Three things that make or break a business (and what to do about them)

Building a business can be summed up as building a rocket ship while flying it.

You’re constantly building bits and fixing problems to make it fly a bit further.

Looking back, nearly every major win (and stuff-up) I’ve faced during my time building my rocket ship can be linked to three things:

People
Product
Process

Let me quickly explain a few scenarios you might relate to:

People

In a previous business, I hired a team of "superstars" on paper.

Big resumes and bigger egos. The result? A total mess as you can imagine…

Everyone wanted to be the boss, and no one wanted to actually do the work.

It took me a while, but we deleted that team and started recruiting for culture fit over credentials with the intention of training the skills.

Did we train them? Honestly? We couldn’t afford it.

But the results still crushed the ego-fest we had before.

Now for the flipside…

Product.

I’m proud to say that at the bakery, we’ve rarely taken our eye off the ball when it comes to our products.

But there have been a few moments where we had to prioritise other things.

It didn’t mean letting our standards slip. Rather, we stopped innovating.

Innovation has been the one thing we’ve always invested in. Constantly trying to improve the product even when nobody’s looking.

It’s often resulted in new products, workflow fixes and lightbulb moments.

I can’t tell you why I value it so highly, But I feel that if your customers start asking you to fix the product, it’s often too late. And that thought drives me to make sure we put good things into the world.

Lastly, processes.

The problem that loads of founders face is that they end up becoming the bottleneck.

I get it, you don't need many processes when you're small, and creating them is a waste of time you don’t have.

The result is, everything sits in someone's head. Probably yours.

But then that key person gets sick, takes leave or exits the business. And then there’s a shit show…

Documenting simple processes solves that. Repeatable things that other people can do without much prior training.

And there are thousands of them in a business, which can be overwhelming if you’ve left it too late to start documenting.

But you just pick the most critical things that could put you out of business, or the things you’re working on right now.

Document them and start teaching others how to do them. And if there's no one to teach, document it anyway - I can't tell you how valuable this is later.

Back to the point I made earlier about building your rocketship while flying it, you can generally keep it in the air for way longer if you start obsessing over just three things:

People: Hire humans, not resumes. Alignment beats individual stars.

Product: Never stop innovating and polishing. If clients start asking for improvements, it’s often too late.

Process: Document what lives in key people’s heads, or drown in chaos.

I hope this helps a few of you out there.