Add a Zero

I’m sure you’ve heard of 10-Xing Your Business. There’s also 16 x another, book on a similar theme. And of course there’s the Pareto Principle 80/20 and all the power, all the operational leverage that you can get from that approach. All of these concepts kind of get to this idea of magnitude changes in what you do or in how you use your time or whatever it might be. I wanna suggest that there’s a great exercise here for you as a CEO to broaden your opportunities and think up new ways to improve your business, helps you get out of the box in a way that you can’t as long as you’re in your conventional line of thought.

Choose an Impossible Challenge
So what I recommend you do is first pick an impossible challenge, and this is where the adding a zero comes in. Whatever your, it might be your leads that come in, whatever that number is, add a zero. How could you get 10 times that number of leads or, if it’s your manufacturing process, how could you get to 1/10th the defects that you have today? You pick the challenge right in your business, something that’s important and, and that if you were magically able to achieve this impossible challenge, it would measurably change your business. It might totally reinvent your business. Resist the urge to disregard this, right? It’s impossible. I can’t do it. It doesn’t have to be doable for this to be useful, okay?

How Could You Achieve It?
Once you’ve got that very specific challenge in mind, do some brainstorming. Do it with your team as well. If we were to do that, what would have to happen? Even if you don’t know how that would get done, what are some conceivable ways that you could combine the right steps? And maybe there’s a couple of like, well, there’s no way this would happen, but if it could, it would allow this to happen. Then you write that down. You come up with solutions to the impossible challenge.

Implement
I think what you’re gonna find is while none of your solutions are actually fully implementable, you’ll have AHAS. There will be parts of your analysis or your ideation that result in a new way to approach something that you hadn’t considered. At the very least, you’re gonna get that insight from this process. And at the best, at the most, there might be one of those scenarios where it may not be 10x, but you could double your capacity if you really went after it. So this is a process not only to open your mind, but it actually will identify some real areas for growth in your business that the things that you haven’t seen that with a change might not be a small change, but it’s a doable change. You can actually make a big jump in your performance in your business.

B2B Clarity
So, this is a thought experiment and you need to set aside time for this. It’s not, it’s outside of your daily work, but I found this to be a very constructive and sometimes really empowering exercise for you to do about your business.