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 or my product, right? So, I might have four 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? One, two, three.

Catch. Well, it's very hard to catch all four 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 Seagull, who wrote the the book uh 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. A thousand 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 four things is most important.

So, we'll just say them all. We have these four features. Rather than limit it to one and then make that one better, we're just going to see all four because we want to 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 fig of forcing yourself to say no. There are three 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 is just only applies to marketing, right? No, it has to go all the way through.

Cuz 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 Canes, right? The chicken shop. They have seven 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 six and there's one more.

I can't remember what it is, right? And so I think kleslaw or something like that. But anyways, point being they could like someone saying, "Hey, have you considered adding an eighth 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 Frank Slutman who wrote the the book Snowball talks about this one thing where he says a lot of companies will take you know they'll have five objectives and 10 five subobjectives and and they go into subobjective you know 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 uh 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 to to pull cash flow from 90 days to to 30 days uh 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 one then it likely makes 2 3 4 5 1 irrelevant. Two by the time you accomplish number one 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 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 like let's use the technician example. You're like man we got the phone's 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 uh that would generate technicians for you or internships or whatever, right?

But the thing is is one month in that still might not really have happened as in like you might not have this over you 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 the only thing we have to do and we'll crush it. But then because I'm impatient in 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 want to try and solve it another way. When in reality, me trying to solve it in two or three ways ends up just pulling 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 a absolute highle 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 they 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 with 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 going to add more to the canvas, right?

But when you when you think about it from from pulling things away, it's like what are all the distractions that I'm creating internal my business, but also to my customers? Because you think about that that that that crumple of 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 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 more the harder it is to consistently say no. Jobs also said, "Focus is the 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 make 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 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 going to get combined, at what temperature, in what order, right? who's going to be the one providing them?

how like what are the price points in like all of these types of things are it's the obsession on the details but we're limit 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 I'm at the 50% mark meaning I'm like about average, right? And you're at the 75% mark. You're above average.

You maybe do a little bit better, right? But not not that much better. You're at the 90% mark.

Okay, now we're starting to see it. But the difference between 90th percentile, 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 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, you would your business would grow.

If you bumped your, you know, margin by certain percent, your business would grow. If you if you increase your lead, sure, the business would grow. But I'm not talking about those improvements.

Those are what I consider the sausage making a business. That's the daily. That's the in-n-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 going to make with our additional resources. Because fundamentally, let's say you've got, you know, a hundred people who work for you.

It could be 10, it could be one, doesn't matter. The point is that you have x amount of people work for you. Maybe they're at 70% utilization or 80% utilization.

They've got a little bit little bit of bandwidth on top of the sausage making they have to do every day to keep the 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 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 trying to reverse my thinking process this way. This is a lot like um Munger's uh 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. Uh in the school games uh we we basically used to have more calls that we did and we had more stuff that we put in the community.

We had like three a week and then we also had like content was getting dumped in there and basically the number one reason that people were cancelling 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, except 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 kind of like you want to like you only introduce something when it's required or necessary for that person to get the 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 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 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 projects 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 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 agents just expand and expand and expand their breath 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 an 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? Um 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 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 um a handful of gym owners reach out and say, "Hey, can we hop on a call? " And I said, "Sure.

" and uh you know we're like hey we're trying to improve the product blah blah and they just like cut us off and they were like we just need leads like just more leads that's it like if you just give us more leads we'll be happy and so it was one of those like you know it's it's uh it's the economy stupid right it's kind of like the present 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 you hate Elon just pretend he's cool for this conversation. Um 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, is accelerating timelines, which is making unreasonable goals because the unreasonable goals create a forcing function for performance.

And this has also been uh Brian Chesy talks about this from Airbnb. There's a bunch of other Y cominator founders who talk about this where they're like, if you want to speed up something happening, number one, big public goal, number two, make it really aggressive on timeline. Number three, check up frequently.

Number four, 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 um 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 I just read a couple books that mention 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, uh, 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, um, by focusing on leverage. And so, it's the the first real presentation I made after basically getting into this whole YouTube world.

Um, 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. And dry.