Welcome to In the Trenches. It’s great to have thousands of you here. My goal with this newsletter is to be all signal and no noise. To that end, make sure you let me know each week how you liked the content:

• ​🔥🔥🔥This post was awesome​
• ​🔥🔥This post was good​
• ​🔥This post was subpar​

I’ll keep incorporating the feedback into future posts.

---

Welcome back to another edition of Tuesday mailbag. If you're new around here, every Tuesday (or most every Tuesday...), I take questions that come inbound from your fellow readers. I select the ones that I think are most helpful and broadly applicable. Since most of you reading are entrepreneurs and founders (current and aspiring!), I try to focus on questions and answers that can move the needle for you in your business journey. Let's get into it.

Question #1: I've recently had really good growth in my business. But I can't tell if it was because of me or because of something else. What I'm really concerned about is that I'm not seeing something around the corner - maybe this growth will fall away as quickly as it came to me. How would you think about this situation?

There's a parable I love referencing when thinking about growth: The Thanksgiving Turkey.

The idea goes like this.

You can separate the growth of a Thanksgiving Turkey in 3 phases.

- Phase I (Strong Momentum): On Day 1, the Turkey is at a good starting point. It's kept in a good environment and sanitized.

- Phase II (Steady Growth): On Day 1-999, the Turkey grows. It continues to be well fed over the subsequent year.

- Phase III (Surprise): On Day 1000, the Turkey dies. Humans have Thanksgiving to celebrate after all.

The lesson? Your intuition is correct. All growth is not created equal. In fact, some growth is a train wreck in the making and has been since Day 1. The more the Turkey grows, the closer it gets to its death.

If you looked at the surface level, things looked really great - there was momentum every month. But the quality of this growth was really low. Even worse, the strategies used were completely unsustainable (e.g. it turns out that giving away free money is great for growth, but terrible for business endurance!).

I applaud you for double clicking into your growth: in this past cycle, so many startups showed amazing top line growth. They didn't prepare for the pullback that they are working through now and it's painful to handle declining growth and operational restructuring.

When evaluating (or building) your business, it's critical that make sure you don't have Turkey growth. A few things I would do in your case to dig into whether this growth is sustainable or not:

• Evaluate what the average growth rate is for businesses in your industry - you should be able to look at an Industry Report to see what the 25th - 50th - 75th percentile businesses are growing at.
• Ask yourself whether there is any abnormality in your growth. Did it come from a change in the industry (COVID or otherwise induced)? Did it come from a handful of customers? Was there any change in behavior amongst those customers? Any reason to believe it's not sustainable?
• Plan for organizational moves in case your growth does retreat - if you grew really well you likely generated material profit; assuming that wasn't eaten up by working capital to fund growth, stack your cash reserves. Save it for a rainy day / the moves you may need to make once growth retreats.

Question 2: I'm a big fan - thanks so much for all the writing you share. It's better than my Ivy League MBA (seriously). In business school, everyone is obsessed with the idea of leverage and scale. I understand why - you can make significant impact; but I imagine I need to balance the vision of leverage and scale with appropriate execution. How have you done this as a leader and what would you suggest?

You're spot on. A business principle I frequently see obsessed over today - especially on the internet - is the idea of leverage:

• “Hire as quickly as possible!”
• “If you need Sales, go get someone!”
• “Need Marketing? Outsource it!”

Everything can be delegated.

But can it? Should it? I think - like most things in life - this statement is more nuanced and should be interpreted carefully.

It is true - leverage is the only way you can get scale. As you progress as a leader, your sole job should be to be world class at 3 things: (1) strategy, (2) recruiting and (3) culture

• Strategy: Set the vision for where the company is going
• Recruiting: Hire and attract the best people to execute this vision
• Culture: Establish an environment in which the best people can do their best work

Leverage too early on however is a recipe for disaster. In the early stages of your business (and your career), you should be doing the opposite. You should be sweating the details.

Very few people do this. Why? Most people hate messiness; they avoid it like the plague and follow the path with the least resistance.

But the details are where the impact lives. If you let the details go, you slowly chip away at the core. Doing 1% more consistently makes achievement inevitable.

Some tactical examples of this:

• Sit next to your junior most employees and observe what they do in their day
• Ask your leaders what is the most challenging thing for them at this stage and help them problem solve it
• Visit your customers in person to check in on them
• Be a part of the brainstorming, not just the end review of a deliverable
• Sit shoulder to shoulder with your senior leaders and help them think through the business

Importantly, here’s what sweating the details is not: It is not burdening yourself, micromanaging, conflating roles and responsibilities or overcompensating for someone on your team.

Rather it is channeling your own individual energy as a leader into your organization and finding opportunities to bend the will of the world your way.

In a world where everyone is looking for leverage and how to “work smart, not hard”, I think sweating the details is a deep competitive advantage. There’s no replacement for getting in the weeds and putting in the elbow grease.
​

Until Friday,

Romeen

---

How did you feel about this week’s post?

• ​🔥🔥🔥This post was awesome​
• ​🔥🔥This post was good​
• ​🔥This post was subpar​