I've Coached 1000s of Business Owners. Here's What I Learned

There was a time when I had a newborn baby, a mortgage, and a quarter million dollars in debt. Today, my partners and I run a $200 million portfolio of 17 companies, and I've worked with over 1,000 seven-figure business owners across just about every industry you can think of. And here's what all of that taught me. It's not about working harder. It's not even about hiring the right people. I can usually tell within 10 minutes of meeting a business owner Who's gonna make it to 8 figures and who's gonna stay stuck right where they are? It comes down to a handful of things almost nobody teaches you. Things entrepreneurs learn the hard way if they learn 'em at all. And in this video, I'm gonna walk you through all of 'em. Let's get into it. Number 1, stuck owners throw people at problems, scalers solve problems with systems. Brute force and effort, that is honestly all you need to get to 7 figures. I mean, seriously, if you can outwork everybody, if you can care more than everybody, if you'll just do whatever it takes, you can probably get to $1 million in revenue. The problem is that's the exact playbook that is probably keeping you stuck right now because when effort-based owners hit their personal ceiling, and don't get me wrong, your personal ceiling is high, but when they hit their personal ceiling and they don't change their playbook, what they try to do is they try to just add more effort. And since they don't have any of their own time or their own energy left, what they try to do is they try to buy someone else's effort. In other words, they try to just hire more effort by throwing people at it. It usually just makes things worse, and here's how that cycle typically plays out. So you're overwhelmed, and so what do we do when we're overwhelmed? We go, "Ah, I need to get somebody in here." Now, we don't have a lot of time to hire them the right way, so we're just gonna hire the first person that seems reasonably competent. So we're gonna hire somebody and we're gonna hire them too fast. Now, of course there's no system for them to run because we didn't have time to build that, and there's no time to train them. And so we're gonna hire somebody quickly, we're gonna throw them in the problem, and they're generally going to flounder in their new role. Now, we know we didn't hire them the right way and we know we didn't train them the right way, and so when they're floundering, we feel guilty, because deep down inside we kinda know we set them up to fail, and so we let them linger in that role way too long, which winds up costing us a lot more money and a lot more time. So eventually, after a while, we do have to get sick of it. Again, the boat's sinking, and so we do fire them, we grab the bucket, and we go back to doing the work ourselves because, well, no one can do it as well as we can. In other words, we get overwhelmed, We hire, we flail, we fire, and repeat. Now, I have watched this exact cycle keep more 7-figure businesses stuck than just about anything else. Here's the fix. Before you make any new hire, I want you to ask this question: What system is this person going to run starting day 1? If you can't answer that question, you should not make the hire. Step 1 is to create a a playbook, a checklist, an SOP, heck, a screen recording of some kind of documentation that when this person shows up, they've got some idea of what the heck it is they're supposed to do. And if you can't build the system because you don't know what the heck you're doing either, the worst thing you can do is to hire someone who's never done it and hope the two of you can somehow figure it out together. Don't hire an employee for that. Hire an outside consultant. Or an agency with one express purpose: build the system. Then, once the system is there, you can hire an employee to run the system after the system is built. Remember, good people don't fix broken systems, broken systems break good people. And that is why we solve for systems first, then we hire people to run the systems. Real quick, since we're talking about systems, everything in this video comes from the operating system that my partners and I use to grow our portfolio of companies past $200 million. We documented that, the entire thing, what worked, kinda what flopped, all of it, in a free case study report. If you wanna go deeper, I dropped a link to that in the description. Again, totally free. Now, here's the problem with everything I just said. You can't build a system for a business that you can't see. And the reality is most stuck owners are flying completely blind.— which brings me to the second big difference between the businesses that get stuck and the ones that actually scale. Number 2: Stuck owners run on gut, scalers run on scorecards. I can usually tell whether a business owner is gonna scale or generally stay where they are by asking a few pretty basic questions. Questions like, "Hey, how many leads did you get last month?" or "What's your lead-to-sale conversion rate?" Or what's your time to value? How long does it take for a new customer to actually get value from the thing they bought? Or what's your gross margins? And what's your revenue per employee? Now the owners who are gonna scale, they either know these numbers by heart or they know generally where to find them. They're gonna be like, oh, I don't know, let me go check and get back to you. The owners who stay stuck, they got no clue. They got no clue. They just look at me, blank face, the pause, and frankly, the pause tells me everything I need to know. I've got two friends and they're both pilots. And one of them is a professional pilot, like a legit pilot who flies for like an airline and stuff like that. And so obviously he's instrument rated, which means he can fly day and night in good weather and bad weather, 'cause he's got flight data. Now my other friend is an amateur pilot. He's not instrument rated, which means he basically flies by looking out the window. Now guess which one I'm willing to fly with? My non-instrument rated friend is always like, "Hey, come fly with me, come fly with me." And I'm always like, "No." Because what I know is, if a storm comes up out of nowhere, we're screwed. Like, we're done. Because he doesn't know how to fly if something bad happens. And running your business on gut is amateur pilot stuff. On a clear day, at low altitude, like when you're kind of in the high 6, 7 figure, land, you're probably fine. But the higher you climb, the more weather you're going to hit. And your gut, I'm telling you, you may think like, oh, I've got a really good gut. No, you don't. Your gut is a terrible instrument. It's emotional, it's tired, it's reacting to whatever shouted the loudest this morning. In a perfect world, and if we were working together, if you're working with us, if you're one of our portfolio companies, we would look to build a full blown company scorecard where you've got metrics for tracking every key point in the customer journey. They'd be tracked and reported weekly by different members of your team with owners and all that other good stuff. If that's too much right now, I get it. So, what I'm going to give you right now is the minimum that you need. There's 3 layers, okay? Layer 1 are 3 evergreen metrics. I want you just to come up with 3 top-level metrics that just tell you is my business generally healthy right now. Mostly lag metrics, things like revenue, cash collected, revenue per employee. That's what we suggest for most of our clients. What's our revenue? What are we generating in sales? How much cash have we collected? How much cash do we have in the bank? And what's our revenue per employee? It's kind of a quick measure in terms of what's our margin, since for most businesses, your employees are gonna be your single largest expense, especially if you're a service-based business. A layer 2 of your scorecard is gonna be 3 North Star. Metrics. These North Star metrics are 3 numbers that you and your team have decided to optimize for the next 90 days based on what you believe need to be improved for you to hit your target. So we're going to select these. There's a billion different things that you could track, but what you're basically saying is these are the 3 most important because you can't optimize everything, right? You can't go out there and optimize every single number. But maybe right now you're going, we got a real lead problem, so let's optimize our cost per lead, or we know we got a sales conversion problem, so let's optimize that. Whatever the metrics are, pick 3 that you're gonna put particular focus on over the next 90 days and just track those every single week so that they're top of mind. Those are your North Star. By the way, remember those, we're gonna be coming back to 'em later on in this video. Layer 3 are your departmental metrics. So these are 3 to 5 metrics that the people who are running your marketing, your sales and your fulfillment team tell you are the metrics that define their success in that role. So, you don't need a 40-metric dashboard that nobody reads, that's basically about a dozen or so numbers tracked weekly, each with an owner, that's enough to know kind of if you're growing or if you're stuck. It's not perfect but I promise that is way, way better than what most businesses are working with. We got the 3 top-level evergreen We got the 3 North Star and we got some basic departmental metrics. Gut feel got you to 7 figures. Instruments, data, that's what's gonna get you past it because if you can't visualize it, you can't optimize it, and if you can't optimize it, you can't scale it. Now, once you can actually see your numbers, one of them is probably gonna jump out at you and it's probably gonna slap you in the face because you're not going to like what you see. And it's probably not the one that you've been staring at because usually stuck business owners tend to watch top line exclusively while the scalers watch a different metric entirely. Number 3, stuck owners chase sales, scalers chase margin. Now in the beginning, it really is all about sales. I'll be honest, it really is all about sales. Nothing happens until something gets sold, so in the early days, yes, just go out there and sell some stuff, sell, sell, sell, go make that Money. But past 7 figures, the question does have to shift from, "Okay, how much money did we make?" to, "Okay, how much have we kept?" And here's why that matters. Inc. magazine actually published a stat that should kinda terrify you. Out of all the companies that make the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies in America, 67% wind up failing. And believe it or not, they wind up failing at a higher rate than non-Inc. 500 companies. So it's not necessarily just the slow ones that fail, it's the fast-growing ones that fail too. And the reason they fail is simple, they run out of cash. Because growth is fire, okay? I want you to think of growth as fire. And fire doesn't fuel itself, fire consumes fuel. Eats it. More people, more inventory, more ad spend, more payroll. Every new log on that fire is more cash. That's why we say growth doesn't equal profit, growth eats profit. That's why if you've ever wondered, why, if my business is growing, am I not making more money? That's why. As your business grows, it consumes more. It doesn't necessarily produce more unless you force it and so that is the fix. We have to flip the profit equation. I've got to give credit here to my buddy Mike Michalowicz who wrote about this in his book Profit First. Most business owners, just most humans, the way that they calculate profit is they say revenue minus expenses equals profit. That's pretty simple, right? Profit is what is left over after you have paid all of your expenses, which for most businesses is zero, not that much. So the fix is to flip it, and the way that we flip it is we say revenue minus profit equals expenses. Profit doesn't become the accidental thing that occurs because we hope it's there. Profit becomes the first bill that you pay, and this isn't just like a pay yourself first kind of thing. This is a we are going to force margin into the business. And we're going to force margin into the business by saying, we're going to declare that this business will operate at a 20% profit margin, and whatever is left is what we will spend on expenses. Now, that may sound crazy, and you may be saying right now, ah, but we can't afford that. And what I would say to you is, you can't not afford that. This one flip, even if it's a little bit painful, forces the margin discipline that stuck business owners never build. Because, because look, if you're thinking that, okay, when we reach the next level of growth, that's, that's when the margin's going to appear, that's when the profit's going to appear— no, it won't. The next level of growth is just going to consume more cash. Margins are just going to get more constrained. So if you can't produce margin when you're small, you're not gonna produce it when you're big. Margin is not something that happens because of growth. Margin is a decision. And again, this isn't just about paying yourself big distribution, although that's nice too. I do think that as early as possible, you should be paying yourself well. That's another difference that I see between the businesses that scale and the ones that stay stuck. The businesses that scale pay their owners really, really well, 'cause they can., right? The main thing though that we're looking to create here is fuel. Profit is the fuel that you need to scale. The systems, the experts, like everything else that I'm going to show you and we're going to talk about in this video, that gets paid for out of this margin. And so if you don't have margin, you don't have fuel, and if you don't have the fuel, you're not going to scale. It really is as simple as that. So we're going to put the margin metrics on that scorecard that we just built. I'm going to encourage you to add gross margin, Somewhere on there, we already talked about revenue per employee. We're gonna put cash on there, and we're gonna expect cash to grow up, to go up. One metric that I have on a lot of my company scorecards is distributable cash. How much cash, not just how much cash in the bank, how much cash do we have available for distribution? 'Cause if that is going up, I know the business is healthy. The reality is P&Ls lie. Cash, money, doesn't lie. Now, those first 3 differences are about how you build and fund the business. The next 2 are about who actually runs it because a lot of that profit is about to get reinvested in people and stuck owners and scalers buy completely different kinds of people. They invest in completely different and wrong types of people in the case of the stuck one. So, let's get into who you should be investing in and who you should not invest in. Number 4, stuck owners hire helpers, scalers hire experts. So early on, we all hire the same way. We hire a support person to answer tickets, an office manager to answer the phone and check the mail, maybe a virtual assistant to handle those little tasks that we don't want to do. And these people are all what I would classify as helpers, and I don't say that to diminish their value as human beings, but what they're going to do is they're going to manage to a particular task. You're gonna give 'em a task and they're gonna do it or they're not going to do it. What they're not managing to is a greater outcome or a strategic objective. And in the beginning, that's fine. But if all you ever do is hire helpers, your job quietly shifts from the person who runs the company to the person who manages all the helpers. Congratulations, you built what is quite possibly the worst job in the company, right? Because a team of helpers isn't really a team. All it really is is a clone of your to-do list in human form because all of those little to-dos, they don't go away. When you hire helpers to do those things on the to-do list where you think you're delegating work, you're not actually doing it. Yes, you're handing it off to somebody else to do, but in reality, when it's just going to be that same person, you're going to have to tell them to do it over and over and over again. Have you really delegated it? Have you, right? Because they're not managing to an objective, they're just kind of managing to a task. Everything still is routing through your brain. They're just extra hands combined with extra overhead to do the task. Every business, I don't care what you do, every business does 3 things. We basically do marketing, we do sales, and we do fulfillment. We've got to generate some awareness. Once we got it, we got to sell the people, and then we got to fulfill what we sold. It's as simple as that. Okay, marketing, sales, fulfillment. Let's keep it really simple and the reality is you're gonna be good at one of those 3 things, you're gonna be decent at another and you're gonna be kind of sucky at a third. Now, you're gonna be reasonable at all of them otherwise you wouldn't get to this point. I've always been really good at marketing. I've been pretty good, decent at fulfillment and kind of sucky at sales. Part of the reason that I like marketing is because I don't like sales. Now, my business partner is phenomenal at fulfillment. He's decent at marketing, he's a solid marketer, he also kind of sucks at sales. The point is we all have our strengths and we have our weaknesses. Now, there are 2 mistakes that we make to compensate for these weaknesses because everybody says, "Oh, you should hire for your weaknesses." The mistake that we make is we try to hire a helper to help us do the thing that we kind of suck at, right? So, we know that we kind of suck at sales, we hire a helper to help us do the thing that we kind of suck at and this doesn't work because we're now managing someone who who isn't very good at doing something that we're not very good at doing either. Why is that supposed to work, right? We're not good at it, they're not good at it, through our powers combined we're somehow gonna be better at it? Of course not. But here's the even stupider plan, okay? Number 2, we hire a helper to cover our strength so we can focus on improving our weakness. Now this is completely backwards. We're basically benching our best player, us, so that they can play our worst position, but I've done this. I've hired somebody, a helper, 'cause I didn't wanna pay full price for an actual marketing expert, 'cause they're expensive, right? I didn't wanna make that investment, so instead, I'm gonna hire a low-level person, an entry-level person, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna, just help me do the marketing. Help me do the marketing while I go over here and figure out sales. What we now have is sucky sales, 'cause you got a sucky person doing sales, and sucky marketing. The solution is simple, stop hiring helpers. At this stage, stop hiring helpers. Instead, hire a peer who is better than you at the thing that you're weakest at. So for me, if I'm good at marketing but bad at sales, then I should just hire a sales expert who is as good at sales as I am at marketing. When you hire people who are good at the thing you're weak at, they step in, they take it over, and the business actually grows. It's not an expense, it is an investment. What's really expensive is paying for a lot of people to do things poorly. Once you do this and the business does grow, sales increase, margins increase, then just repeat the process and hire an expert to do the thing that you're just okay at. So the next hire I would make would be in fulfillment. Then, and this is where the biggest breakthrough happens, hire someone who's better than you at the thing that you're really, really good at. Because yes, there are people who are better than you at that one thing that you're really amazing at, if only because they'll just be doing that one thing and not doing that one thing while also trying to run a business. I'm a really, really good marketer. Like, really, really good. But my head of marketing is better at marketing than me because all he does is marketing. He's not also trying to run a company. Helpers complete tasks. Experts deliver outcomes. And if you hired someone to do a job, and they have to ask you how to do it, you hired the wrong person. But here's the trap. You can't hire the best experts in the world if every decision still has to route through you. If that's the case, you didn't build a team, you basically just built a waiting room where everybody's kind of sitting out there and you're the doctor they're waiting to get into. So, we don't want to have that so here's how we fix that one. Number 5, stuck owners hoard decisions, scalers build decision engines. I want you to write this down. 'cause this is kinda big. Businesses scale at the rate of good decision-making. So it's not enough for your people to make good decisions, they have to actually make good decisions quickly. If you take forever to make good decisions, the world's gonna pass you by. Also, obviously, if we make quick decisions but they're bad, that's bad too. We need to make good decisions, we need to make them quickly. But time and time again, I see business owners who, they get good at, delegation, and they demand that their people do everything, and, "That's your work. I want you to do that." But then the reason they get good at delegation is because right before the finish line, they also demand that everybody check with them first, right? They make sure that they're able and allowed to kind of step in to give it the okay before it goes out. So they've delegated, but they've also bottlenecked. And I'll tell you, if every decision runs through you, you're not the CEO, you are still the bottleneck. So, here's the simple framework that I run with my own team just to create a culture of distributed decision-making. That's what we want to create, and I call it the 3-3-3 model. So, anytime somebody wants to bring me a decision, there are 3 3s standing between them and my office. The first 3 is 3 minutes of research. So I'm basically gonna ask them, have you taken 3 minutes to Google the answer or Ask Claude or ChatGPT? Now, I know that sounds obvious, but the number of times that people have brought me questions and it truly was just a Google search or a ChatGPT thing away, they're infinite. And I'm sure you've experienced the same thing. So I just made it a policy. Second, and the second 3, 'Have you talked to 3 peers?' Now, these peers can be inside the company, they can be outside the company, it doesn't matter. The point is, judgment gets sharper when it's been tested through other people first. I also want to encourage my people to just expand their network, to realize that I am far from the only source of good ideas and advice, like far from it. And again, this is about empowerment. This is about them realizing that they can seek out ideas and they can understand that answers are findable and problems are solvable and things are figureoutable without having to come to me. And very often the best way to do that is just to talk to other people ideally in the company. Third, and the third 3, if it still needs my input is you gotta bring me 3 possible solutions. And I wanna receive these 3 solutions in a document known as a 131. And so I want it to have 1 clear statement of the issue or problem, 3 researched options, that's what I mean, give me 3 researched options, and then 1 recommendation. So don't just bring me, here are 3 things that we could do and then me pick. Clearly state the problem that we're dealing with because I probably don't know what we're solving for, I don't have all the context, so frame it for me. Then give me 3 possible options, show me that you've done your research. Right? If you don't know what we should do, show me that you've at least come up with some ideas, um, and then give it your best guess. What's— what do you think we should do out of all of these? So the rough flow is, here's the challenge we're dealing with, here are the 3 things that I think could work, and here's what I think we should do. Now here's the thing, 9 times out of 10, I just take the recommendation. I say, yeah, I agree. And that's the real payoff, because when I take their suggestion This not only builds their confidence in themselves, it also builds my confidence in them at the same time. Now, somebody who's consistently bringing me solid 1-3-1s, they eventually earn a, "Hey, you know what? Next time, don't ask me, just do it." These people are eventually called leaders and executives because that's what being an executive is. You execute, you make the decision. Your company can only scale as fast as the people inside it can make decisions. So stop being the place where decisions go to wait and start creating a culture of good decision-making. The last 2 differences aren't about how hard you work, they're about pace and how you structure time itself. So let's get into that. Number 6, stuck owners build annual plans and then abandon them. Scalers run 90-day sprints. Most of the owners I work with do have a plan. They do, and I think that that's unique because I feel like a lot of the business owners out there have no plan whatsoever. They're just kind of flying by the seat of their pants, but when I'm working with a business owner, I'm talking to somebody, they generally have a plan. You probably, if you're watching this right now, you probably make plans. The problem is that most of them, and this may or may not be true for you, they're kind of creating a plan in December. The problem is when, we set plans in December, it's way too optimistic. I mean, it's a bit like going grocery shopping on an empty stomach, right? I mean, we're kind of in the holidays, we're at the end of the year, we're like, "Ooh, next year's gonna be so amazing," right? So, we've got all this optimism but it's not really informed by a ton of data or how the next year is going to go. And so, in many respects, the annual plan is really just kind of like New Year's resolutions for entrepreneurs. And like New Year's resolutions, most annual plans are abandoned by the first week of February. And on the other end of the spectrum, you've got entrepreneurs creating these like big, hairy, audacious goals and vision boards, which I guess can be motivating in the moment, but they don't really inform a single action come Monday morning. So here's what you wanna do instead. Every 90 days, you wanna build what we call a 3-5-1 sprint plan. And the 3, 5, and the 1 stands for, number 1, 3 North Star metrics. Now the 3 North Star metrics, that should sound familiar. We talked about that when we were talking about scorecards. These are the 3 critical metrics that we've decided we most need to hit this quarter to hit those kind of longer-term revenue and profitability targets. So I'm fine with setting a, a longer-term target. We specifically like to set 3-year revenue and profitability targets, I just wanna pull it back and say, for planning purposes, what needs to be true this quarter? Um, and specifically, what are the 3 metrics that we need to focus on this quarter, that we need to optimize this quarter to get closer to those goals? Now, once we've selected those 3 metrics, then we wanna select the 5 key initiatives. Now, these 5 key initiatives are the 5 new projects over and above the work that we already do. That we believe will actually move those 3 metrics. And this is really important, 'cause oftentimes when we're deciding what we're gonna do from a project perspective, they're all over the place. We should do this and we should do that. Why should we do this? Well, because I think we should, because the boss said so, because our competitor is doing it. And it's probably a very good idea, but it's not necessarily informed by data. That's why we wanna select the data first. These are the 3 metrics that we need to impact to hit our goals. Okay, then what projects do we need to execute to impact those metrics? A project can be a good idea, but it can be a good idea at the wrong time if it doesn't impact those metrics. We're gonna look at the metrics and say, what must we do this quarter to hit those targets? And why 5? Because frankly, we've just discovered that 5 is about as many new projects as a company or team can take on in a given 90-day period. Period. You can pick a lot of projects, but if you don't finish any of them, it's not going to matter. Okay, so we selected our 3 North Star metrics, our 5 key initiatives. Now we need to select the one rallying cry. That is the one in the 3-5-1. This is the single unifying phrase that's just going to kind of keep everybody focused and on task for the quarter. Think about it as sort of a short-term mission statement. That gets reset every 90 days and that actually means something. So we're going to look at the key initiatives that we're doing. We're saying, okay, what's a phrase that unifies all these together? And when somebody has an idea or a shiny object pops up, we're going to say, you know, that's fine, but does it align with the mission for this 90-day period? I'm generally not a huge fan of mission statements because they're just kind of fluffy and airy and they don't inform anything. But if we can have a short-term mission statement that defines this is our area of focus for this 90-day period, it can actually be really helpful and impactful, especially if it's the kind of thing that's short and tight and memorable and can fit on a t-shirt. So that's our goal. Once you're running the sprint, there is one final difference between the owners who stay stuck and the ones who actually scale. And honestly, this is the biggest one of all. It's what we do every single week, whether it's exciting or not. Number 7: stuck owners chase shiny objects, scalers run boring rituals. Here's kind of my tell. Anytime I'm talking to a business owner and all they want to talk about is their new thing and then the next new thing and they're asking me, hey, what's new and what should I be doing and you see this new strategy over here and oh my gosh, my competitor's doing this new thing, I know that's somebody who's going to get stuck. Just point blank, without a doubt, they're going to get stuck and they're not going to get stuck because they're lazy, it's the opposite. They're gonna get stuck because they're doing a lot but nothing's getting finished and so nothing compounds. It's basically just random acts of growth and marketing and sales and projects. Meanwhile, the companies that actually scale, from the outside, they look kind of boring. I mean, they're not flailing, they're not chasing, they're just executing the right next thing and then the next thing and then the next. I've got a friend who is incredibly fit., and I got a friend who is, let's say, less fit. And my less fit friend always has a new diet, a new program, a new health and fitness app that he's trying out. My fit friend has been basically doing the same workout, eating the same food every single day. He never really talks about it, and it's not just a metabolism thing, it's just what he does every single day. It's boring and it works. Compounding doesn't care how exciting the reps are. It only cares that you keep showing up. So here's our boring rhythm that just works, and notice you already have all the pieces in place from earlier in this video to execute and implement this rhythm. So first, we set a 3-year revenue and profit target. That's where everything starts, and you could do this right now. You don't have to wait until the end of the year, just right now as you're sitting there 3 years from today, what would need to be true to make you really excited about the growth that you've achieved? And one of the things that you could do is just say, what about doubling? What if we doubled our sales and we doubled our profit? Obviously, if profit is zero, let's do better than doubling. We're gonna set a 3-year revenue and profit target. Now, why 3 years? Because it's enough time to do something meaningful, something really, really big. 3 years is a good amount of time. I mean, if you can just create 24% year-over-year compounded growth for 3 years, you will double. Once we have that, then we're gonna break that into 12 quarters, and every quarter we're gonna build a new 3-5-1 sprint plan like what I just talked about based on what we did or didn't do the previous 90 days. Then every week we're gonna hold a 60-minute pulse meeting with the leadership team. We're gonna pull up that scorecard that we talked about. We're gonna look at our key initiatives, and we're gonna ask 2 questions. Are the metrics that we said we're optimizing, those North Star metrics, are we improving these and are we doing the things that we said we would do in terms of the key initiatives? If we're executing the key initiatives and the North Star metrics are moving, great. If we're not doing the key initiatives, why not, right? If we're doing the key initiatives and they're not moving the metrics, why not? This is where accountability comes in. Very often we create plans, we don't execute them because there's no accountability. Then every month we're gonna do a sprint review. Do we need to make any changes to the 3-5-1 sprint plan? Do we need to adjust our North Star metrics? Do we need to alter key initiatives, or are we good to stay the course? A lot of people, once they've set a plan, they're like, we won't change this plan at all. I think that's ridiculous. Once you have some data, if the data informs something new that you would've done differently had you known that, then change. And so we allow ourselves to do that once a month based on that sprint plan. In general, we're gonna look to stay the course. Then just repeat in pursuit of that 3-year target. We take very few moonshots. At our companies. We have very few pivots. Just one foot in front of the other and the work compounds because the work actually gets finished. Your brain is going to fight this. It has been programmed to believe that growth requires fancy new tactics and something new because the new is what got you where you are. And the urge to to tinker with a working system is truly the last boss of scaling. But this is the boss that you must conquer. The Navy SEALs have a saying, and their saying is, "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." And that same rule applies in business. Scaling businesses look boring from the outside, but they can pretty much go wherever they want because, again, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. That's the whole game. And if you're realizing that a lot of what got you to this point is exactly what you need to unlearn, you're right. I actually made a whole video on the biggest things business owners need to unlearn, including a few sacred cows from the business books that everybody worships. If you want to watch that one next, I'll drop a link to it somewhere around here. Go check it out. I'll see you there.