How to Finally Clear Your Never-Ending To-Do List (And How It Will Help You Grow Your Business…)

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“To master the art of letting a fire burn, you need nerves, vigilance, and practice.” - Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn.

Businesses come with more than their fair share of fires - those obstacles that come up that require your attention. The trick is knowing which ones you need to fight.?

In reality, it’s not ever as easy as saying, “Pick your battles.” If you really want to see exponential growth, you ultimately need to just let some fires burn.

That might mean doing something seemingly crazy, like sacrificing customer service response time, or saying no to short-term propositions, or (as you’ll read below) not backing up your databases. It means knowing what your priorities are. It means instead of saying “Ready. Aim. Fire!”, sometimes when you’re moving fast, you’ll need to say “Fire! Ready. Aim.”

Examples of “Deliberate Neglect” and Why It’s a Good Thing

The Reid Hoffman quote from above comes from his outstanding podcast “Masters of Scale” and his episode on this topic is extremely relevant because it’s a concept most of us business owners don’t learn until later if at all.?

“Smart entrepreneurs don't try to fight every fire. Instead, they figure out which fires they can let burn — so they can focus on the ones they absolutely have to fight.”

To grow your company, you won’t be able to put out every fire. It’s a fact.

You need to train yourself to rely on your team and free up your time to fight the ones the are absolutely necessary to unlock your business growth.

Reid drops another gem…”If you’re moving fast, you have no time to study.?Rather than prepare for every fire… embrace the wisdom of intelligent triage.” In medical terms, “Triage” is the process of determining the priority of patients' treatments based on the severity of their condition.?

You need to do this with your business as well. Show your team, your customers, and your investors that yes, you see the problem AND that your neglect in solving it is deliberate.

Deliberate neglect in service of achieving a larger goal or vision is strategic. Not lazy.

Ain’t Never Gonna Slow You Down

Focusing on fires that slow you down, instead of focusing ONLY on the fires that will take you down will completely halter your growth. When you have an opportunity, taking time to research and make “the right” decision can cause you to miss the opportunity.?

PayPal (another organization Hoffman helped scale) experienced tremendous growth and in the early days, they (incredibly) decided to completely ignore customer service. They had so many emails flowing in and found themselves getting behind by 10,000 every single month. They just didn’t have the resources to give to customers if they wanted to grow - and that meant focusing more on getting new clients.?

Editor’s Note: I’m not advocating fully neglecting customer service. There are many situations where neglecting customers is a one-way ticket to ruin.

Another example of neglect - LinkedIn. They were years into growth before they had a backup database of their users. Sounds crazy in retrospect, right?

Another is SurveyMonkey. For the sake of growth, they neglected to invest heavily in a sleek, modern web design in favor of an easy to use, practical design in their early days. This came at a cost - people didn’t take them seriously at first glance and they found it difficult to attract talent.?

This forced the company to be more creative in how they express their vision by going to conferences and speaking directly to potential employees. But did they put a hold on everything and invest in redesigning their website during this growth phase? Nope!

As crazy as it sounds, every startup needs to make these kinds of decisions. For example, being on the Inc 5000 of fastest-growing businesses for four years in a row. Anyone who sees continued growth like that is bound to have fires to put out - it's true, we did and still do. But along the way we’ve learned this lesson -

That the resources and energy you give to the specific fires you decide to put out are the ones that will determine how quickly you will grow.

I learned pretty quickly that “omnipresence marketing” - where you’re everywhere and everything to everyone was not going to pay off for the effort. It might be good for some people but not for us.?

It was actually sucking time, resources and bandwidth from my team that we could have put to better use to contribute directly to our growth. We needed a more targeted approach and once we trimmed our marketing mix to include ONLY what was directly getting us appointments, we were more productive and we saw our growth increase. By simplifying our approach and cutting out a lot of what the “guru’s” said we needed to do, we addressed the ‘fire’ of overwhelm and put out a thousand other sparks at the same time.?

That’s just one example of choosing your fires to fight. We’ve also had to address fires that directly affected how our business would continue. And that’s meant dropping certain services that weren’t giving us or our clients the results we were looking for. Once we went through and dropped anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, streamlining our team and our processes, and bringing the focus back to our core values, we immediately saw a jump in profitability.

My question for you today is this… where can you “deliberately neglect” some fires, letting them burn while you turn your attention to the ones that will take you down - even if that neglect sounds crazy?

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2. Drop us a comment below and let us know what kind of fires you have to deal with and how you choose which ones to prioritize.?