OUR BUSINESS PHILOSOPHY
AT THE CORE
Our approach follows these 5 Principles
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Fundamentally, business owners are responsible for 3 things: People, Profit and Strategy.
Though the journey of business demands we become “expert generalists” many times over, business success hinges on our ability to embrace these three fundamentals as our most important focus.
The brutal truth is, we can hire or engage individuals that are smarter, better, or more experienced than us in almost every element of our business. However, most business owners fail to see this (or do anything about it) because they are trapped in the day-to-day.
Building a better business starts with a choice. To take 100% ownership over your People, your Profit, and your Strategy. Do this, and everything changes…fast!
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Business is hard. It is a constantly changing landscape of never-ending problems. And our brains are not designed to handle this level of complexity alone.
Yet, many business owners don’t have a single person in their life capable of helping them with (or even understanding) their challenges.
The Socratic Method of Business solves this problem. Dialogue, through targeted questions from like minded people, makes problems simpler, solutions obvious, and action easier.
It is a scientifically established fact that people solve problems far more effectively together than alone.
Community, mentorship, and leveraging the skills, knowledge and experience of others is essential the further you go in business. It is a need to have, not a nice to have.
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Most business owners struggle not because they are bad at business, but because the window of them going from problem, to solution, to action is simply too long.
If it takes you 4-6 weeks for any given challenge you are facing to move through these steps, there are literally only so many problems you can solve in a given year.
When you start leveraging others for strategic support and improve the way you make decisions (let’s say you cut the timeframe from 6 weeks to 2 weeks using better tools) you can literally get 3 years of progress into 1 year. Not because you are doing anything magical, but because you are making better decisions, faster.
Deliberate decision-making is the closest thing to a super power there is in business.
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“Finite Games” you play for the purpose of winning. “Infinite Games” you play for the purpose of playing. Spoiler alert! Business is an Infinite Game.
One of the most common mistakes I have seen lead good business owners to burnout and despair, is that they think they can “win” the game of business. If they can just find that magic pill, they can solve their problem and never look back.
They tell themselves “once ABC happens, then I won’t need to worry about XYZ”. Or “once we get to (insert arbitrary milestone here), then we will be financially secure”. It never happens.
There is no shortage of gurus and experts telling business owners what they should do, how they should do it, or what they should be striving for. But, listening to your own voice, playing your game your way and pursuing your version of success, changes the game entirely.
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Most people never question why they think the way they think. One of the biggest frustrations any business owner will experience is that their team doesn't think the way they do, or to the same level.
Success in business isn’t just about what you do, it's also about what you don’t do.
When you can lead your team to stop creating preventable problems, your business will thrive on this alone. The role of a leader is to create more leaders, and leadership is leverage.
Though the starting point is to get the business owner making better decisions and taking action faster, the real magic happens when this is injected into the team. People will always be the greatest strength or weakness to your business.
Our Primary Decision Making Frameworks
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Most things in business don’t matter. They look important, they feel important, but at the end of the day, they don’t move the needle. Most business owners spend most of their time on things that are not the Primary Constraint to their current situation and, as a result, they feel trapped, exhausted, and like success is always out of reach.
Theory of Constraints states that your business is a system. Like any system you have inputs and outputs. Inputs being labor, IP, materials etc. Outputs being products/services to your customer, and profit to your business.
By virtue of being in business, there will always be more problems that you could solve, than resources you have to solve them.
This means, every business owner must choose which problems/opportunities to act on, and which they ignore. And the “ignore” list will always be greater than the “act on” list.
Most business owners do not understand this concept.
As a result, they allocate almost all their resources (time, attention, people, money) to solving problems that are not the Primary Constraint, and they stay stuck. The kicker? Every dollar, and every minute, that is spent downstream of solving the wrong problem is an irrecoverable waste of resources.
The single greatest advantage any business has in its respective market, is the ability to correctly identify, solve, and act on the Primary Constraint faster and more consistently than its competitors.
The key to identifying the Primary Constraint is listening to your gut, but deciding based on the data. The business will tell you what the constraint is, if you listen to it.
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Most business owners stay trapped, and progress feels painfully slow if not impossible to achieve, because they believe they need to be the one to implement the solutions to their problems.
Leadership is leverage, and if you have chosen to be in business and build something of scale, you have chosen the path that demands you let go of being the doer and your own “Who”, and instead, you must embrace a process of constantly finding “Who’s” to get you from Problem to Solution and Action as fast and effectively as possible.
The concept is simple enough. Yet many business owners simply cannot integrate Who Not How into their way of doing business.
Why? Because most business owners are addicted to solving problems.
When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Countless times each day business owners do tasks that ‘need to get done’ even though they know they ‘shouldn’t be doing them’.
The mental and emotional discipline it takes to see a task, know that you can do a better job in less time with less effort than it will take a team member, and either force yourself to delegate it to a ‘Who’ or refuse to act on it, is huge.
If your goal is to run a standard small business with substantial key person risk, average profits and minimal asset value, Who Not How is irrelevant. But! If your goal is to build wealth through business, get your business under management, or prime your business to do an acquisition or strategic exit, Who Not How is essential.
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First, a brief definition:
Micro is tools, hacks and tactics. Immediately actionable information that addresses highly specific problems, yet is typically circumstantial, and only effective some of the time, in some situations.
Macro is strategy, bigger picture thinking. A more medium/long term plan to create value somewhere in your business. An integrated set of choices that will set you up to win, with a broader theory behind it.
Meta is the fundamental operating system of how you play the game of business. It is the identity, beliefs, values, and thought processes of the business owner themselves.
My experience has been that a lot of coaching, consulting, and business support works at the Micro level. It is just telling business owners things to do, with little to no context of their situation, outcome, or actual problem.
Like throwing spaghetti at a wall, sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't.
When seeking help many business owners actually go to the Micro level first because it feels tangible and therefore valuable. The Micro is ‘sexy’, but rarely does it create any lasting results.
Making business decisions from the Meta level seems intangible and slow at first. But it is actually a radically faster and easier approach to building a successful business, because once you set your Meta, most other decisions make themselves for you.
A Meta first approach makes aligning people to a Macro strategy 10 times easier, and the Micro tactics either take care of themselves, or become so obvious that finding a “Who” and implementing the “How” becomes remarkably simple.
Micro < Macro < Meta is the secret “fast forward’ button in Business.