Tag: opszero

Every time a new feature or product was proposed, Jeff Bezos decreed that the narrative should take the shape of a mock press release. The goal was to get employees to distill a pitch into its purest essence, to start from something the customer might see—the public announcement—and work backward. Bezos didn’t believe anyone could…

We have a six week cadence where we spend four weeks of intense work, and two weeks of course correction and planning. Every December we take time to reflect and relax and make detailed plans for execution. | Task | Marketing & Sales | Product & Engineering | | — | — | — |…

Any company can only be good at two of these things and should really optimize the efforts on two. As a company can’t do it all and can really only focus its resources on optimizing a few pieces. Examples: * Coca Cola. Sales, Marketing. They are selling sugar water no new value is being created…

Product businesses are so hot right now. There is a literal app for every single thing. Product companies are great because margins are high, custom work is low and scaling that is relatively easy. Unfortunately, with opsZero I’m in the service game. Services are interesting because after doing services for 20+ companies in the last…

While writing PR.FAQs for my projects I keep doing, “this project does x and y and z.” Basically, bundling too many things into a single thing. This results in lack of focus and projects that are not connected to each other but if you squint it looks like they are. For example, I wanted to…

For a business cash is king. This has been a truism and it is definitely something that I have paid little thought to. However, how money comes in and how it goes out to vendors/employees plays a huge role. Unfortunately, I have come more and more to the conclusion that getting paid upfront for a…

Owning a small business has a pitfall that where you start and where the company starts are blurred. You take money out whenever you want and treat the company as a personal bank. I think this has caused misaligned incentives and coming to the conclusion that it be avoided. When you are the owner of…

Complexity is Entropy. If something takes you much longer to do than doing it the easy way you are basically wasting energy. I’ve been wondering why that is? I think the reason is that though simplicity scales better it gets boring. For people who can run a marathon or do the same weightlifting routine for…

 Banks are conservative. They don’t loan money to businesses that need money, they loan money to businesses that don’t money. This doesn’t help if you are an agency where companies pay you in whatever timeframe they want even if you say NET-15. An agency likely also has a hard time raising money since it…

I’ve tried OKRs long enough now that they are not resulting in a positive outcome from a quarterly perspective. The problem lies in a couple things: 1. Changing OKRs from quarter to quarter seems too fast and doesn’t result in actual time to develop long-term strategy. 2. Once a strategy has been developed for an…