week 82: work fast, not hard
a lesson for life
thank you to over 11,000 of you who read this weekly and share with your friends and family for behind the scenes on building a million dollar business from scratch and beyond.
i also include a personal note in the end so i am grateful that you let me do that without judgement.
in business, one of the greatest lesson i have learned over the years is this:
making decisions… fast.
most times when i have taken too long to make a decision, i just made a smaller problem, bigger.
that’s a fact that hurts and i am still not good at it, at all.
instead, when things are not going well, the best thing is not to keep working hard.
counter intuitive, right?
i read this sometime back and have found to be true →
99% of the decisions are anyway reversible but not making a decision is irreversible.
making quick decisions on what’s not working and start testing something else, is what i have found as key to sustainable growth.
for example:
earlier this year, when we realized traditional sales approach (SDR/AE model) was not working, we immediately pivoted to founder-led sales and quadrupled out output and outcome. if we would have tried to make traditional sales work, we would have not only burned thru cash but also the opportunity to set ourselves up for success in 2024
when we realized we have high burn given the high quality advisory work we do, we realized that selling traditional subscription won’t work. we need to sell big deals and create momentum. if we would have kept working hard to sell smaller subscriptions, we would have likely run out of money
we made a decision to build a small profitable and efficient growth business from day 1, meaning we would build a business that has great services and products but we will want to keep the head count to 10-20 people. this fundamentally changed how we view our offerings and our pricing and packaging. we are now focused on creating outsized impact as opposed to trying to simply double-double, triple-triple our revenue numbers for short terms gains.
in summary, here’s what i have learned:
fast decision making leads to exponential outcomes because you are constantly testing what works and what doesn’t and can earn the right to put all your energy on the winning strategy. you are obsessed with ideas that work without a personal agenda.
that’s powerful.
you don’t care about being wrong. you care about being too late to be right and time can kill any business, especially in today’s market.
majority of the times when you have to make a really hard decision, it’s already too late. in my experience, hard decisions leads to incremental outcomes that is focused on making a certain type of model work to fit a certain type of outcome.
it’s unoriginal. it’s boring.
on a personal note, this topic was inspired by Krish’s tennis coach who was teaching him to not hit the ball hard but fast.
hard, not fast??? he was confused.
so was i.
the coach was telling Krish - you are hitting too hard and that is why you feel tired and can’t get the ball moving fast for your opponent.
instead, hit fast.
meaning, when you get to the ball swing the racket in a specific way quickly, called “the top spin”, so you get the ball bouncing high which gets the ball outside of the opponents strike zone.
boom!
once you do that, you are in control of the point.
that’s wicked smart.
in life, we all are working too hard at times.
but i never thought of this idea of working fast as the goal.
when i think about it, i imagine that every thing we do at work and in life, we need to find a way to work fast and not hard.
fast doesn’t mean clumsy or low quality.
fast actually means quickly test what’s working and double down on what works.
the goal is find what works, quickly, before you have to make the hard decision.
leader point: leaders who know when to work fast and when to work hard are obsessed with finding winning ideas.
wisdom. :)