Kathleen Eisenhardt explains how simple rules drive growth. A concrete company called Prinquist used five rules to scale: prefer partners with laser screed machines, keep territories separate, require product adoption within three months, add a new partner every quarter. These constraints actually freed the company to move faster.
Chapters
Now you're probably not thinking too much about concrete these days. But did you know that concrete is the third largest source of man-made CO2 in the world? So it's actually a huge environmental issue around concrete. It also is a very high per capita consumption of concrete. So per capita, we all use a lot of concrete. It's right up there with water. Believe it or not. And so the— what the guys at Prinquist did was come up with a process that made for concrete that lowered the emissions in the production of cement. Also was— you needed to use less cement, so that saved on it. And then also was less likely to crack, so less often you had to replace it. So it's kind of an eco win-win-win going on. But what do we do? This is— these are mostly technical guys. So they go to Las Vegas and people enjoy their product and they get all these partners who want to partner with them, you know, hey, we'll do your concrete. Well, what do they— how do they pick? We have all these partners, so that becomes their bottleneck, who are we going to partner with? And they start thinking, they look over some of their evidence on who they worked well with, think about it, look at other people, talk and come up with a couple of simple rules about who to partner with. First rule was around let's partner with people that have a laser screed machine. That wasn't top of mind to me, but it turns out it is to them because that's a signal that that partner cares about quality and cares about innovation. If they have that machine, they are into it like we are into it. The second rule was around no duplicate partners, so everybody gets their own territory. Another rule was around if you haven't started using our product within 3 months, you are done as our partner. And then the final rule was around we add a partner roughly every 3 months, we can't do it faster than that because we can't really absorb the organization. Within that context, they then basically started selling their concrete around the world.
