Entrepreneurship

What a week.

We wrapped up our Less doing LIVE event in New York — 3 absolutely life-changing days, in many ways. Had some absolutely amazing people, just great networking. Lots of “doing”, incidentally.

One of the best talks we had was with the absolute rock star Todd Herman. One of my favorite people was really an honor having him speak, and if you haven’t somehow heard of him make sure you pause this article and go check him out.

Todd grew up a farm hand in Alberta and went on to build a coaching empire that’s spanned about 2 decades. The guy spends his days showing billionaires and Olympians how to be 10x better at what they do — just a master. He’s got a killer 90 Day Program he’s circuiting right now.

What Todd talked about was the difference between coaching and consulting. I’ve dealt with this a lot over the years at Less Doing, and Todd really helped enunciate what I’d been feeling for a while.

A natural way to break into coaching is to consult. You make more money, you get the contacts, you refine your methods, but honestly, I always struggled with it — the cash in the bank was nice, but I never felt good at the end of it.

We stopped consulting entirely at Less Doing this year — our whole focus is on coaching now.

The main lightbulb moment that Todd brought up was in understanding the key difference between consulting and coaching: the former is reactive, while the latter is proactive.

A coach is playing defense. You’ve got him/her in your corner, they’re there to help you fight your battles, and keep you in game shape for the ones on the way.

Consultants are fundamentally reactive. You’re generally called in as a consultant when something’s already wrong, and you’ve got a playbook for it. You teach the playbook and you’re off, it’s up to them to implement.

More often than not, you coach the playbook and go away, fruits of your labor vanishing a few days later — it’s set and forget, and that’s honestly not rewarding.

As a coach, you’re there in the trenches with the person. You’re fighting battles with them, you’re essentially a sounding board for their challenges and act as a way to help them overcome it. You get to help someone learn & grow and, most gratifyingly, you get to see that growth.

It’s also fundamentally meritocratic. As a coach I have to get results — you’re held to far lower standards as a consultant.

You’re a catalyzing factor rather than a bandage. That distinction from Todd really clicked with me and really appealed to why I love coaching. There’s a sense of pride you get from the results you bring to your clients that isn’t there as a consultant.

But, maybe that’s just me. I love it in the trenches.

I had a 6 month review with a client recently, who’d been making really, really great progress. He was procrastinating less, being way more productive, really getting shit done. We celebrated his achievements — it really was great work, and progress (particularly inner progress) is extremely hard.

And then we stopped. It was time to reflect.

(Breaking-the-4th-wall side-note: Run retrospectives on your personal growth. Constantly.)

The worst thing you can do when you attain a certain amount of success, is forgot about how hard you worked to get there.

The analogy I always give is of crossing the Grand Canyon. It’s like making it to the end of the Grand Canyon, and looking back and marveling at it — it’s incredible, right? The problem is, most people latch on to that high and forget all the rattlesnake bites and broken legs that got them there.

This is a very common issue with crossing the chasm, that I coach most of my clients on. Success isn’t a one time thing — it’s a boxing match. You’ll come out on top one moment and get knocked out the next. You might be out of the forest now, but there’s another one coming.

You should never lose sight of what got you there. Because when the next rodeo inevitably comes, you need to be mentally prepared for it — and the higher up on the pedestal you place yourself, the bigger the fall.

Nearly 80% of NFL players are bankrupt within 2 years of retiring. I’m not making this up — you can even cross-reference the always-accurate Wikipedia page.

While a lot of this is attributed to poor money management, there’s plenty of young and wealthy people in other industries who don’t face nearly the same financial decay. So why is it prevalent among athletes in particular?

They forget where they came from.

With the majority of athletes, particularly in the NBA and NFL, coming from lower-income neighbourhoods, the moment they get exposed to any kind of wealth the game is “over”. What was once a life of grinding to perform and saving every dollar for basketball camps, now is one of partying in different cities every week and spending $40k at a club.

Then, they retire at 35, with a lifestyle that drives the remainder of their savings to extinction within a few years. And of course, while playing, they never do what they did the entire first 20 years of their lives: prepare for the future.

You can never lose the hunger that drove you to success in the first place, and the best way to do that is to never forget the struggles on the way. The best founders have a single thing in common: they’re always slightly terrified.

Unless you have a healthy fear of your demons coming back, you won’t be ready to fight them again when they do.

Did you know last week had a “National Merry-Go-Round Day”? I’m not kidding, a “carousel historian” coined July 25th as that a few years back.

In my experience, a lot of business owners eventually find themselves stuck on a merry-go-round of sorts and that round-and-round thing can get pretty disheartening. I mean the ride not only lacks the thrills of a roller coaster, but you’re not going anywhere. Ever.

I find that many founders don’t take the opportunity to look at their “meta game” — the whole amusement park. Sure, the end product/service and customers may be interesting. But eventually, especially as a business grows, you get more and more detached from the end product as the routines and internal company issues start occupying a larger space in your head.

In other words, I’m pretty sure Walt Disney didn’t have to clean up every “protein spill” on the tea cups.

One of the biggest challenges of the “meta game” is routine — you have a lot of goals for your product/service, but why don’t you have any for your company itself? Indeed, if you’d like to break the routine and feel like you’re always moving forward, you need to start setting internal company goals.

We’ve developed this idea here at Less Doing that we call, “days to departure”. We track how many day’s notice we need to give one another before going on vacation. There’s no hard and fast rule, but most companies seem to require at least two week’s notice.

At Less Doing, we strive for one day.

If you think about it, demanding at least a fortnight’s notice and a subsequent, massive review process is pretty archaic. There are enough tools out there today that the average person’s job should be less about holding context or performing a necessary skill, and more about owning a particular goal and keeping the stakeholders in check. This is especially true for primarily digital businesses.

If an employee has to go offline for awhile, why would you need two weeks to get your ducks in a row? Why, in this day and age, as a digital facing business, is a 2-week absence from an employee so crippling that you need to roadmap so far in advance?

The short answer is complacency.

Too much attention is placed on anticipatory planning, and less on resiliency. A company that demands its employees give months notice for a week’s vacation is not one that’s built to withstand the rapidly changing tides of the industry. If one engineer going offline for a few days requires a quarter’s worth of planning, how are you going to deal with an economy that’s more chaotic than it’s ever been?

You can extend this same idea to your employees leaving. The industry standard is 2 weeks — two weeks?! Companies essentially rely on an employee sticking around (usually frivolously), followed by a manager or a founder taking over their jobs until the new hire is onboard. Often times that means several weeks of someone absorbing the person’s workload until there’s a replacement.

As controversial as this sounds, if you need to take over a departing person’s workload for more than 2 or 3 days, you’re doing something wrong.

If it takes you weeks of management before hiring an employee to take over a workload, it means you haven’t put in place the proper communication & workflow channels that can hold down the fort for a departing employee.

If you take the right steps to ensure that context is always shared, over communicated, and held evergreen in accessible places, while also preventing pigeon holing among your cross functional teams, then a departing employee should be able to leave immediately.

It’s obviously a high standard to set for yourself — but if you want to build a resilient organization that’s built to last, it’s a reasonable one. Stop relying on two weeks notice.

It’s so last year.https://upscri.be/6892b4?as_embed=true

There are two types of roles in a business: ones that take you farther and ones that take you further.

Bear with me here.

When structuring roles in your company, you’ve got an opportunity to do one of two things: on one hand, you can build a basis for an employee to explore, refine & expand their own position in a particular skill. These are general technical positions — think sales, programming, etc. These are the roles that take employees farther — they enable a very surface-level career growth, strictly along skill lines.

On the other hand, you can structure your roles not around particular skills but around business areas. Hiring people to take ownership of some pillar of your business — whether it’s a market, a technology, an underlying value — and deep diving into it. Rather than focusing a person’s attention on being, say, an engineer, their focus and company identity is refocused around the business goals they’re solving.

Both types of roles have their benefits (and really, many roles have some mix of both), and fundamentally your business needs to accommodate a mix of both. Ultimately though, roles that are built to take one farther generally end up in folks moving on from your company — there’s a skill ceiling to any role, and beyond that point, there’s little you can do to accommodate further leveling up.

On the other hand, roles that take folks further are the ones that form the pillar of your company. These are the lifers, the ones who stick around for half a decade, a decade or more, and pick up a PhD in the minutiae and finer points of some business aspect. These are the ones who drive your business forward, the foundations on which you 10x your growth.

Most companies have too many roles that take you farther, and not enough that take you further.

I know what you’re thinking: “Alright, that’s just peachy Ari, so what now? Do I just scatter the words farther or further a bunch of times in my job posts?”

Ultimately, the way to make use of this dichotomy is to rethink the way you see a “role”. Rather than hiring for specific roles, the best companies are those that (for at least some part of their hiring budget) hire generalists. I don’t mean the tacky startup thing of hiring “hustlers” — I mean they focus less on skills-based jobs and more on ownership.

Rather than hiring a strong technologist, hire someone with the eagerness to take ownership of a particular business domain who also happens to have those technological skills. Rather than hiring an engineer and then assigning them to a cross-functional team later, hire for a specific team right from the get go.

When you take that approach, you start attracting folks who aren’t just interested in leveling up their particular skills — you find people who are actually inspired by the business problems you’re trying to solve.

And while you might find yourself compromising slightly on skill, it’s generally more than made up for in dedication & results.

Ever seen a Japanese bonsai tree?

That’s your business.

Even if you’re dealing with Excel sheets, you’re a craftsman. And the Japanese get that.

In fact, they even have a word for doing things perfectly, and I came across it in Helena Escalante’s excellent newsletter:

Kodawari.

One definition says it means to obsess with details. Another (and this is a very accurate one) is: a sincere, unwavering focus on what you’re doing, with a goal of making it perfect.

Now, you don’t want to get bogged down by the details or miss the forest for the trees, but Kodawari is a standard that we set for ourselves when we refuse to cut corners on something important.

Why?

The most incredible things were created because the creators wouldn’t compromise.

Steve Jobs created Apple because he was focused. He wanted things to be done not just any way, but the right way. It’s not just perfectionism, it’s the craft of doing things perfectly because you know it can be done better.

If you look at the Japanese, you can see it’s really ingrained in their culture. They take pride in their attention to detail.

Have you ever seen Japanese pastries? They look perfect, inside and out.

When I was in Tokyo, I saw these young ladies in nice uniforms, cleaning the streets with a dustpan; with focus, pride, and craftsmanship.

That’s Kodawari in action.

I’m always saying that we don’t want to get stuck in the details, what we want to do is focus on that ONE detail.

That one detail is really worth it, and I’m willing to spend 10 minutes on it because what I’m going to uncover, will have real value for me.

Perfection takes time, don’t rush it.

It’s not necessarily more efficient for the process, but the benefits carry over. There’s such a satisfaction when you remove one step from a process, and it’s incredibly motivating.

Invest your time in the beneficial details. Clip that leaf over and over again, even if no one else understands. You are the leader and you know what is right for your business.

Kodawari means knowing your craft even better, and making your business the best it can be.

It’s not just perfectionism — it’s relentless devotion. You started your business with passion but it’s easy to slip up and say: this will do.

It won’t.

This is your craft. Don’t cut corners.

Take pride in it.

tl;dr What can we learn from Kodawari?

1. Know when not to compromise.

2. Perfection takes time.

3. Don’t focus on making things perfect — focus on doing them perfectly.