Scaling Up: Growth During Wartime | Investing During Times of War

Okay, company growth during wartime. Welcome back. Been a couple months since the last episode, but we're getting back into it, everybody. So let's get it. Okay, the market has changed. We are in a wartime market. So how do you grow in a situation like this? Three things, and then I'll get into a proprietary process that can help you. So first things first, people. Companies don't exist without people. You need high-quality talent, and especially talent that's been there and done that. So you need to find the right people to execute a plan and figure out what that plan is. Number 2, a hypothesis-testing mindset and process. In order to continue growing, you need to focus on a process and trust that process. And the 3rd piece is how you organize the company. Or the organization itself. And it's really about, again, a process. So let's get into the hypothesis testing idea first. So it really comes down to what are the biggest problems in the company, and can you stack rank them top to bottom across a number of different dimensions? And those dimensions would be things like how important is it, what is the effort That it's going to take by how many people? How much is it going to cost both in soft and hard dollars? And then what's the potential ROI or return on that effort? And then what you do once you have those ranked is you start executing them one by one to determine which ones work and which ones don't. Okay, so now let's get into this organizational design process. So this is a proprietary framework that we've developed over the years, battle-tested, battle-approved, and we've done this in a variety of organizations, variety of markets. We've done it for ourselves. We've done it for founders, we've done it for boards, and we've proven this model. It doesn't matter what stage of the company you're in— pre-seed, seed, A, public company, you name it. Doesn't matter whether you're VC-backed, bootstrapped, PE-backed. Doesn't even matter what type of industry you're in. That's why this is so powerful, because we've proven this over many, many years in many different environments. So let's go through it. I'll include this in the show notes so you can take a look at it or reach out to us, everettadvisors.com, if you need to. So for the folks that maybe can't see this and are just listening in, I would say click through to the website so you can get this. Otherwise, I'll try to describe it via voice if you can't see it. So imagine a clock and that clock runs clockwise around the outside of the clock. So I have things ordered from 1 through 10, and the idea is to continue to repeat 1 through 10 and Each time you repeat it, get a little bit faster and get a little bit better. If you do that, good things will happen. You will beat your competition. You will move faster within them. You will capture more of the market than them, and they will wonder how you are executing so much better than everybody else. It will seem like magic to the outside world. I've done it. It's true. Okay, so number one, develop a hypothesis. What is the thing that you believe that could work based on the problem? And then I've also included some disciplines in here that can help you figure out which kind of people will give you good ideas. Good ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The people operating at the edge, the ones right in front of your customers, your sales teams, your marketing teams. But particularly, especially in tech companies, there's, there's 2 disciplines called product and a discipline called growth. And their primary job is to figure this out. And their primary Their primary job is to cut across organizational silos, figure out that golden thread, and execute against it. Number 2, once you figure out an idea, you have to write it down so other people can understand what you're doing, can review it, can accept or reject it, and ultimately can implement it. Again, the specialty for this is product management and growth. Next step, determine ROI, return on investment. Again, product would be involved in that, perhaps growth, but finance and legal, you need to make that you're not breaking the law. You need to make sure that your finance team is bought in if it's going to cause a change in your cost structure, for example, or an investment. But we'd want to do these things lean. Number 4, build the test, build the hypothesis test. Who is going to build it? Well, they're going to reference that spec. It should have the team members listed in there. That could be marketing, could be sales, could be design, could be engineering, could be product, could be operations. Depends on the business, depends on the environment, depends on the hypothesis. Hypothesis test. Number 5, review. People need to review things. That's how we get better. That's how we make sure we don't make any mistakes. This should include stakeholders, leaders in different departments. We'd want to do this very rapidly, shouldn't get bogged down in a lot of Zoom meetings, should be very quick accept-rejects, perhaps one call, perhaps even decentralized, or maybe not even on a single call in a single spreadsheet where you can check the box if you're okay with it, add some comments. These would departments like marketing, design, engineering, product, finance, legal. A little bit more movement towards the tech side of the industry here. Okay, number 6, operationalize. Now that you have this plan, it's been reviewed, it's been accepted, we've built the thing, we need to implement it. So that means your operations team, your sales team, your marketing team, your program management team needs to go to the individual people who are going to be performing the test because this could be something that crosses disciplines, crosses departments. That's why this is so hard. And so you need soft skills as well in order to do these things correctly. Next step, drive traffic. At some point, you need to put your thing out into the world, out into the market. They need to see it. They need to interact with it. They need to engage with it. They need to respond. There needs to be a conversation here. You see where this is headed. So that's disciplines like sales, marketing, growth. product. Could be customer success, other folks. Number 8, watch. So after you've put forth a test, results aren't going to be immediate. Now the best in the world can run multiple of these tests simultaneously without impacting the, let's just say, the scientific rigor of that. And sometimes you have to sort of squint your eyes a little bit in order to do this at speed. But you need to make sure those results come in. Other departments would be like, Analytics. You would need to set up some tracking here beforehand. And so that leads us into number 9, which is measure results. After some set period of time— day, week, month, year, quarter, 3 years— you need to measure the results. Different tests can run for different periods depending on the scope of these tests. Some things are just gigantic, other things are small. The goal is to find the ones that take a small amount of effort but have a huge lever, which means the impact out the other side is giant. So small input, large output. And then finally, 10, you want to review your strategy, your thought process, how the idea occurred, where it came from, what were the results. Do we need to shift our plan? Do we need to shift our strategy? Has the market changed since the last hypothesis test, and what do we need to do? So that brings us all the way back around to number 1, where we develop a new hypothesis and we start the cycle all over again. So I've included an hourglass in here with sand running through it to show you that you don't have infinite time. In a world of resources that are not infinite but are finite— time, money, energy, people— We need to be very smart about what we do, execute well, understand how it impacted, and then iterate. It's all iteration speed. And if the slope of your iteration speed, the slope of your growth line, your learning line, your revenue, profitable revenue growth line is steeper than that of your competitors, you will win and continue to win. Your results will compound and you will start to create a bigger gap than the rest of the market. So that's it. In the words of Nike and Top Gun, don't think, just do it. Reach out if you need help. All right, everybody, have a great day. Hope that's helpful. Let's, uh, let's get it. Let's get out there and win. Alrighty.