In this Issue

✍️    Systems as Competitive Advantage
🩻    Business Challenge Diagnostic
🏎️    Red Line Business
🐦    It’s Not a Sales Challenge

✍️  Systems as Competitive Advantage

Great companies are built on great systems, not great people.

Every CEO wants to hire unicorns. Having exceptional talent can make all the difference in the world. The problem is unicorns are rare, hard to find, and hard to retain.

You can’t build a business or a growth strategy based on hiring unicorns. Systems are the difference maker.

According to a study by McKinsey, Companies with standardized processes and clear playbooks outperform their peers:

• 4.2x more likely to outperform direct competitors
• 30% higher revenue growth
• 5% less employee turnover

Effective systems empower talented, smart people to perform like unicorns.

🩻  Business Challenge Diagnostic

What’s holding your business back? I am excited to announce a brand new survey to assess common business growth challenges and how to overcome them. It’s fast, relevant, and free. Try it today.

🏎️  Red Line Business

I’ve been fortunate enough to only own manual transmission cars. There’s something so visceral to shift late and run the car up to the red line, especially on a track.

You can push a car to its red line for peak performance, but you can’t drive like that all the time.

The same is true for a business.

A “Red Line Business” is a company that has been run hot and pushed hard. It’s growing, but cracks start to form:

• Burnout: The leadership team and key individuals are working hard to keep up.
• Safety: Mistakes happen, especially in a physical business, leading to injuries and accidents on the job.
• Turnover: Morale can slip because jobs are under resourced, leading to turnover.
• Profitability: The company is busy and growing, but it’s less profitable.

You can red line a business for only so long.

The key to growth is to continually build for the next level to get to the next level. Hard work is necessary, but without increasing your organization’s capacity and capabilities you can only grow so far.

Discover if you have a Red Line Business with the Business Challenge Diagnostic.

🐦  It’s Not a Sales Challenge

Operational issues often masquerade as sales problems:

• Capacity Exceeds Demand: Revenue and sales aren’t meeting overhead requirements, often due to scaling up before validating customer demand.
• Fix Operations Second: Invest in operations and capabilities once we have the customers and revenue.
• Competing on Price: It’s getting harder and harder to acquire and retain profitable customers.

These are all sales issues. The business needs more customers and revenue to be sustainable. But the fix doesn’t start with sales. It starts with improving your operations and capabilities.

To give your sales team a fighting chance, they have to sell something your customers want to buy.

If your products and services are lagging behind the competition, or if you’ve invested in the wrong infrastructure, it shows up in your sales performance.

This is not a sales challenge. It’s fixed by evolving your products, services, and operations to meet the needs of your customers.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

We’d love to hear your feedback. Message with any thoughts, comments, or ideas for future issues.