Containing complexity as you scale is key
Reviv has really hit it’s stride. The business is growing almost too fast.
And the full implications of ingesting over 1000 customers per month is starting to be felt.
Because it’s not a pure d2c ecom play. Rather it also has a community and service-based component because we track progress diaries.
And we’re preparing lots of various projects to go deeper in certain countries, certain channels and new product areas.
Yet i’m still the only full-time person.. it’s just me and something like 15-20 part-timers doing various things. I manage all of them direct pretty much. Through the ‘Beast Method’.
And doing this has, in my view, allowed me to reign in complexity quite well. Which is the topic I want to talk about today because i’ve developed a bit of a philosophy around it.
A single Clickup space
So my philosophy is that everything needs to happen in a single Clickup space, at least for the forseeable future.
And I am the only one that creates folders and lists to ensure that I completely understand the structure. I know where to find everything and nothing that the company is more than a couple clicks away.
Plus since everyone is using Beast Method I know that the statuses and due dates are up to date on every task.
So if I wanna run through literally everything that the company is doing it takes me about 30 minutes of clicking through all of the folders.
No pinging someone on Slack to get the latest status.
No wondering what someone is doing.
It’s all there in black and white and it’s beautiful. It is literally the best run company I have ever been apart of by a long shot. Hahahahaha ok i might be a bit biased.
A lot of CEO’s and managers let complexity get out of hand
I cannot recount how many times I have seen this happen. It is literally pretty much every time.
A CEO hires a bunch of managers and they all do their own thing while aligning in update meetings that happen every week or two. These update meetings take the form of either 1-1’s with the CEO or senior leadership team meetings.
The CEO has no way way of really knowing what is happening in that person’s team unless they start randomly stopping by people’s desks.
And if they want an update on something they need to ask. Which requires interfering with what the manager was working on so that they could provide an update.
This to me is a complete and utter waste of time.
I never ask anyone for these wasteful updates. Because I just click through their folders and in a few minutes i’m up to speed.
And if their cards are not updated.. i drop a bunch of comments like “these cards don’t seem updated.. what’s going on?” Problem is usually resolved the same day.
If I ever see a card that doesn’t look like something I agreed to prioritise, I also drop a quick comment asking why it’s being worked on.
In this way I stay abreast of what everyone is working on and make sure we don’t spend money on things that we should not be investing in.
And it took me barely any time.
But what if the team is a lot larger?
This is a question that a number of folks have asked me in the past… they might ask “Ken… it sounds like your system works well at 20-30 people but can it work when it is 100 or say hundreds of people?”
And my answer is absolutely.
How? You just layer it like a computer program.
I would do exactly what I do now with my direct reports but some of these cards would then need to be broken down by them into tasks that their teams actually execute on.
So they are staying abreast of the detailed tasks plus they’re updating my tasks, which are a bit higher level.
I’ve done this a number of times already in the past with clients and it works well.
But it does mean that the manager needs to get updates from their team and then update the higher level cards that i’ll comment on. But it’s a less granular update because part of the idea of having a manager is that I don’t want to deal with all of the details myself.
But if I do want the details I know exactly how to find those lists that have the detailed tasks because I’ve usually set those lists up with the manager.
The whole point is…I always control the structure of how we work.
Things never turn into the Wild West where someone just starts making lots of folders and lists on their own without aligning with me. Because then chaos ensues.
When are you trying to do too much?
Someone recently asked me.. “But what if you’re doing lots of stuff and you can’t manage everything in a single Clickup space?”
As I knew he only had about 50 people in his company I was very skeptical of this.
And explained my viewpoint that if you cannot control everything in your company with a single Clickup space than you probably do not have the mental capacity to stay on top of all of that stuff anyway. And so you’re probably trying to do too much.
At least that is the way I think about it.
If I cannot control and have transparency on all of the important initiatives of my company, than I need to reign things in. I’m spreading me and my company too thin.
Closing thoughts
In today’s article I explain something that I think is absolutely foundational to a founder as they begin to scale a company…. how to control complexity.
I recommend doing it in such a way that you:
And if you manage to achieve this… I think you are going to really enjoy scaling.
You’re going to be able to steer it like driving a motorbike through the crowded streets of Bangkok rather than chasing it like a person who has missed the bus.