Less is More: The Magic of a Simple Business

Catch. Tough, right? Now catch. Much easier. So this one idea will change how you think about business. It's keep simple, but not the way you think. Fundamentally, it's about how to make a more profitable business and doing this from the top down, from a strategy, marketing, sales, product delivery perspective. And I want to take you through an exercise first, and then I'll talk about it afterwards. Let's imagine that I have a marketing campaign. And I want you to understand some of the benefits of my services and my product, right? So I might have 4 different benefits that I think are really, you know, really material that I want someone to know, okay? And so the problem is the vast majority of marketing looks like this. Ready? 1, 2, 3, catch. Well, it's very hard to catch all 4 at the same time. But if I just said, hey, real quick, I want you to understand something. Catch, you'd probably be able to catch that. And so it's a great visual analogy for the value of a simple message. Ken Siegel, who wrote the book Insanely Simple, talks about this when he was in his meetings with Steve Jobs. And that was an exercise that he took the marketing team through. Whenever they'd want to start saying multiple points, it would— he knew that it would eventually devolve into every single thing under the sun that we could possibly say about this thing, which meant that we hadn't done enough strategic thinking around what is the one thing that matters most. And so the saying that they live by, which I really love, find the most compelling point and communicate it in the most compelling way. I'll say that again because I think it's so important. You focus on the one most compelling point and then you communicate it in the most compelling way. 1,000 songs in your pocket, right? It's, I think, a discipline that has to be taken pervasively from the top down. It has to start with the business owner, has to start with the CEO, has to start with the founder, Whoever person is calling the shots in terms of what we're doing as a business, because this level of simplicity, right, takes more work than complexity. And that's what's crazy about it, is that complexity is less work than simplicity, because complexity is typically the child of lazy thinking. We can't prioritize, we're not sure which one of these 4 things is most important, so we'll just say 'em all. We have these 4 features, rather than limit it to 1 and then make that 1 better, We're just gonna see all 4 because we wanna appeal to all sorts of different people. But most really big business ideas, in my opinion, are the opposite of what you would naturally do. Because if what people's natural instincts led them to do were the things that made businesses successful, then most people would have successful businesses, and that's anything but true. And so it's the constraint of forcing yourself to say no, there are 3 things here, there is one of these that is more important, and we have to keep whittling it down or chunking up the language such that this one point is the most compelling. And you're thinking, okay, well maybe this just only applies to marketing, right? No, it has to go all the way through. 'Cause think about it, if you figure out that this one core promise or core feature, right, is the most important thing, then that informs our product strategy. What features are we going to build? What services are we going to deliver? And if we only have one to do, wouldn't we spend so much disproportionate amount of time trying to make that thing exceptional? Like, You look at Raising Cane's, right? The chicken shop. They have 7 ingredients on the menu. Like they arguably couldn't have fewer ingredients in order to make a meal. They've got toast, they got fries, they've got chicken tenders, and then they've got sauce and beverages. There's 6 and there's one more, I can't remember what it is, right? And so I think coleslaw or something like that. But anyways, point being, they could, like someone saying, hey, have you considered adding an 8th item? Yeah, they probably thought about it. But the ability to say this is what matters most. If we only did this one thing, would we accomplish all of our goals? And I think it's one of the most powerful questions. Frank Slootman, who wrote the book Snowball, talks about this one thing where he says a lot of companies will take, you know, they'll have 5 objectives and 10, 5 sub-objectives and they go into sub-objective nightmare, right? He says if we cannot say what the one thing that's most important in the business, then the job of the CEO, that CEO has failed. And I'm guilty of this too. So I'm not saying, this is not me saying this from a pedestal. This is me, you know, this is me trying to document my own thinking rather than say this is a sermon. Is that what one thing, if it were true 12 months from now, would change everything for our business? And what's interesting is that when you ask that question, like what one thing would have to be true? Like if we had a dedicated lead channel that we owned, that one thing would change everything. If we just had a great supply of talent for our HVAC company, for new technicians, if we just did that by the end of the year, it would change everything for us. If we were just able to pull cash flow from 90 days to 30 days for each sale that we do, that would change everything for us. Thinking about that as the what must be true then becomes the most important business objective because you might have objective 2, 3, 4, 5, but if you just did 1, then it likely makes 2, 3, 4, 5 irrelevant. 2, by the time you accomplish number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 might have changed because you will now have new resources and new assets at your disposal. And so you're basically trying to make a decision about variables before the board has changed from the decisions that you're ultimately trying to make. And one of the difficult parts, and this is the really nefarious one, once you make that one simple decision, like this is the priority, this is what we're doing, all systems go. Every department seeks to make this one thing true about our world so that it relates back to this business. Sometimes solutions take time. Sometimes you have to sit with the pain of an unbuilt bridge without building a second bridge. So let's say, you know, that let's use the technician example. You're like, man, we got the phones ringing off the hook. I could expand my practice, I could expand my XYZ if I just had more talent to deliver, right? Well, if you're in that boat, you know, once you've realized that, you might kick off some sort of recruiting search, you might kick off some sort of community or some sort of play where you get referrals from all these different networks that would generate technicians for you or internships or whatever, right? But the thing is, is that 1 month in, that still might not really have happened. As in, like, you might not have this overflow of new talent in the business, right?. But you know that if that one thing were true 12 months from now, that's the only thing that matters. And so the hardest part, and this is a lesson, I'm kind of making this public so that me sticking with it too, is that sometimes you have to let the little fires burn. Is that like you could, and like we sometimes do, and this is, I'm guilty of this, I will kick off a real meaty solution to a big thing. Like if we do this, this is the only thing we have to do and we'll crush it. But then because I'm impatient and a human being, I'll be like, it's, you know, it's 30 days later and I'll be like, oh my God, it's not solved yet. And then I'll wanna try and solve it another way. When in reality me trying to solve it in 2 or 3 ways ends up just pooling resources from the one way that I know will work but will take time. And so I would rather take the sure bets on the thing that has the absolute highest leverage impact on my business rather than many small bets that might or might not work. Because the thing is, is like this is the death by a thousand paper cuts. And so it's, it's that, that one thing that then also simplifies what everyone's doing. So this is an absolute high-level strategy thinking process. But what's really fascinating about this is, and so they talk about Steve Jobs. He has this great comparison between art of Western and Eastern art. And you're like, where's he going with this? I'll explain. So Western art, when most people imagine like creating art, they think of a blank canvas, right? Or a blank document. And so then what you do is you add to that document, right? What's interesting is that the Eastern philosophy is opposed to this. So they think of it as like you have this big slab of jade And so all we're doing is removing the excess to reveal the art or the sculpture underneath. And so it's the difference between Eastern and Western philosophy. And as it applies to business, it's kind of the same way, which is like when you delete everything that sucks about a phone, what remains is an iPhone. And so I think about that with services a lot because a lot of times it's so easy to just say like, okay, well I'm gonna add more to the canvas, right? But when you think about it from pulling things away, it's like what are all the distractions that I'm creating internal to my business but also to my customers? Because you think about that crumpled paper, right? If I say I'm going to help you with this one thing, then just help with that one thing. That's it. And Jack Dorsey says this, and I love this quote. He says, "Perfect every detail and limit the number of details." It's so elegant. Like if you're going to do it, do it well. And the vast majority of things you can't do. This has been such a struggle for me for my entire career because the more capable you get, the more resources you have at your disposal, the more opportunities present themselves, the harder it is to consistently say no. Jobs also said, "Focus is the number of amazing ideas that you say no to." Right? "I'm just as proud of the things we did as the things we didn't do," is one of his famous quotes. And so the idea that they liked saying over and over again was amazingly simple and simply amazing. How do we just think like, I'm just gonna make one sandwich, and if I just made this one sandwich to be the best sandwich in the city, I will probably have lines out the door. I don't need to have 20 sandwiches because if I just make this sandwich the best sandwich, and I think about it from the experience of someone eating it, the experience of them waiting for it, the experience of them ordering it, how I source the ingredients, how those are gonna get combined, at what temperature, in what order, right? Who's gonna be the one providing them? Like what are the price points that I'm gonna charge? Like all of these types of things, It's the obsession on the details, but we're limited because you can't go deep if you have too many things. And fundamentally, that's the problem is like myself included, we all have too many things going on and you just can't go that deep when you're spread too thin. And the thing is, is that all of the outsized returns come on the end of the curve, right? So it's like you do this work, do this work, do this work, and it's only when you're like, okay, I'm at the 50% mark, meaning I'm like about average, right? You're at the 75% mark, you're above average. You maybe do a little bit better, right? But not that much better. You're at the 90% mark. Okay, now we're starting to see it. But the difference between 90th percentile and 95th percentile, boom. Between 95th and 99, boom, in terms of who captures the market. Who's the one that people just can't help but say good things about you, right? And so I just think about what are these need-to-believes? What are the things that if I just did one thing, and if you're thinking about this, you're like, well, there's a lot of things that if I did this, it would grow my business. We're not thinking increments, we're thinking orders of magnitude. So yes, if you improve your sales close rate, your business will grow. If you bumped your margin by a certain percentage, your business will grow. If you increase your leads, sure, the business will grow. But I'm not talking about those improvements. Those are what I consider the sausage-making of business. That's the daily, that's the in and out, that's just like how you run a business. I'm talking about what are the orders of magnitude changes, the bets that we're gonna make with our additional resources. 'Cause fundamentally, let's say you've got 100 people who work for you. It could be 10, it could be 1, doesn't matter. The point is that you have X amount of people who work for you. Maybe they're at 70% utilization or 80% utilization. They've got a little bit of bandwidth on top of the sausage-making they have to do every day to keep the trains going. So you have to scoop that little 20, 30%, right? And you have one real bet that you can make on it. And so it's like you want to make that bet worth it. What's interesting is like, how do you come up with these ideas, right? And so I think this level of like, how do we just remove everything that doesn't matter? And I try to reverse my thinking process. This way, this is a lot like Munger's invert, like okay, if I wanted to destroy my business, what would I do? Like, it's a really powerful frame. This is a different frame, which is how much can I take away and still have it be good? And not only be good, but it probably is better. And so I'll give you a real-world example. In the school games, we basically used to have more calls that we did, and we had more stuff that we put in the community. We had like 3 a week, and then we also had like content was getting dumped in there,. And basically the number one reason that people were canceling was overwhelm. It was not, oh, I need to provide more value. It was, I need to provide more value per second in fewer total seconds. And so rather than say, okay, so what we did was we removed two of the three calls, kept it to one, and we moved the big download from once a month to once a quarter so that people could get on top of it, right? And we removed some of the things that were native and turned on inside of the app so that people would have fewer things to do when they got in. So they were like, oh my God, there's so many things I have to do, I can't think about it, and then they leave, right? And so we want, kinda like you wanna, like you only introduce something when it's required or necessary for that person to get the desired value. Rather than say, here's all the different things you can do, it's like, well, why don't we just do this one thing that most people find valuable first and then perfect that step? And then once we've done that, maybe we'll show the next step. If you're actually subscribing to this ideology, which is something that I'm really trying hard to, I'd say like the inversion process is how I've made a lot of strategic decisions. And I'm also thinking more and more often with this frame of one, which is if I can't decide what the one most important thing is, then I'm not doing my job and I need to think about it longer. Because the thing is, is that one provides more efficiency than just about any strategy. You want to cut costs, you want to improve your margins, do one thing. There's way fewer things to do. And if you do one thing, you also need to have way fewer meetings about it because there's only one thing. And when you have just one thing, you don't need to have lots of people at the meetings. You just have a very small group of very smart people. And fundamentally, that's how these products start to get organized. And the easiest way to screw up a project like this is to give it too much time. And so if it is simple, you can also do it faster. So you could say in 12 weeks, and it doesn't— what's crazy about this is that you can do projects, even at like huge company levels in 12 weeks because you have more resources, right? And so just thinking, what is the one thing that matters most? If I'm not sure, what are all the things that I can delete away and have it still be valuable? And if I do know what that one thing is, how deep on that one thing can I go? Because if I made this one thing true at the end of the year, all of my other problems would shrink into irrelevance. They would no longer matter. It makes the noise go down. But the thing is, is that you have to subscribe to this philosophy through and through. Like you have to believe in it. Balls to bones because you think you're overwhelmed. I promise your team's 10 times more overwhelmed because they don't know what direction you're in because you're changing it all the time because you have so many different conflicting priorities. And so having this focus of one is easy to communicate. People remember it because it's only one crumpled piece of paper, right? It's easy to sell because it's one thing and you can just make that point as compelling as humanly possible. When you're delivering on product or services, you just perfect that one result, that one deliverable. A lot of marketing agencies just expand and expand and expand their breadth of like what they do, all these different services they tack on, tack on, tack on, right? Now if you're in an enterprise value business, those companies, if you're serving Fortune 100, it's a little bit of a different use case there because for them the one thing is full integration, right? Like that would be the chunked up one thing for that business, right? If they actually had one person that could globally support their business, then that would be the one big thing we try and solve for, right? But many businesses, it's like if you just got them leads consistently, they would be happy. Like you don't need to offer these other services, the other quote, value benefits. Because if you just did the one thing that mattered, they wouldn't care about anything else. And I remember there was this moment in Gym Launch when we had a handful of gym owners reach out and say, hey, can we hop on a call? And I said, sure. And we're like, hey, we're trying to improve the product, blah, blah, blah. And they just cut us off and they were like, we just need leads, just more leads. That's it. If you just give us more leads, we'll be happy. And so it was one of those, It's, uh, it's the economy, stupid, right? It's kind of like the president. Like if you just fix the one thing that matters, and if I'm, if it sounds like I'm hammering this a lot, it's because I'm hammering it into my own brain. And if you think of like, if you were to deconstruct this, like I love this little quote of, uh, to achieve great things, two ingredients are needed, a plan and not enough time. And so it forces you to prioritize so that you can actually do the things that matter most. And I think that this is something that I'm trying to artificially do. You see like Elon talk about this. For those of you who hate Elon, just pretend he's cool for this conversation. You're also wrong. Anyways, point being, if you see the rate of innovation that they're able to do across the companies that he owns, a big part of it he talks about is accelerating timelines, which is making unreasonable goals because the unreasonable goals create a forcing function for performance. And this has also been, Brian Chesky talks about this from Airbnb. There's a bunch of other Y Combinator founders who talk about this where they're like, If you want to speed up something happening, number 1, big public goal. Number 2, make it really aggressive on timeline. Number 3, check up frequently. Number 4, remove people who shouldn't be on the project because they just create more communication cycles and more waste and more people to talk and, and get, you know, approvals from. Fundamentally, you have to make bets and sometimes you just have to let people go, as in like let them work. Let them cook, right? Because if you get out of their way, a lot of times if you have a clear goal, clear objective, you're checking in regularly, you don't need to do much more than that. And so this is something that I'm half shouting at myself as a reminder of the few things that matter most. And if I do not have that one thing for my team, then I have failed, not them. So that is my insanely simple— it's been top of mind because I just read a couple books that mentioned Jobs recently. It's been really valuable for me. And so when I'm thinking about my own marketing campaigns, I'm like, what is the one most compelling thing I can bring up? And how can I say that one thing in the most compelling way? Hey, if you enjoyed this, I had one of my best presentations of all time where I talk about how to accelerate how you get to your goals, whether they be financial, physical, whatever, by focusing on leverage. And so it's the first real presentation I made after basically getting into this whole YouTube world. And it was just kind of like compiled from years of me thinking about wealth creation. And if that's at all interesting to you, you can click and watch it here. Enjoy.