"You should make this your top priority."
Many consultants and frameworks tell you about how one thing is the key to a business or initiative. Commercial insight, customer success, product-led growth: books or advice usually end with focusing your organization on their particular idea because it will reap returns.
Maybe it will! But unanswered in this well-meaning advice is: what does not get done? What should we as founders not do?
The reality is that all managers manage resources. This resource includes staff, cash, assets - and our own time, which is the most limited resource of them all. We cannot keep expanding the scope of the organization we run based on new ideas. Growth should come from the market demanding we be bigger to serve its needs. Other increases in surface area are just incurring overhead or eating at gross margins.
I have seen several techniques to introduce this kind of change in an organization. They all seem to fail. I believe this is because the question of what not to do gets lost.
For example, I asked Josh Seiden, author of Sense and Respond, how to implement his ideas sustainably and what one needs to cut as a response. In reply, he told me a story about keeping customer support in the core product group for a new offering in a larger company. He believed this radically improved the early days of product development while he was with the client.
After he left, he expected that customer service would move out of his new product business unit to the shared services group of the company. Big companies maintain these shared support centers to manage sources of variable costs better.
But this reversion to "classic" structure happened after he completed his consulting project - the super-close, all-about-customer-contact mode was successful and what they did while he was there. He did not say in our discussion, but my anticipation based on his writings and speeches is that he would expect the virtue of having adopted his model to degrade as they moved away from that focus.
The famous "milkshake" story from Competing Against Luck is similarly one of great potentially company-organizing insight brought by a consultant. Many of us love that tale of "Jobs to be Done." It helped the late Clay Christensen sell his books. But McDonald's, the client from the story, did not implement his advice for its marketing.
Adding a consultant is a temporary stimulus that generates temporary effects. That effect can be focusing, and it delivers value in the short term. But we rarely answer what to cut that matters or lasts.
When I started in management consulting in the 1990s, the vogue thing was figuring out how to thin the ranks: letting more staff go. I was not directly in that part of the business, but even I could see that the result was not shrinking the company's concerns but just handling those same concerns with fewer people. The promise (with apologies to Champy and Hammer) was to "re-engineer" the corporation, but not much of that change happened.
My theory of the case is that telling executives that whole functions should go is not popular with the people writing the checks. Executives hire consultants to help them solve problems with people and processes further down, not to challenge their ranks. As such, firing staff is a palatable engagement, but the lists top out at a grade or two below the executive managing the engagement.
The opportunity for us as founders is to start with a better theory of our companies. What do we want our companies to do? And what are we deciding we will not do?
A sophist reply is not to do things that "don't matter." I take that to be table stakes. Identifying that unnecessary fat is often not clear at the outset. I've seen many people convinced something is important early that turns out not to be important later. Shedding "dead weight" isn't easy later on, but it is possible, and consultants like the above can help with that kind of fat-trimming.
The question is, what is the muscle we will choose not to bring into our company? What is nearly essential that we opt not to do?
I like the Y-Combinator startup school mantra that pre-market, there are only two things to do: talk to customers and write code. One should prioritize in that order. My view is that the job of writing code is to learn more - quickly - from customers. This shortlist keeps things focused. Many founders start to spend their time on other pieces pre-market. These additional tasks become boxes in the organization if the company does achieve liftoff.
Why work on these? After many conversations and case studies, I believe that these tasks come from a lack of confidence. People hear "X is important" from advisors they trust, so they do X. It's easier to say yes to the seemingly-wise people around you.
But the problem is that if you don't have X as a core competency, you will do it expensively, and that often means needing more resources for it, which creates a constituency in the organization, and away we go.
Having a clear idea of what your business needs to accomplish and your plan for achieving it should give you a sufficiently complete picture of your business. Undoubtedly there are a bunch of functions missing. I like to outsource those or even just let them burn for as long as you can stand it.
If you are feeling pain from not having the function in-house, that's a good thing. It means you have chosen a focus from among seemingly essential components. That discomfort is the price you pay for a leaner organization.
But we, as founders, set the tone and can do this early. Have confidence in what you want to do, focus on doing that, and choose to do little else.
Focus is saying no.
Photo by Isaiah Rustad on Unsplash