Category: Growth Series

How well do you understand your challenges?

I just spent three days surfing coffee shops in small towns in the Columbia gorge. I turned off Slack and email. I was alone with my thoughts as I went from location to location. View to view. One cup of coffee to another.

It was somewhere around the 8th or 9th personal retreat that I’ve done in the past ten years.

This time, I wanted to focus solely on business strategy.

It was an odd experience. I kept circling in a loop around my values, the business vision, pulling out my calculator app, running numbers, checking our analytics, checking search stats.

I’m having a rough day. An early morning tornado transported my house to Oz and I’ve been fending off flying monkeys.

I’m waaaay off course from what I intended.

You know what I’m talking about.

Here’s the advice I give busy people I work with:

Do what you can, where you are.

Today, I’m swallowing my own medicine. I committed to writing a blog post when I’m working. This is what I can do today. See you tomorrow.

Featured image is “The Wicked Witch of the West melts,” from the William Wallace Denslow. Illustration in the first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Used under Public Domain

Have you ever sat on a mattress and had something roll to you? Your body creates a gravity well on the mattress and pulls objects to you.

A similar effect occurs when we engage our attention onto a focused point. If it’s a problem, solutions begin to appear. If it’s a question, answers begin to bubble up. I call this, “putting your thumb down.” As in pushing your thumb into the mattress.

What is the limit of your current capacity or capability?

It’s a challenging question. If I asked you, “What are the obstacles limiting your business’s growth?” You would know immediately.

But where the line is that demarks what is possible for the business today is harder to identify. Standing on that line, you can’t help but think about the frontier beyond it.

“What would it take to…”

• Increase customers beyond x
• Grow profit higher than y
• Boost throughput above z

In the shadows beyond that limit is a future version of your business.

The question is valuable because it provides hints on how you might grow. It prompts you to try and fill in the blank about what might increase customers beyond x.

Today, the limit is the highest you can reach. Tomorrow, it will be the ground that you stood upon.

Featured image is of dragons beyond the edge of the world on the Psalter world map, a 14th century metaphorical map of Christianity. Used under public domain.

I spent the first month of 2022 working from a remote fishing village in the middle of the Baja peninsula. A couple sand covered streets over from our beach house was a baseball diamond for the high school kids. It was backed by a concrete wall with a slogan painted on it, “hard work equals success.”

It was a belief that I was familiar with as a high school student. That effort oriented thinking served me well when I was in the Marines and as an aspiring martial artist.

But it’s not true.

Growing up on my parents’ farm, we irrigated using handlines: sections of hollow metal pipe topped with a sprinkler. These sections were connected into lines with around 30 pipes that stretched from one end of the field to the other. Every morning and evening, they had to be moved fifty feet over to the next position to ensure the whole field got water.

A couple of years ago, I was in a mastermind with another entrepreneur who specialized in lead gen and sales. He had just launched a website for selling his expertise as a consultant. The website was sharp, but what most impressed me was his inquiry flow. It seamlessly transitioned from a video pitch to a slide in form with conditional logic for the fields.

More recently, I had a conversation with a consultant around the sophistication of different types of industries. He held enterprise software and insurance as two industries that were excellent at selling. As an example, he talked about the intricate marketing automation that powered follow-ups and segmented customers.

Sophistication is a kind of magic. All the wonderful technological advances that we use day-to-day are inscrutable. It’s natural to infer that if something is convoluted that it must also be powerful.

As it relates to growth, it’s easy to think that you can buy or build your way to growth by tacking on sophistication.

You look outside your business for opportunities and see complex solutions and reason that they must be a magical difference.

The antidote to this fallacy is Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

John Gall

Effective video pitches and conditional forms started as sales conversations. Effective marketing automation started as a manual system derived from managing sales conversations.

Though we want to buy or build around challenges without surmounting them our real opportunity is to face our simple, and often hard, problems.

What is working in your business? This is your opportunity to optimize to a higher functioning, perhaps even sophisticated, level.

Where are the problems in your business? This is your ground for innovation.

Featured image is “The Self Operating Napkin” by Rube Goldberg. Originally published in Collier’s, September 26 1931. Used under Public Domain.