Bucks don’t scale. Ideas do.
Q: Given your background in go-to-market strategies, can you help my business partner and I figure out the fastest path to growth?
We’ve been working on something truly important for over two years, a media product to create more conversation about race dynamics. This was well before George Floyd’s murder & the recent activism. And it’s why we feel even more compelled, motivated, and passionate about growing. The thing is, we earn absolutely no money from it. We actually spend money on it, because we need to resource it with skills that we don’t have. It needs to be “bigger” by at least 2-3x to monetize. And fast. So: how do we get this growth and make money, so we don’t have to give up on this important work?
Dear Fast-Path Seeker,
I must tell you this as plainly as possible: by seeking the fast path, you’re going absolutely the wrong way.
I get how hard that must be to hear, given your passion to make change.
You believe that the primary challenge you have is growth and money. You’re not alone. Money is where nearly everyone starts. Last weekend, a new friend asked, how do I best position my (new) work to get paying clients? A few months ago, I was in a group reading a god-awful economics book where the author argued, “whatever you want to build in this world, you start with an investment, with money.”
No, no, no. Money, while once crucial to outcomes, is just one particular mechanism of scale, and it is not the starting point.
It all starts with an idea.
ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
An idea shared by many is how we create (or rather, co-create) newness.
And, yet, what was so underdeveloped in your note? The idea.
Your note was far more focused on how passionate you were about the idea. And the potential of it. But, passion makes it mine, not ours.
You need to ask and answer:
- To whom does this idea also belong? You care about race, great. Who else does? And how do you find each other?
- And, you must turn to those already engaged and ask, hey is this really serving you? How? And, if not, how can it? Then, grow the idea. Make it stronger and more viable.
- Growth comes as you co-create, lean on & trust one another. So join forces with others doing similar things.
This lets you go “up and to the right” in the Onlyness framework. (Using the 2×2 grid you’ve seen before.)
We’re not saying money doesn’t matter at all. And we’re also not leaning on the tired trope of, “do what you love and the money will follow.” But, we are saying that making money as a starting point is a misdirection, a red herring, a distraction.
Understand that value creation is distinct from value capture.
Melange & mix the two as if they are one and the same, and you will get caught in what feels like the devil’s snare; the wrong questions entangle you and pull you away from the real work. Focusing on the value creation lets you do the work.
Which sounds so obscure, until you see it up close.
MONEY FOLLOWS MEANING
You remind me of an entrepreneur I advised a few years ago. Let’s call her Stacey. Like you, her starting question was how to get the money to scale. To fund the expansion of her project to multiple cities.
She had started two major initiatives in her career but each fizzled out when her personal passion/energy/exuberance ran out. This was telling.
It meant that she had a history of holding ideas in that tight, closed-fist kind of way, effectively saying here is MY IDEA, not here’s AN idea.
At one point, she wanted to fire someone out of frustration that they weren’t more like her. So, I asked her: Does that person add something useful to the idea? We talked it through until Stacey could see that what mattered was how that person activated the idea, and not simply whether they did as they were told, or were just like her, personality-wise.
That person wasn’t fired. And now they run the day-to-day operations of the enterprise. Perfectly.
Next Stacy and I turned to her board. They had all been picked because they could give money to the organization. They would give bucks “to do good,” and then ask the entrepreneur to do all the work.
Seek money, and you can easily surround yourself with folks who don’t really give a shit about what you give a shit about.
As we started evaluating potential new board members, we invited them to whiteboard sessions on growth strategies. We gauged who was a good match based on who offered to shape and challenge and build the idea. And we walked off those who came to Stacey with “an” answer. We wanted folks who could and would activate the idea in new ways, not wield authority over others.
As the board was revitalized, people who cared deeply participated in shaping what happened next. With that shared purpose came their networks. The new members said, “Hey, I know someone who would want to support this.” Money came, after community, which came after commitment to the shared idea.
Because it all starts with the idea.
Stacey changed from having an idea she personally loved, to loving the development of an idea she first birthed. Enough to build a community around that idea and trust its advancement and betterment to others.
This is what you need to do, too.
The business model we designed? It was rather simple. Instead of asking for grant money to then drive growth to other regions, the construct was to train people to take the concept and apply it to their own region. It enabled even more people to co-own the idea.
“Scale” came through that shared ownership. It wasn’t especially fast, and it wasn’t about big bucks, but rather about the change she wanted to see happen in the world. Keeping her eye on that prize let her add the value only she could, and manifest that shared idea into value creation and eventually a new reality.
MAKING IT OURS
An idea becomes real when it becomes ours.
The idea is the organizing principle of Onlyness, the way we share what we value to create value. The way communities join together, as one. Ideas are what disrupt the status quo and pull us into the future. The idea acts like a portkey, which we are each brought to by our onlyness. As we hold on tight, we feel that hook of meaning inside of us, and, by our shared efforts, we are all pulled forward.
CREATING VALUE IS NOT THE SAME AS CAPTURING VALUE.
Now, I get your challenge. There’s a reason why that book club group and possibly you look at me oddly when I say money is not the starting point, the idea is.
They were once very much intertwined, inseparable. It was the King or Queen who had the money to send the ships of colonizers to new lands. They could then make tons of money from that early capital by trading tea, sugar, slaves. Later, companies took over. It was the East India Trading Company that formed from the British Empire. And so on and so on. It’s a “Rich Man’s World,” as the song lyrics go.
In all of the pre-1990 eras, money wasn’t especially coupled with the idea at all. But it was always the starting point. (An academic paper I published years ago with my good friend Tim Kastelle and colleague Martie-Louise Verreynne lays this out in a time grid.)
But today, to create new worlds, new rooms, and change, we must see anew.
Today, in this Social Era, connected people can now do what once only large organizations (or before that, the very rich) could.
Ideas — especially fresh, disruptive ones — take time to build out. Relationships work at the speed of trust, as Stephen Covey teaches. And, trust, community, and connection are central to how you build the new.
And so, fast-seeking one, slow the f*** down.
You say you want to be a change-maker. Be that. Don’t focus on an ancient tool — money, money, money — to build what comes next. The phrase, we “can’t dismantle the master’s house” using their tools, comes to mind. You reminded me why that’s true: it keeps us from our own work: (re) building our own house, our own houses, the villages where we thrive.
