A weekly dispatch on the three things every small business has to get right: Operations. Marketing. People. Real stories about the structural breakdowns that keep good businesses stuck — and what it looks like when you finally fix them.
armchair ordering
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Hello Reader, For years I ordered our groceries from the couch. Mark called it armchair ordering. Phone in my hand, Giant app open, going off memory. I know what we like and I've made these dinners a hundred times. Then Wednesday would come and I'd be standing in the kitchen with everything for the recipe except the one thing that made it that recipe. I hadn't forgotten 90% of the order, just the one thing, and then I'd need to throw together whatever I could out of what we had. The other problem was the complaining. We'd get into a routine with a few dinners that worked and eat them into the ground, and by week three somebody at the table would say something about it. They weren't wrong. The armchair ordering routine took me about half an hour, and I'd still get it wrong pretty much all the time. This Sunday I planned six dinners and placed the order in ten minutes. What changed is that I finally got it all down, every recipe we eat and the one ingredient that breaks each dinner if it goes missing, plus our rules about fish and red meat and what to check on a label for Noah (he's got allergies and Celiac). Then I handed it over to AI. The new routine I put together asks me a few questions about the week and gives me the dinners and the order list. It's just like this in our business. We all do this with the work we know cold. You've run it enough times that you stopped writing anything down. It's in your head, it's fine, you'll remember. And you mostly do remember. Then one day you forget, and of course it's the piece you needed. I was doing it with dinner for nearly fourty years, so I'm not standing over here pointing at anybody. Here's what I'd do this week. Think of one small job you do from memory, then ask four questions about it:
Four yeses means that's the one to start with. It'll probably be the smallest, most boring thing on your list. Don't discount it because it's boring! I put those four questions on one page with room to write your answers. Grab "Pick-Your-First-Playbook" here. The longer version, with everything that went into the dinner playbook and why I started at home instead of with client work, is on the blog. So what's the thing you've been armchair ordering? Hit reply and let me know. I'd like to hear whether yours is a Wednesday problem too. Shell, Yes! Here's to your success, _______________________________________________________________________ “It’s Just Like This in Our Business”A weekly dispatch on the three things every small business has to get right: Operations. Marketing. People. Real stories about the structural breakdowns that keep good businesses stuck and what it looks like when you finally fix them. |
“It’s Just Like This in Our Business”
A weekly dispatch on the three things every small business has to get right: Operations. Marketing. People. Real stories about the structural breakdowns that keep good businesses stuck — and what it looks like when you finally fix them.
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