The Atomic Scaling action plan

Think with both sides of your brain.

How might you use storytelling and data the next time you’re enrolling someone in a task or project?

Stay as small as possible.

Instead of hiring more people, how might you invest in the people and the culture you have to increase performance and profitability?

Focus on team performance, not individual talent.

How might you create a culture of trust and accelerate team performance in your company rather than focusing on individual skills or talent alone?

Focus on magical pairs.

Who are the magical pairs in your company? How might you arrange for them to work together more often if they don’t work together already? How might you assemble a team around them?

Hire EPIC employees.

• Employees. How might you increase the number of customers each employee serves?
• Profit. Is your profit scaling higher than your revenue? If not, what one thing might move the needle the fastest?
• Impact. What is the mission of your organization? Is it more powerful than compensation to your employees? Do your employees care about your customers — do they want to serve them?
• Cost. How might you take one step toward the Valve 2.5× rule in your organization?

Bring the power of prediction to the people.

How might you begin shifting more of your decisions to your team?

Learn how to predict.

Are you teaching your team how to predict and use mathematical probabilities in their daily work? Are you focusing on the process rather than results?

Know the difference between prediction and Prophecy.

Do you know the difference between prediction and Prophecy — and when to do both?

Practice the prediction cycle of hypothesis, measure, change, and repeat.

In what area of your business can you begin practicing the prediction cycle of set a hypothesis, measure, change, repeat?

Define your mission.

What is your moonshot? What ignites such passion in you and your team that would be worth trying and failing at?

Define your users with the BRAW Framework.

• What big total addressable market can you serve?
• Who do you relate to?
• Who do you have access to?
• Who do you want to serve?
• What group of people meets all four of these criteria? These are your BRAW users.

Define your method.

How can you begin using prediction as part of your core method in your company?

Set a rhythm.

What weekly meeting or activity can you schedule now to provide structure to your company and strengthen your culture?

Earn your OBE in traffic.

• Own traffic. How will you reach out to your own list?
• Buy traffic. How will you optimize your ads on your chosen platform?
• Earn traffic. Who are your Dream 100 traffic sources? How can you reverse engineer your Dream 100 into partnerships?

Create your peak sales machine.

What steps will you include in your sales funnel? Are you building a model you can test?

Bring the magic with your follow-up funnel.

What follow-up sequence will you use for each step in your funnel?

Measure, iterate, and scale.

• Are you overlaying each part of your funnel with data? For example, are you creating your hypotheses? Are you measuring? And are you making changes based on the data you received?
• What is your CAC versus LTV ratio? If you don’t have numbers yet, what do you want them to be?

Live product development.

• Build retention into your product DNA. What initial metrics will you use to measure the strength of your company’s product retention DNA?
• Monitor user feedback. How will your company monitor user feedback?
• Make sure your user feedback is not changing your product or user DNA (unless you want it to). How will you make sure you are prioritizing your BRAW users?
• Make sure you are able to make the changes from your user feedback. What resources do you need to make the changes your users are requesting? If you don’t have the resources to make those changes right now, what rhythm will you set to regularly iterate your product based on feedback?
• Set a product release rhythm. How often will you release new versions of your product?

Organized event calendars.

• Do you have an editorial calendar?
• What major events will you add to your calendar, including festivities?
• What rhythm are you planning for your content releases?
• What exactly will you do for each planned event, and what will it impact?
• What tools will you use to monitor the impact of your events?

Very special sales and offers.

• Know your bestselling product categories in terms of volume and revenue. What products or services are your best sales contributors?
• Segment your customers for special sales and offers. How might you target specific customer segments for your special sales and offers? What is your “big guns” offer?
• Use a variety of messaging and display capabilities. Where do your top users gather? What messaging tools do they use?
• Use anchoring or other techniques for your sales offer. How can you optimize your sales conversion rate?
• Set a rhythm for your very special events. How often will you offer your very special sales and offers?

Engagement and re-engagement.

• Know the definition of an active user and how to measure it. What is the definition of being active for your company? What metrics do you use to measure whether a user is active or not?
• Know the definition of a dormant user, what typically causes user churn, and how to measure it. How do you know when a user goes dormant? What typically causes users to go dormant or quit? What metrics do you use to measure whether a user is dormant or not?

Start with purpose.

Remind yourself of your mission and why you are creating this revenue model in the first place.

Get tons of free users.

What service or product would appeal to the largest number of your users so you can have a big total addressable market?

Get users to stick around.

• Does your product or service solve a one-time problem, or a recurring problem? If it solves a one-time problem, is there a recurring problem you could solve for your ideal users?
• How can you solve your ideal users’ recurring problem on a daily or weekly basis?
• How can you optimize your session or service time? Are you minimizing download time, if applicable?
• If your users must use other products and services to use your product or service, how might you develop those yourself, perhaps through your own ecosystem?
• What are the significant profitability and retention benchmarks for your industry, both offline and online? Create a hypothesis and prediction cycle to aim for these benchmarks.

Create a service or product whose value increases with time.

• How might you leverage the power of inventory, or personal data, in your product or service?
• How might you leverage the power of connections, or the network effect, in your product or service?

Keep cost per user low.

How might you lower your cost per unit, using a dynamic definition of cost?

Get the skills to create the product or service.

What skills do you need to automate, develop, or hire for?

Create a clear monetization plan.

• Who are the minnows, dolphins, and whales in your business?
• How can you monetize your product or service for each of these segments?
• What are your free versus paid offers? Where are your paywalls?
• What is your ideal monetization lifecycle and funnel, from free sign-up to activation to first-time purchase to upsell? How do users flow between multiple paid offerings?
• Are you measuring to know when customer lifetime value is greater than customer acquisition cost (LTV > CAC)? When LTV > CAC, it’s time to scale.