3.2.1 - Atomic Scaling: Strategy
Hey,
Happy 3-2-1 Thursday!
Today, let's dive into Strategy.
Most founders confuse strategy with a slide deck. In a small team, strategy is much simpler and much harder: it is the list of things you refuse to spend people on. Here are 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question to consider this week.
3 Ideas
I.
Plan ahead: Don’t work for the present; work for the future. Every hour spent on today's fire is an hour the future never gets. Block one morning a week where the team only works on what will matter in ninety days: the next product, the next channel, the next hire you will not need if you build the right tool instead. If your calendar has no room for the future, you don't have a strategy, you have a queue.
II.
Automate: Prioritise effort in automating self-repeating processes and focus more on predicting the next move. The rule I use is simple: the second time a task appears, write it down; the third time, automate it. A ten-person team that automates its reporting, onboarding and follow-ups behaves like a fifty-person team, without the fifty-person payroll. That freed capacity is what you spend on prediction, which is where the real leverage lives.
III.
Improve: If you’re not improving, you’re not growing. Track your performance and be green all the time; add an improvement brick every week and constantly enhance your workflow. One metric per person, reviewed every Monday, with one small change shipped by Friday. Fifty-two bricks a year is a wall nobody in your market can climb.
2 Quotes
I.
“Strategy is simply resource allocation.”
— Jack Welch
II.
“Strategy is about shaping the future.”
― Max McKeown, The Strategy Book.
1 Question
Do you already have a strategy for this month's improvements? If not, pick the one metric that would change your business if it moved ten percent, track it daily, and build the workflow that moves it. That is the whole strategy. Everything else is decoration.