Business
Coaching
We have consulted for and coached over 100 CEOs and corporate officers. We’ve run companies, sat on boards, run workshops, and much more. We’ve been management consultants charging $30,000 per day for big corporate clients, but we prefer to work with smaller businesses.
We believe most coaches see things from their perspective rather than working with clients to take a broader, more Bayesian perspective on their business. We teach decision science and cost/benefit analysis, and we believe that although day-to-day execution rules, getting the big stuff right is more important.
Governance
Governance of a business, a family, or a fortune is harder than most people think. As Richard Feynman said, “First, you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest one to fool.” People who have been successful are overconfident. Don’t make big decisions alone. Don’t surround yourself with people who are like you. We believe every entrepreneur should create a personal advisory board who can help vet different options. You should be able to explain what you want to do, what your options are, why you lean toward one or two particular options, and ask them what you should do. Give careful consideration to outliers that could be bigger than expected later. Try to take small steps and validate your assumptions before making a big commitment.
Sales and marketing
Sales solves a lot of business problems. Too many small businesses make the mistake of premature scaling — trying to become a bigger company when they aren’t ready. This is the reason we don’t believe in business school (note: one of us was a candidate to be the dean of Stanford business school) — rather than going to business school to learn how to build a business, building a business is the best way to learn how to build a business.
Have you automated sales and marketing? Do you have a full-blown marketing stack? If not, read our book on sales funnels.
A business is built on sales. If you can make the sale, you can improve everything else. If you can’t make the sale, you can close it down and go do something else.
Complex adaptive systems
The business world is a set of interconnected ecosystems that continuously adapt to change. To do nothing new is to fall behind. In business, there are only three activities:
Process
Projects
Decisionmaking
To manage process, you use lean principles, like Kai-zen (incremental improvement), local optimization, and micro-optimization. This video will inspire you to learn more:
To manage projects, use agile principles, like Kanban:
For decisions, use the right decision process and tools, and document your decisions. Most people — especially business people — aren’t very rigorous in their decision process. Their biggest mistake is having essentially already made the decision before going through the exercise of deciding. They don’t give enough weight to other options and are overconfident that their instincts are right. See our section on decision science to learn more.
Systems
Part of both agile and lean is creating systems. We want to get knowledge out of people’s heads and into systems, where everyone can access it. For smaller businesses, we use a system called Notion, which is extremely flexible. Larger businesses often get locked into enterprise software that fossilizes business processes and inhibits innovation. See how we use notion with clients, and see our Notion page for more examples (note - the examples here are for personal use, we’re working on a business Notion page).
Simplification
Business processes and documents are often too complex. We help streamline everything from legal documents to shipping to design to customer service. Most small businesses have a lot of services, yet they don’t understand the basic principles of service design. We help simplify everything. We are especially good at simplifying legal documents so they are easy to read, easy to use, and scalable. If your non-disclosure isn’t on one page, talk with us about how we can help get everything unstuck and flowing faster.
Budgeting
Most companies don’t think much about budgeting. It’s a weak point. Budgeting should be adaptive and flexible. We recommend using the principles of Beyond Budgeting to build a more dynamic system for allocating resources.
Cyber security
Most small companies don’t take cybersecurity seriously enough. We want to make sure your data is protected, your use of passwords is safe, and your systems can withstand attacks.
Management
Generally, less management is better than too much management. Listen to Richard Sheridan, author of Joy, inc., give you a taste of what’s possible:
Summary
We enjoy working with flexible business owners on their business and personal lives. We can make it a business expense, rather than a personal expense. Contact us to set up a time to talk.