Your business will keep reflecting the part of you that leads it.
Carl Gould on finding the weak side of your company, escaping feast and famine, and building the systems growth demands.
I told Carl during this conversation that I have made the mistake of trying to serve too many avatars. The result was exactly what you would expect: unfocused marketing and harder operations. Once we narrowed it to one or two, both got smoother.
What stuck with me is that the same pattern runs through the whole business. The company is strong where the owner is strong and soft where the owner has a blind spot. When the same bottleneck keeps returning, I am trying to look past the next tactic and ask which part of the business I have not wanted to lead.
Your company is soft where you naturally look away.
A full delivery calendar is not permission to stop selling.
More effort cannot rescue a system built for a smaller load.
- 01The blind spot
Find the side you do not lead.
Carl maps a business across strategy, business development, operations, and finance. Most owners naturally pull one or two of those forward. Look for the area that only gets attention when it becomes urgent. That is usually where the owner needs a stronger system or another person with complementary instincts.
- 02The pipeline
Keep business development level.
Feast and famine starts when selling stops during fulfillment. Work backward from the number of customers you need, determine the activity required at each step of the funnel, and hold that activity steady. A full delivery calendar is not permission to let the pipeline go quiet.
- 03The capacity test
Know when you need a bigger truck.
Carl once kept loading 15,000 pounds into a dump truck rated for 10,000. Many companies do the same thing with people, software, and informal processes. Growth eventually asks for specialization and infrastructure. Pushing harder on an overloaded system only makes the breakdown more expensive.
From the conversationIt's never going to get easier. You just have to get better.”
Build a weekly blind-spot check.
Use Carl's framework to identify the weakest area and put a 20-minute weekly review on the calendar.
- 1
Score strategy, business development, operations, and finance from one to five.
- 2
Choose the lowest score and write one sentence describing the recurring problem that area creates.
- 3
Schedule a 20-minute weekly review with one named owner and one number that shows whether the lowest-scoring area is improving.