Paul Battrick

Investor | M&A | Man United Superfan | Mental Health Warrior | Beyond The Wall™

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Every time the founder solves a problem nobody else learns to solve, the founder gets stronger and the business stays weak.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

The org chart formalises relationships.

It does not create them.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Leverage Launch update:

£3.39 spent, £0 paid promotion.
+12 LinkedIn followers and +12 newsletter subscribers from the 25 Aug baseline.
0 borrowed-audience wins.

Founder hours and genuine Find Your Wall completions remain unverified.
https://t.co/YQGelpf3Wg

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

No caveman ever created a brand bible.

But humans have always had reputation, symbols, stories, expected behaviour and things outsiders knew them for.

The human problem came first.
The business terminology came later.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

A job title tells you where someone sits in the structure.

It does not tell you where they sit in the human system.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

The question I keep coming back to:

What is actually happening between the people?

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

If nobody had ever told us this was how businesses were supposed to work, would we design them this way today?

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

The founder's job changes as the business grows.

Early:

Have the answer.

Later:

Build people who can find the answer.

Early:

Solve the problem.

Later:

Build a business that can solve it.

Early:

Be the engine.

Later:

Build the engine.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Business may have become complicated.

That does not mean every business problem has to be.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

A village does not become a town because the chief works harder.

A business does not truly scale because the founder answers emails faster.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Before they are employees, founders, managers, suppliers or customers, they are people.

Business theory starts making more sense when you remember that.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Strip away the language.

Find the people.

Start there.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Imagine somebody offered to buy your business tomorrow.

Then said:

“Obviously, we'll need you to stay for the next five years.”

Interesting question:

What exactly are they buying?

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Modern business has formalised many things human communities used to do naturally.

Sometimes formalisation helps us scale.

Sometimes it makes us forget why we were doing the thing in the first place.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Innovation used to be a very simple question:

Can we do this better?

Then we turned it into a department.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Try this tomorrow.

The next time somebody brings you a decision that shouldn't really need you, don't immediately answer it.

Ask yourself:

Why did this need to reach me?

That question can tell you more about your business than the decision itself.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Strategy is not a PowerPoint.

It is deciding what matters, what doesn’t, where we are going and what we are prepared to ignore.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

A CRM is memory at scale.

That’s all.

Sometimes business gets easier to understand when you translate the software back into the human problem it was created to solve.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

Every hour a founder spends solving something somebody else could eventually solve has two costs.

1. The hour.
2. The thing only the founder could have created instead.

The second cost is usually much bigger.

[Paul Battrick @redbat75]

No village ever had an org chart.

But everyone knew who people actually listened to.

Your company has an org chart.
Your people have another one in their heads.