Category: Fundamentals

I know a guy who has returned to school to get certified in medical billing. He used to be a transcriptionist and software ate his job. I know another guy who dropped out to wander around the country in a van. He was an adult caregiver and is trying to support his van-life as a virtual assistant. More recently, I met another guy who runs a content marketing agency that’s been battered by ChatGPT, Claude, and the other AI’s.

What do these three guys all have in common?

They’re all trying to work at the bottom of the value spectrum, the area where value has the characteristics of a commodity or is one.

Last week, in a weekly meeting, my team discussed how we could improve projects with clients to avoid what we call “zombie” projects where the client’s behavior kills project momentum.

We looked at a specific project that is in motion with a client who has frequently disengaged in the past. My team listed off all the trouble behavior that they’re sure that the client will do that will result in the project being difficult to work on and hamper momentum in the coming weeks:

– Fail to deliver assets
– Continually change the scope
– Stop communicating
– And etc.

They held up their collective Zoom hands in frustration, as if to say, “We’re powerless in this situation.”

Adding things is tough.

If you look at your business, adding customers, employees, products, marketing, and systems all require a significant series of investments. And once you’ve added the thing, the return is inconsistent. Even if you’re scrupulous in your execution, you rarely get home-runs. Mostly, you get a mixture of base-hits and strikeouts. It often takes months and years to see your new addition bear fruit.

Subtracting things, on the other hand, is much easier. It’s typically quick, simple, and has an immediate and positive effects. You cut a bad-fit employee and profit jumps up,  you fire a bad-fit customer and life gets easier, you kill an unproductive service and suddenly the business is more valuable.

The offer is the atom of business. When you disassemble the complex systems of enterprise into their most fundamental components, you end up with offers.

I’ll give you this in exchange for that.

Value propositions. Offers of employment. Strategic partnerships.

Offers aren’t perfect. They exist on a spectrum of acceptability from, “Hell yes!” to, “Uhhh… I guess so.”

Offers exist in an environment that is in flux. An amazing offer today might be an untenable one tomorrow.

When I was in my early twenties, my roommates and I entertained ourselves by playing an old Nintendo. We stumbled across a game titled, “Caveman Olympics,” which had an event where you and a competitor would race to start a fire. Two cavemen set next to each other on the screen and the players’ cavemen would blow on their piles of kindling as fast as the players hit the “A” button. In order to start your fire first, you had to build up a rapid tempo of hitting the button and maintain it.

Your business has a tempo too. There are a series of tasks that take place for you to produce value. E.g. for a service business, they would start with marketing tasks, continue to sales, and then dive into operations before delivering an outcome to a customer. Like in Caveman Olympics, a certain tempo is needed to develop the momentum to scale up to the next level and start the fire.

I do a lot. If you ask any of my friends or wife about how I spend my time, they’ll say that I’m always busy. You might be like this. It’s common to find entrepreneurs that are driven.

One of the tricky aspects of this aggressive orientation is that when I don’t meet a goal, it’s not because I was sitting on the couch eating potato chips, it’s because a competing goal overshadowed it as a priority.

This is a key challenge in a tiny, sub-25 person business like mine. As the owner-operator, I take on different roles in the business: sales, account management, marketing, financial management, team management, and etc. Each of those roles asks something of my time, energy, and attention.

I spent the last week working from the family farm in Southern Idaho. As a teenager, one of my jobs was to change hand lines. Hand lines are sprinkler systems for fields that have to be moved by hand, pipe section by pipe section. It’s tedious and labor intensive work.

In the past twenty years, my dad has replaced all of the hand lines with automated pivots. Pivots are computer operated pipes on wheels that pivot in circles around a connection to a source of water.

For the first half of the upgrades to pivots, my dad used a local supplier operated by a guy named Jack. For the other half, he used someone else over an hour away. Why?

At some point in the years long upgrades of all his fields, my dad noticed that Jack started to price gouge his customers. Now he only uses Jack’s business when he absolutely has to.

During my entrepreneurial career, MBA’s have been unpopular with most of the other small business owner-operators I know.

Seth Godin kicked things off with a rant on the problems of business schools back in 2007 and launched his own altMBA a few years later. Josh Kauffman picked the idea up and wrote a book, The Personal MBA (which I rather like).

Tim Ferris penned an essay about using the cost of business school to design his own version of an MBA in, Tools for Titans ($120k focused on angel investing.)

“The MBA’s value is only in the network you develop or the clout of the school,” is a common refrain.

Because of this perspective, I never thought much of business school. “Learning by doing” was where I believed real value to be.

Though I still believe in the value of experiential learning, as time has passed I’ve come to question this common judgment of formal education as frivolous.

Six years ago, I met an entrepreneur in Philadelphia who was running a mid-sized service oriented business. Over dinner, he shared that at one point he was homeless and sleeping on a park bench. He was still “in business,” he was just running his operation from the library.

One of the recommendations he gave me was to write out my vision for the business and my life. He told me that he did it and nearly every fantastic goal he projected, he achieved. His experience with creating a vision isn’t unique; I’ve linked to a couple of other examples at the bottom of this article.

I’m working on a book on growth strategy for service businesses and, as part of that, I’ve been thinking and writing about visions, both for you (primary) and for your business (derivative.)

Good visions create clear pictures of the future that show what, how, and why your world will be different. But what makes them challenging is that we don’t know what we want.

More accurately, we only know some of what we want and often what we desire doesn’t actually serve us.

For example, I get fired up when I watch mixed martial arts. When I was fresh out of the military I thought, “This stuff is amazing, I should do this.” So I did. Within a little over a year I had my first amateur fight. After that fight, I planned on taking another fight at the next local event in three months. But three months turned to six months because I wasn’t training as hard as I needed to. Six turned to nine months as my training tempo dropped further. Eventually, I realized I didn’t actually like the lifestyle of being a fighter.

Watching fights was exciting. Training three hours a day, six days a week was a grind.

Similarly, with visions, we often make three mistakes. We choose goals: