Process Design

When a Facebook Page connection failed in Radi8, my software told people the same thing every time: you don't have the right admin role. It was right... sometimes. But under that one message were three different failures, and two had nothing to do with anyone's permissions. So the message sent people off to fix something that wasn't broken — and quietly told them the problem was them. I went looking for the real cause. Now it names which of the three actually hit. Fixes like that land in hours, not release cycles. This isn't really about software. When your process fails a client, whose fault does your language imply? "You didn't send the intake form" and "my intake form is confusing" are the same event described by two different people. Default blame is a design choice... usually one nobody examined. Genuine question — where does your process quietly blame a client for something you could have made clearer? Link in the first comment. #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #Solopreneur #CustomerDiscovery #Positioning …more

It’s time for my daily dose of marketing caffeine. Today I’m talking about the customer journey and the theory of constraints. First, what is the theory of constraints? To keep it really simple, it’s a bottleneck that’s preventing you from achieving your goal. For example, if you want to pour soda from a bottle into your glass it has to pass through the bottleneck. You can’t pour it any faster because the bottleneck is small. But the interesting thing is actually how most people try to solve this problem. They get a bigger mug, they shake the bottle, they ask someone else to do it!! It doesn’t matter what you change, if you don’t deal with the bottleneck you can’t speed up the process. Now what does that have to do with marketing and the customer journey? Your customer is on a journey right now. First they need to become aware of your product or service. Then they can consider and compare you to arrive at a buying decision. If you’re a good fit you acquire them and take their money. Then they move to the adoption phase, they start using your product or service. If they’re happy they end up at the end of their journey in the advocate stage where they tell others. This journey has a bottleneck. It’s different for each business, and only you know where it is. The key is for you to put all your energy into fixing the bottleneck, nothing else. If you’re successful the bottleneck will change and you can repeat the process. Where people go wrong is they put energy into marketing that has zero impact on the bottleneck. If nobody knows about you, it doesn’t matter how good your product is. …more

Busy founders and stalled founders often look identical from the outside. Both are working constantly. The difference is what happens to all that effort. Here's the pattern I've watched for 25 years: activity that isn't built on a system doesn't compound. You do the outreach, the post, the follow-up, the demo — and then next week you start from zero and do them all again. It feels like progress because it's exhausting. But nothing accumulates. You're not building an engine; you're pushing the car. A system is just the opposite. It's a motion you run once, learn from, and improve — so the next turn is a little sharper than the last. That's what compounding actually is: the same effort producing more each time because the thing underneath it is getting better. The trap for a stalled founder isn't laziness. It's the opposite. There's so much motion that you can't tell which of it is worth turning into a system and which is just noise burning the hours. Here's the filter I use. One question separates the signal from the noise: Which single motion, if it got 20% better every time we ran it, would change the trajectory of the business? That's the one to systematize. Not the ten things that feel urgent — the one whose improvement curve actually bends the outcome. Usually it's unglamorous: how you talk to customers, how a lead becomes a conversation, how you decide what to build next. Almost never the thing that's loudest on your calendar. Then be honest about the rest. Most of what fills a stalled founder's week is motion that will never compound no matter how well you execute it. That's not a productivity problem you fix with a better tool or another hire. It's a focus problem. Cutting it isn't losing ground — it's freeing the attention the one motion needs to become a real system. The uncomfortable part: you can't systematize everything, and trying to is its own form of noise. Compounding demands you pick. So the question worth sitting with this week: Of everything you're doing right now, which one motion is actually worth turning into a system — and what would you have to stop doing to give it the attention it needs? #Founders #Startups #Entrepreneurship #FounderLessons #GrowthStrategy …more

If you're solving the same problem every week, you don't have a task problem. You have a structure problem. It's one of the clearest patterns I've learned across four startups and a lot of advising rooms: recurring firefighting is almost never about the fire in front of you. The same issue keeps coming back because something in the system — how work flows, who owns what, how decisions get made — keeps producing it. You can put the fire out beautifully every single time, and it will still be there next Tuesday. W. Edwards Deming made this point decades ago, and it still holds. In Out of the Crisis, he estimated that about 94% of the problems in any operation belong to the system, not the people — only around 6% trace to a true one-off. Read that again: the overwhelming majority of what looks like individual failure is actually structural. So when the same thing breaks over and over, blaming the person doing the task is the most expensive mistake you can make. The fix is slower up front and far cheaper over time. Instead of solving the instance, you step back and ask what keeps generating it — then you change that. Redesign the handoff. Clarify the ownership. Remove the step that keeps failing. Do it once, at the structural level, and the symptom stops recurring instead of demanding your attention forever. Firefighting feels productive because it's visible and urgent. But a leader's real job isn't to be the best firefighter in the building. It's to build something that stops catching fire. What's the problem that keeps coming back no matter how many times you solve it — and what structure might be quietly producing it? …more

As covered in Forbes, Joe McKendrick summarizes Brian Solis' ServiceNow research on human + AI. The core mistake I see is treating AI agents only as task replacers instead of partners. From building startups and launching programs I learned three practical steps: map workflows to define human/agent decision points; measure quality and trust, not just speed; run small frontline pilots with clear handoffs and governance. Send me a message to discuss pilot designs. #AI https://briansolis.com/2026/03/forbes-publishes-brian-solis-latest-ai-research-the-biggest-mistake-companies-are-making-with-ai-agents/ …more

Inspiring Founders Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts. If you want to learn from other founders, check it out. I learned early that a good idea rarely guarantees survival. After launching early initiatives I found two practical levers that matter: repeatable operational rhythms and access to mentors who help navigate inevitable pivots. The Inspiring Founders Podcast digs into these realities with founders who share what actually worked and what didn’t. If you want practical takeaways, subscribe and listen. If you want to get more involved in the startup ecosystem, send me a message. #founders https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inspiring-founders-podcast/id1847207641 …more