Just "Send It"

When I purchased the Twin Cessna, my instructor, a corporate jet pilot, Tom Zeiser, who did my transition training, didn't allow me to fly (even with him beside me). I had nearly 1000 hours of flight time with multi-engine, instrument and commercial ratings, but I was underqualified to handle an aircraft this complex.

Tom was clear that I had to know the systems by heart, read the checklists pointing at every button, number and needle when sitting in the cockpit with the plane in the hangar (it's referred to as "hangar flying"). I was asked to brief every stage of the flight plan even before the power came on. As Dale Carnegie would say...

‘An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing’. - Dale Carnegie

You don't have to be a professional to be a pilot, but you have to bring your professionalism to the cockpit.

A big part of that professionalism is having a solid plan, staying ahead of that plan, being organized in execution and recognizing your comfort level to close any gaps in knowledge and training before you "send it" - anything less would be highly irresponsible.

“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail” — Benjamin Franklin

It's the same in business as the stakes get larger. Before you "send it" it's important to seek guidance to close gaps in competence, to strengthen the plan and to highlight risks so you can be prepared to mitigate in an instant.

A plan was practically optional when I was flying a simpler plane as I wasn't moving quick, and poor choices can be quickly corrected (285 horsepower non-turbo engine). I could fly "by the seat of my pants".

This isn't very different from running a smaller company. Everyone knows what everyone is doing because there were only a handful of employees. Any bad decisions can be course corrected quickly with an "oops", and customer experience fails are easily forgiven as you know them all; you can personally call them to apologize.

However, with this Twin Cessna I have two 335 horsepower turbo supercharged engines with which everything moves twice as fast with complex systems, and I have the complexity of a multi-crew environment.

Stakes are much higher. I can't be reactive and fly "by the seat of my pants" without some planning, organization and "cockpit resource management" (i.e. clear division of labour with the co-pilot).

Right hand needs to know what the left hand is doing. Descends from flight levels and power management has to be planned out at least sixty miles ahead, and approaches to land need to be handled like an airline.

The parallel to business is this: Seed stage company where the team size is small and you can go fast without consequences as the bets are small with fewer people to coordinate actions vs. Series A and beyond where the budgets are larger, organizational complexity is greater and choices can mean making a short runway even shorter - a 5% drop in revenue can mean disaster when you are maximizing your investments, expecting cash flow to catch-up to pay for all the additional people you've brought on.

This is why most companies have a hard time scaling, hit plateaus, and even implode. Teams need to build real scale-up capabilities; operating as they did earlier isn't going to cut it.

As a leader you need to help elevate the team to bring them along. Create structure, master the lines of communication, define decision rights and roles/responsibilities, structure performance reviews based on subjective measures, run efficient meetings, and align each month and quarter with a plan that everyone understands and gets behind.

It's not about taking days to complete a plan and getting bogged down in detail on things that aren't material (that would be overplanning and procrastination). Even a one page plan hashed out (taking hours not days) with a summary of the big actions, ownership, milestones and expected outcomes is enough to take a thoughtful approach to execution.

As a bonus, it will minimize workload so that when you execute on the plan you can sit back and enjoy the view, knowing that everything is unfolding as it should (and if it doesn't you can easily adapt the plan vs. reacting, isn't that comforting?).

“For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.” –Benjamin Franklin