Author: johnhooley

Nintendo started as a playing card company in 1889. In the 114 years since, they’ve sold: table-top games, electronic games, virtual shooting systems, virtual reality games, handheld games, platform games, home entertainment systems, the Wii, and theme parks.

In their time in business, there has been an incredible amount of change; change that they survived while hundreds of thousands of other businesses shuttered their doors.

Every business is affected by change. Some ride positive lift from market trends and technological innovation. Others descend on the backside of change, struggling to survive and eventually failing.

That change is a constant is why you should plan for it.

Plans force you to anticipate. To cast your eyes ahead and see the branches in the river, so that you end up on a route that will take you where you want to go.

When you don’t plan, you’re rolling the dice to see what fortune has determined for you instead.

You’ll still see change, but you’ll be reacting to it as it occurs. You’ll be rowing up-river fighting to get back to that fork you missed while drinking a beer and celebrating your success.

Featured image is Original Nintendo headquarters (1889–1930) and workshop in Shimogyō-ku, Kyoto, c. 1889. Used under public domain.

Are you able to make decisions stick? You make a choice today and then your behavior is consistent with it across months and years?

People who know me view me as highly disciplined, but I struggle with this as much as anyone.

As a simple example, last year I started managing my Rotary club’s service events. One of the first things I did was to create a SOP to capture the ideal method schedule events. Recently, I realized I haven’t followed that SOP for the last three events. It wasn’t an intentional lapse- I’ve just been busy and didn’t notice that I had drifted off course.

When a decision is recent, it’s not that hard to stay on top of it, but as time passes it’s easy to lose track of it.

As it relates to growth, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about consistency as the core operational obstacle that can limit growth (https://knighterrant.co/the-bouncers/). One manifestation of this is a lack of systematic execution in creating value. Like with my Rotary example, there are two main phases to implementing systems improvements to a business:

• Creating the system
• Consistently executing the system

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to just commit to executing a system. “We’re doing it this way from now on,” doesn’t work. Eventually, entropy will prevail and pick apart what you planned.

I encountered a forum post yesterday where people were discussing a coaching program that purported to double your revenue in a year (Austin Netzley, https://2x.co). One of the forum participants shared their experience and said that they did double their revenue, but quit the program after a year and a half because they couldn’t grow beyond that. Their assessment was that it worked great when the bottleneck was in their operations, but once they fixed that, they needed more customers and they plateaued.

I’ve written several posts on identifying the blockers of growth in your business. But for most businesses, it’s usually one of these two high-level limiting factors:

• Revenue
• Throughput

Revenue sounds like:

• “We need more customers”
• “We need better marketing / visibility / funnel”
• “Our pricing is off”

Throughput sounds like:

• “We’re working crazy hours”
• “We’re backlogged”
• “We’re constantly putting out fires”
• “We keep losing employees”

Revenue and throughput are high level descriptions because there are a myriad of ways that they can manifest as blockers. For example, if you have a weak culture, you might have systems that should work, but throughput is low because employees abuse those systems.

“Were we right about last week?” I asked my project manager.

She laughed, “Not really.”

Yesterday, we reviewed our new forecasting system as part of our standing management meeting. The goal is to be able to predict how our operations are going to look over a month out. I.e. Who will work on what and when for the next month.

Similarly, on the growth plan I’ve been developing, there are financial forecasts for a variety of scenarios.

No forecast I’ve ever developed has been accurate. While I’m sure I could be better at planning and analysis, the reason they and the ops forecast haven’t proved true is because no one can predict the future.