Move faster: run the five-step process, then commit

1. Trying, or doing everything it takes

A reframe that is, it is thought here, a really good one: a question, heard secondhand, put to someone who had been having trouble with something and had, in effect, settled: are you only trying, or are you doing whatever it would take to shift something that will not move? It moved the person it was put to, and it is just really liked here.

Apply it to the goals people so often bring, such as more leads or a bigger company. Are you really removing all doubt, and every variable you possibly could? Or only trying?

2. Lock the decision makers in together

One owner's case. For one launch an owner needed a full set of funnels and video sales letters. It could reasonably have been put at many weeks; the question asked instead was what building all of it would actually take. A team was then shut in a room, with nobody let in except for food and water. They built all of it, with every connecting point, and had the whole thing basically live inside that sitting. It was timed, to prove the point.

The mechanism. Run the usual way, the owner was sure, it would have dragged on for weeks, the project always said to be moving forward. The owner's read was that all of it could be finished if every decision maker spent two days together in the room, and so it was done.

3. Stop proving yourself right

The client who changed. Years back, one business had a client described, honestly, as mediocre to poor, always complaining that nothing worked. A few months later that client was among the best performers, and asked what had changed, answered: me. He had always hunted for a reason a thing would fail, some special circumstance of his own, and had, in effect, stayed poor and unsuccessful to be proven right rather than going all in. Once he did go all in, he earned far more.

What it is for. Whatever you conclude about what you have learned, you will be right. Believe you will wring a great return out of it and put many parts of it to use, and you are right; it will probably work well for you. Believe you were never shown where to click every button, and you are right as well: it did not work for you. Needing someone to do that for you is, on this reading, wanting money handed over for no effort. Many people will promise that; nobody will actually deliver it. People take different lengths of time to accept that some things they must simply work out.

Get the direction right. Set the direction correctly and sidestep some of the pitfalls en route, and your results will be significantly better, it is said. One practice here would be to think about every decision by its direction rather than as an absolute, a point stressed as meant. Thinking in directions when the metrics are missing: SOP 202, section 4. Deciding quickly when a bet can be reversed: SOP 189.

4. Ask what you would do if you had to

The device. One owner needed, in effect, to double his sales team, and said it was going to be hard and a great deal of work. The account is probably exaggerated a little, for dramatic effect, it is admitted. The answer offered was a question: suppose you would lose your child within 30 days unless 40 salespeople were hired; do you think you could hire them? The owner said yes. Then why not? What would you do?

The same test for content. If posting 20 pieces of content a day were the only way to stop someone dying, would you? If yes, why not now? You would make that effort to save someone else but not to save yourself, which is called odd. If you know how to do a thing when a family member's life depends on it, you already know how; you are choosing not to try as hard. Why people who know what to do do not do it is called hard to understand.

5. A sales team stood up in 90 days

The case. A portfolio company needed a sales team of 50 people inside 90 days. What they did, called really straightforward:

• They took on 10 separate recruiters, each told it could bring them as many candidates as it liked, paid at a flat rate.
• They spun up recruiting of their own as well.
• They maxed out their ad spend across more than one platform.

They hired about 80 people and kept 50, in 90 days end to end. Supposing $5,000 per rep, the cost is put at $250,000, and set against what that team went on to bring in each month the cost is treated as small.

Firms that find only one narrow kind of hire, at a larger headcount: SOP 166, section 3.

6. The steps for fixing a process

A sequence found so useful here that it is thought about a lot; it is said that it applies to all of business whenever a process needs fixing. The steps, in order:

Step	What it asks of you
Question	Why are we doing this?
Delete	If doing it turns out to serve no purpose, stop
Optimize	Once everything that can go is gone, improve what remains and find where the greatest leverage sits for the fewest actions
Accelerate	Ask the questions below
Automate	Once the timeline is shortened, you can automate the work, which would be great, it is said

The questions that speed it up. First ask when the person thinks the thing can be done by. Then ask why not today, or inside the next two hours. The follow-up is: what are you working on right now that matters more than this? If nothing is, this becomes the top priority. You only have to ask. Sometimes the answer names work agreed to be more important, and then the two are put in order, with the stated aim of getting it done by the end of that day (section 16).

Make it matter. In this operating mode, if the work matters to you, make it matter.

How to automate. One practice here, for handing routine work to software or an AI tool:

• From a list of everything you do in a week, pick one repeatable job to hand over first.
• Say what done means, with one example the output must match: this is perfect.
• Hand over the written steps you would give a person (SOP 43, section 3).
• Run the smallest version first, with set points where a person checks the work.
• Have a second, independent pass hunt for faults before anything is used.
• Log what was done and every change, so the work can resume or roll back.
• Make every correction a permanent rule, with something that checks it: in this view, a rule nobody checks drifts.
• Expect trial and error; it will not work the first time.

7. The steps at work: one media team

A real case of the sequence: one company reworking its media team after buying very good cameras.

The questions. Why could a video filmed now not go out that day, or within the hour? The footage took eight hours to upload. Why eight hours? Because of the fancy cameras. Why buy cameras that only make uploading slower? Because they were fancy. The next question asked whether the fancy cameras made any difference at all; the answer was that they did not, so why were they used?

A 24-hour target. The new standard: 24 hours from filming a piece to putting it out. Some of the videos had been running on a lead time of two to three weeks, which was thought absurd. By comparison, a streamer on Twitch switches between three camera angles on a setup costing a hundred dollars, while that team's cost 400,000; the team surely had the resources, skills and intelligence to match that.

Where the time went. The next breakthrough: about 80 percent of the effort came afterward, in post-production. They solved it by preparing more: 60 minutes of preparation was worth about 18 hours of post-production, while each video's post-production had run roughly eight to 16 hours.

The result. With more preparation and no fancy cameras, the lead time went from two weeks to two days. That is called an 8x gain in how fast they get from input to output (section 16).

8. Input and output

Most of marketing, it is said, comes down to this: an equation of input and output. The job is to improve what happens in the box between them, and that is all. A business pictured as a box that turns attention into money: SOP 195, section 3.

9. AI for the call to action

For those who make content regularly, a piece ends with a call to action, and one company uses AI for that closing call a lot of times. AI video, in the opinion here, is not good enough for a whole ad, but for a call to action at the end there are a great many video AI tools, HeyGen among them, and you can simply have one say it. That company keeps roughly 32 settings for one avatar: different T-shirts, a hat or none, indoors or outdoors, sitting, standing or walking, selfie-style phone footage or a professional camera, and other permutations. Its team types in the call to action, and the avatar delivers it. This is called a really easy way to get more leverage on your work. Where on each platform a call to action goes: SOP 215.

10. Speed, and what strategy is for

The view here: being fast beats every other edge a business can have. Picture the two poles. At one, you move so slowly that nothing is ever accomplished. At the other, you move so fast that nobody holds an innovator's edge: one second after someone makes something, yours exists too.

That, it is said, is why strategy matters so much: it unlocks speed, since it lets every resource go to the point of greatest leverage. Strategy as the allocation of scarce resources, with the constraint as the one priority: SOP 185, sections 7 and 8.

11. A flip cycle cut from 90 days to 30

The case. A decent-sized home-flipping business went through its operation in a small group of owners. The point of greatest leverage was a slow cash conversion cycle, which left it constrained by cash flow. The owners knew how to find deals and flip properties, but the time from buying a property, through the money put into it, to the sale and the profit meant the alternative was raising a very large fund. That did not suit them: diluting their equity, or the returns, was something they wanted to avoid, and it would not have been worth it.

The question put. The owners were told that going from 90 days to flip a property to 30 would solve every problem they had: they could do three times their current revenue and would no longer be short of cash. Their first answer was that there was no way. Each reason was then worked through with the question why: could you pay this person more? could you do that? In the end they said they could certainly do it, and probably in 20 days.

Other ways to bring cash in sooner, from vendor terms to receivables: SOP 198.

12. Start from what it would take

As with choosing dinner by what you want to eat rather than by what is in the fridge, ask what it would take. What would we do to be fastest? To be easiest? To be the most guaranteed, or free of risk? Then work from that answer. The dinner picture itself: SOP 216, section 9. The question asked of an offer, with risk and ease beside speed: SOP 209, section 3.

13. The big things still matter most

However many tactics you take notes on, no restaurant succeeds if its food is bad; the sandwich has to be good. However strong your marketing, word of mouth eventually catches up with you on the bad side, since negative word of mouth moves far faster and further than positive. A decent reputation takes a great deal of time and very consistent execution; a very bad, very big one takes a very short spell of terrible execution.

14. How hard are you really trying?

People, it is said, badly want to feel justified: to have tried it all and somehow found a problem with no solution, because saying so protects the ego. The view here is that, unless physics rules it out, it can be solved, and you must accept that you are the reason it stays unsolved.

15. Choose one thing, and let a fix work

Choosing one thing. The recommendation here is to choose one of the things covered and commit to it completely, with unreasonable volume behind it, then give it the respect it needs to bear fruit.

Let a fix work. A piece of advice passed on: sometimes a solution needs time to solve a problem, so hold off on solving a problem again until the first solution has taken hold. It is called super common: something hurts, you attack it with a fix due to work in three months, and a month on, still hurting, you want to attack it with a second fix.

Where it ends. That is offered as a balance to the earlier message. Yet if it had to work within 30 days, the closing words on it are: probably start with that first (section 16).

16. What this page does not decide for you

• Which task goes second. When the answer names more important work, one of the two goes second so that something is done by day's end; which one is unclear. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• The media team's gain. It is called 8x; cutting a lead time from two weeks to two days is a sevenfold gain.
• What the 400,000 counts. Not established on this page.
• What "that" means in the last line of section 15. It may be the one thing you picked, or whatever would work within 30 days. This page does not settle which reading is right.

17. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Of a stalled goal, ask whether you are only trying or doing everything it takes, and whether you have removed every variable you possibly could
2	For a big build, lock every decision maker in together and build all of it in one sitting, as one owner did
3	Get the direction right and avoid some of the pitfalls; one practice here would be to think about decisions by direction rather than as absolutes
4	Ask what you would do if something terrible rode on it; if you would do it then, ask why not now
5	To fix a process: question it, delete what has no point, optimize what is left, accelerate, then automate, starting with the smallest version and a set example of done
6	To accelerate: ask when it can be done, why not today or within two hours, and what matters more; if nothing does, make it the top priority
7	Find where the time goes, as one media team did; in that case more preparation cut post-production
8	If you make content regularly, you can have an AI avatar deliver the closing call to action, as one company a lot of times does
9	Let strategy steer every resource toward the greatest leverage point, so it unlocks speed
10	Ask what it would take to be the fastest, the easiest, the most guaranteed
11	Keep the product itself good; bad word of mouth outruns good
12	The recommendation here: pick one thing and commit fully, with unreasonable volume; give the first fix time to take hold before solving that problem again

18. What this page does not cover

Interviewing and screening salespeople in volume is SOP 253 — Run a group interview for high-volume roles; training a new one is SOP 255.