How to Move Your Business Faster

Improving Team Communication - The Write It Down Rule

How we've improved communication across our business.

I noticed my team and I, as small as we are, spend a good sum of time repeating similar information to each other.

As we operate from a physical location, we enjoy some osmosis benefits. However, there's still plenty of packet loss along the way.

So I started looking for better ways for us to communicate. It turns out the solution is not better/more coms; it's less.

We just needed a new rule.

'if it needs repeated, it needs written down.'

Now, whenever I'm asked for the information more than once or if I need to communicate the same thing more than once, I write it down. Then add it to our company Wiki (notion is great for this).

As we've gotten into the habit of writing stuff down and each learned where to find said information, the burden of education has shifted from the holder to the searcher of information.

Resulting in noticeably less unnecessary slack, email, and social messages for all.

Notes: A knowledge base for your business in the form of a company wiki will kill plenty of unnecessary back and forth coms.

Your Top Goal - Moving Faster

The framework we're using to move our business faster.

There's always an endless list of problems to fix and jobs to do in business.

And it's easy to get caught up spending all your time trying to reach the bottom of those lists. Bogged down with things that feel urgent and important (S/O to the Eisenhower Matrix) but don't necessarily take you where you want to go.

We get stuck reacting to nothingness while our grand projects and ideas fade into distant memories, and the future we daydream of never happens.

The remedy is lazer focus.

In his book Essentialism, Greg McKeown explains in depth the value of focused productivity and offers a framework to make this happen called your top goal.

The premise is, you only ever set yourself or your business one top goal and you spend a dedicated amount of time each day working towards that goal.

For the team and me at World, our top goals are the OKRs we set ourselves at the start of each quarter and spend 30 mins to 2 hours of focused time most days working towards those objectives.

It doesn't mean we don't work on other things or towards other goals, but our primary focus is always our top goals.

Until I found this approach, I was stuck on a hamster-wheel going nowhere fast. Until I passed this onto my team, they were running towards their targets like a herd of cats.

Focus = speed.

Notes: Focused work for a small amount of time each day towards one top goal is how you move fast.

ENTREPRENEURS CORNER

There’s No Point Sweating The Small Stuff

How the world's most influential entrepreneurs approach decisions

Once a month, I jump on a call and chop it up with a couple of other small business owners.

They commonly struggle to make minor decisions, and the issue is the lens through which they view these decisions.

Jeff Bezos used to refuse to make what he called reversible decisions.

Reversible decisions have somewhat reversible consequences, no matter the outcome - they're revolving doors. He refused to make them because the outcomes were inconsequential - they didn't matter.

Example: Leaving home without an umbrella. You might get wet or waste 10 minutes going home again to get your umbrella.

For Amazon, if the decision was a winner, they won. If the decision was a loser, they reversed it, took their learnings and moved on.

I've heard that Mark Zuckerberg and a few other entrepreneurs take on a similar philosophy.

Another way to look at it is, how long into the future will this matter?

A wet jumper because you left an umbrella at home probably only matters for a few minutes.

Pushing play on an ad that doesn't work will only hurt this month's PnL, and then it'll be forgotten.

The point is, when a decision is reversible and or only matters for a short period - it's better to do something than deliberate on it beyond the value of the decision's outcome.

Do - learn - do again. That's how the top organisations and entrepreneurs move fast and improve as they go. Not pointless months of board-room or inner-mind debates.

Notes: 99% of decisions are reversible and won't matter when you wake up tomorrow. It's better to do and learn than debate what could be nothing.t