Making Tough Choices: Cutting Through Complexity
- Carol Chong
- Feb 5
- 2 min read
Every leader wants to scale.
The best ones know scaling starts by cutting through complexity.
In this clip, TJ Kanaris, former President of Select Food Products, talks about the hardest part of strategy: making tough choices.
When his leadership team went through the T&C strategy process, they faced difficult questions:
Aspirations: How big do we want to be?
Focus Areas: Which category segments to serve? Which channels and products to prioritize? Which packaging formats to invest in?
Supply Chain & Operations: Where to invest, and how to use existing capacity smarter?
Systems & Processes: What to modernize to better enable growth?
Talent: What capabilities and structure to deliver on ambitions?
Every answer required a trade-off. And no choice stood alone. A decision about which channels to serve affected which products to prioritize, and how operations would need to adapt.
Every decision meant saying NO to something that once felt important. Per TJ:
“When you don’t make the choices, you push that complexity down into your business. And whether it’s intentional or not, that complexity gets in the way of performance.”
By defining fewer, sharper priorities, his team could finally align resources around what mattered most.
And that’s when performance accelerated.
“Inherent in those choices, you’re saying no to way more things than you’re saying yes to. But that’s by design. It allows you to organize your finite resources against the critical few things that that you’re saying yes to.”
The Takeaway
Complexity is the cost of avoiding hard choices.
Clarity is the reward for making them.
Which part of your business has become more complex than it needs to be?
This story is part of our 5-part series in our interview with TJ Kanaris, President of Select Food Products, a Thompson & Chong client whose team doubled revenue and quadrupled profit after going through the T&C strategy process.
If you'd like to watch the whole series, here are the video links:
1️⃣ Part 1: No Strategy, No Destination
Strategy began with a shared focus: aligning on what business they were really in, where to play, how to win, and what their financial ambition should look like.
2️⃣ Part 2: Why Strategy Doesn’t Stick
Strategy doesn't stick when it's handed down. Real commitment comes from participation, with healthy discussion and debate.
3️⃣ PART 3: Cutting Through Complexity
Complexity is the cost of avoiding hard choices. The Select team made tough calls about segments products, supply chain, and talent, saying NO to far more than they said yes to.
4️⃣ Part 4: Operationalizing Strategy: From Direction to Execution
Strategy turned to action through workstreams. Per TJ: “It was as critical as the strategy work itself, a way to have oversight, ensure alignment, and move faster.”
5️⃣ Part 5: The Payoff: 2X Revenue, 4X Profit
A business built to scale, growing faster, more profitably, and with greater clarity than ever before.
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