Mike Andes stopped checking his bank account daily because startups under $1 million in revenue often make decisions based on cash balance instead of real metrics. As his business grew, transaction feeds became noise. He now focuses only on the numbers that actually drive growth decisions.
I don't look at every bank account every single day. And when I first got started, it was helpful. It pushed me, it allowed me to be able to operate based upon how much cash was in the bank. Because if you have $20,000 versus $20 in the bank account and you're just getting started, it is absolutely going to change your behavior for that day. It is absolutely gonna change whether or not you buy another piece of equipment, whether you hire someone. As the business grows, understanding that what inputs aren't actually going to change decision-making today allows you to get clear with what inputs you actually need to remove from your visibility so that you can get clear outputs. So I don't look at like Stripe payouts, daily transactions. There are thousands of them every single day, probably tens of thousands across the franchise, across the software, across the media. Every single day, hundreds of thousand dollars, millions of dollars going in and out. My attention on that keeps me distracted from making good decisions. Again, to be clear, if you're doing under a million dollars annual revenue, it's likely that you're doing what I call bank balance accounting or bank balance decision-making, which is I look at bank balance And based upon that is whether or not I will hire someone, whether or not I will buy another piece of equipment. And that is required when you're smaller. As you begin to grow, constant attention on things other than the inputs required to make the decisions you need to make is just noise.
