Fight in the arena that was designed for you

The rules of the game are very different depending on who is running the show.

That is the one thing that has consistently been true my entire career.

In some companies it was more about relationships and perception.

In others it was more about sticking to processes or your results.

And now that i’m fully focused on my own company, I get to make the rules.

And here are some of the things I’ve learned and am thinking about.

Revenue and profit are the universal yardstick

Everyone leader is gonna have their own philosophy on culture and management.

And to try to argue your own against someone who has a different point of view is in my experience a complete waste of time.

But at the end of the day it comes down to the bottom line and questions like:

• Is your company growing?
• Is it profitable?

My D2C ecom, Reviv, is hovering at a $50k monthly revenue rate right now for March having growing 50-100% month-on-month for about 4 months now.

And we’ve consistently turned about a third of our revenue into profit.

Another founder can sit here and spout their theory to me till the cows come home. But if they haven’t turned a dollar in profit yet.. then it’s all just fluff to me.

They have not figured out how to create a viable business yet. So why are they advising others on business again?

Controlling your destiny

Many founders have taken on significant VC investment and are at the mercy of their investors.

I’ve seen numerous times just how inefficient this is.

Because many of these investors are not in the details and so they love to sound smart in meetings and give advice based on their experience.

Only problem is oftentimes that ‘experience’ has a completely different context. Perhaps they were in consulting or in corporate or on a board of a startup.

But did they start a company from scratch in that domain and succeed?

And if the answer to that question is ‘no’…. than I think drawing parallels to the startup’s current situation and giving them a mandate on what to do is, in my experience, a recipe for a bad outcome.

The company will operate far more efficiently, in my experience, if the founder has near full control of their own destiny and has their hands in all of the details.

Because they will know all of the nuances and therefore be in the best position to focus the resources on the path that has the best potential.

At least if the founder is good.

The MBA case study metaphor

I remember when I did my MBA two decades back your grades were based on your participation in class. Because it was the ‘case study method’ that Harvard MBA had popularized.

And so your participation in class depended on how well you prepared as well as how well you were able to make your remarks at the right time.

Some guys were naturals at it. And so they realized they didn’t even really have to prepare. So they either wouldn’t read the case materials or they would just skim it very quickly.

But they’d still manage to make smart sounding contributions and end up with a very good grade in class.

I, on the otherhand, was not very good at that. So i needed to prepare thoroughly and still i’d have trouble sometimes making a quality remark at the right time.

It was to me a perfect metaphor for the corporate world. In corporate it is often about how smart you sound. A lot is based on perception and relationships.

In Reviv I have built an initial foundation that is completely devoid of that shit. We have no team meetings in which to sound smart.

My perception of someone is purely based on:

• what tasks did they do?
• did they do them well?
• were they done on time?
• did they stick to the ‘Beast method’ and do them in a very transparent way?

That is it.

The guys that don't do the work and try to sound smart… they get blown to little bits in my system.

And i watch as their guts drip down the wall. Hahaha

Reflecting on an old manager

Just recently an ex-colleague was talking to me about he didn’t feel how his review was fair from his manager. And how his work environment was a pretty political place.

It reminded me of a couple of my past experiences in situations like that. There was a manager earlier in my career who I did not really get along with and I personally thought he was pretty useless.

I just checked out his Linkedin profile.

He never started a company.

He just continued working for corporates playing his little political games.

And when somone played that game better then he did, he probably got squeezed out into the next company.

Closing thoughts

This story above is not to single this person out… rather it is to talk about the managers that are like him. They were good at fighting in that arena.

Good at managing perception but without adding much direct value. Without being in the details.

Typically they eventually have an expiration date and get shown the door.

And so hop, hop, hop they go…. from one company to the next like a virus.

Till one day the music stops.

And nobody needs them.

The arena that they were good at fighting in no longer exists. Or perhaps younger fighters had gotten better at the political games then them.

And so eventually they’ll settle for early retirement, trying to pretend like it’s gonna be great (when in reality it’s gonna probably be boring as hell).

Meanwhile i’ll be hard at work building my company. Loving pretty much every minute of it.

I found my arena.

And now i’m gonna try to build it as strong as i can.