I hired a new A Player.
Originally sent exclusively to The Letter subscribers on August 17th. Want to be the first to get my personal newsletter in your inbox every Monday at 7am? Subscribe for free here.
I’ve got myself a new A-player brain.
He’s our new FD.
Hard-working. Answers the phone. Motivated. Realistic. Wants growth. And importantly, he’ll stand up to me.
I can already see that he won’t simply agree with my opinions. He’ll bring his own, and they’ll have merit.
That’s exactly what I want.
Companies need good heads to march forward every day. But if you want to march forward and win, you need great heads.
I think there should be tension between entrepreneurship and management.
Not tension in morals. You need the same values, the same destination and the same desire to win.
But there should be tension in thinking.
Entrepreneurs decide the outcome. Great managers help determine the method.
Entrepreneurship solves big problems. Not just inside companies, but across the world.
Entrepreneurs challenge the status quo. We look at something everyone else accepts and ask:
“Why does it have to be this way?”
And never forget; if it could be better it’s as good as broken.
Entrepreneurs eat constraints for breakfast. Folk will try and put constraints and obstacles in your way every day.
Where most people see a reason to give up, entrepreneurs nestle into the constraint and start looking for a way through it.
But entrepreneurs need managers to excel.
Without great management, entrepreneurial energy can become chaos and even worse lost.
I’ve come to believe you need four hardcore believers at the heart of a growing business:
VISION + FINANCE + OPERATIONS + MARKETING
You might be the vision.
But you need three other people who believe almost as much as you do that excel in the above.
People who will be on your vision but spar with you for the best outcome.
Challenge you.
Tell you when you’re wrong and you tell them when they’re wrong. For the companies success not the individuals ego.
And then fight like hell alongside you to achieve the outcome.
As the owner, I think there are five things you should increasingly obsess over:
Innovation. Marketing. Culture. Capital allocation. Recruiting.
And that last one never stops.
You are always recruiting.
Because truly great people are effectively free. They create more value than they cost. They make money for the business.
On Friday, I found myself in a difficult meeting.
Business does that to you.
The question isn’t whether difficulties will arrive. They will.
The question is what you do with them.
Greatness is using difficulty as fuel.
There is nearly always a path through.
Obstacles and difficulties are overcome by work, persistence and good thinking.
And having a few smart people standing beside you doesn’t make business easy.
It just makes it easier.
Remember this too:
Most people will never believe as much as you do.
They’ll doubt.
They’ll question.
They’ll tell you why it won’t work.
Punch the doubt out.
Stay in the race.
When you get knocked down, get the hell back up again.
And finally, sometimes the answer you’re desperately searching for isn’t somewhere out there.
Sometimes the diamonds are buried beneath your own feet.
You just need to excavate them.
Amazon is a brilliant example.
Amazon was losing money.
Burning more cash each week than a lottery winner’s loot.
But sitting inside that business was infrastructure Amazon had built to solve its own problems.
That infrastructure eventually became Amazon Web Services.
AWS changed everything.
It grew into an extraordinarily profitable business and became a major profit engine that helped fuel Amazon’s wider retail growth.
The diamond was already beneath Jeff’s feet.
He just had to excavate it.
So when business gets difficult, don’t only ask:
“What new thing do we need?”
Ask:
“What have we already built, learned, acquired or created that we haven’t fully exploited yet?”
Your next breakthrough might already be sitting inside your business.
The diamonds might already be beneath your feet.
To your continued success
James
