Don’t Strategize During The Execution Phase.
Many businesses get stuck in a place of permanent planning. They might settle on a strategy and then, after a few moments of execution, they retreat and being to tweak their approach. This pattern of thought keeps so many people trapped because it feels reasonable, rational, and intelligent. But in reality, it’s like trying to get to a destination by hitting the gas pedal and the brake at the same time—you will never make progress towards your goal if you don’t amass enough data to make actual informed decisions.
For example, let’s say you start a new cold outreach campaign and after sending 10 emails you get a few negative replies or rejections.
What most people do is conclude their approach is inherently flawed and completely rewrite or redesign their campaign. But when you’ve sent enough volume your realize that chaos theory is the dominant rule in life. For every prospect who tells you that your message is irrelevant and rude, there’s another prospect who tells you that they love your approach and it’s a great offer. In other words: life (and by extension business) is far more chaotic than we understand.
To be clear: I am not preaching brute force techniques or a sort of “marketing nihilism” where if you just do anything long enough it will work—that too is a false promise that exists on the opposite end of the scale. We need to find a middle ground, a golden mean, between constantly restarting and tweaking and persevering far too long in a strategy that isn’t working.
The best solution I’ve found is to adopt a sprint mentality: lock in your strategy and then execute as best you can for a given period of time. Only then can you stop, zoom out, and look at the data.
Here’s how it looks if you’re a solopreneur: imagine that, just like in the military, there is a chain of command that must be followed at all times.
The military works because orders from higher up in the organization are followed to the letter by those of lower rank. The strategic commanders, generals, and admirals, set a mission plan and then it is up to the lower ranking officers and ground troops to execute the plan as best as they can. If the ground troops refuse the orders that are administered from up above, they may face a court martial and be dishonorably discharged.
Ground troops of lower rank are not meant to debate the strategic viability of various of operations, they are trained to execute the plan to the best of their ability and have faith in their leaders to decide on the correct course of action.
You can operate the exact same way.
Whether daily, weekly, or monthly, you can decide—at the strategic level—on a specific tactical sprint that must be followed. Then you virtually pass the baton to yourself in another role and execute the plan. Your job in the execution phase is not to question the decisions of the strategy phase, but to execute the plan as best as you can.
One of the reasons so many businesses, especially solopreneurs, get stuck is because they are constantly switching between these two roles. Much like a writer who is trying to write and edit at the same time, they end up chasing their tails and making no progress. To go back to the car analogy, it’s like they are pressing the gas and the brake pedals simultaneously—an action that will inevitably destroy the engine.
When you are planning, plan. When you are executing, execute. Dismiss or banish any thoughts that get in the way of executing and just follow through on the plan.
The amount of self-esteem you generate from this one activity will shock you. As will the enormous financial and economic returns.
One common question I hear is How long is the ideal sprint? I used to operate day to day. But I think that might be too short, especially if you’re prone to overthinking. Locking in for a week, five business days, is enough time to gather initial data and see if something is working. Once you establish a clear path, a month or a quarter makes sense, but in the early iteration phase operating on a weekly timeline make sense.
Lastly, daily sprints are extremely useful if you are very early on in your business process. For example you are testing a new process or you are very far away from product-market fit. You might discover an insight or uncover a bottleneck in the process that needs to be addressed. A great rule of thumb for these situations is to execute the daily plan exactly as you drew it up and meet your target for the day, then strategize and iterate afterwards. A great cadence for this is to execute your hardest tasks in the morning and then use the afternoon to review and adjust. Or, alternatively, have an “execution” day followed by a “strategy” day—whatever suits your preferences.
