Two: identify the levers. The two or three numbers that, if they shifted, would change the year.

Three: ferret out the assets. Everything already sitting on the books, budget, or roadmap, whether or not anyone's paying attention to it. You can't sort what you haven't inventoried.

Four: Kill anything that doesn't move a lever. If it isn't connected to one of the two or three things that actually drive the business, it doesn't earn a debate. It goes.

What's left gets sorted by one test: a Crank, a lever, and an asset, all pointing at the same thing. All three aligned, that's a Blossom. Missing one of the three, that's a Park, and you name which piece is missing so you know what you're waiting on.

That's the whole call. Not gut. Alignment.

Run that sequence and the 90 days stop being a scramble. Skip it, and Kill Park Blossom isn't a methodology. It's a coin flip with a framework name on it.