The Effective Founder: Removing Your Speed Limit
Andy Baldacci and Chris Sparks discuss the origins of the Forcing Function, doubling down on what works, and compounding gains.
Audio recording below (57m). Full transcript following.
Podcast Transcript
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Andy: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Effective Founders Show, the podcast for software entrepreneurs who value strategy over tips and tricks. I'm your host, Andy Baldacci, and every Wednesday I interview successful founders who uncover how they built their business and overcame the inevitable challenges along the way.
When you're grinding to a million a year and beyond, you don't need the latest hacks. You need to execute. My goal with this show is to help you do that, so let's jump in.
Today I'm talking with Chris Sparks, the founder and CEO of the Forcing Function, where he and his team help founders, investors, and executives install the habits, systems, and processes necessary to reach the next level in their business. Chris is also one of the world's top online poker players, and he uses the same frameworks that propelled him to the top of the game to help others achieve world-class performance in their own fields. In our own chat, we dig into what those frameworks are and how you can apply them in your business.
Chris is honestly one of the most thoughtful and deliberate people I have met, and the lessons he shares here are ones you do not want to miss. So without further dismay, here's Chris Sparks of the Forcing Function.
Chris, thank you so much for coming onto the show today.
Chris: A pleasure. Thanks, Andy.
Andy: We've been kind of catching up a bit before recording, just figuring out . . . So it's been fun just getting a bit more of your context. So we both come from similar backgrounds in poker. You have much greater success than I do, but we can relate a lot in the way we approach things. And I want to talk today about what you're doing now with the Forcing Function and how you've kind of taken a lot of your lessons and distilled them down and are helping other people. So can you just share what exactly the Forcing Function is?
Chris: Sure. Of course. And yeah, thanks for asking. The Forcing Function has been my primary focus for the last four years, and it all started somewhat selfishly, in that I looked at my trajectory in life, you know, what I wanted to accomplish, and saw that what I was doing wasn't going to get me there, that I didn't have the right habits and systems in place. And in this journey of doing lots of reading, research, and talking to people who I saw as prolific, I saw what I thought was a great opportunity, and to do what I called 'deconstructing excellence.'
So, what are the key principles that need to be embodied, and what are those supporting habits and systems that allow someone to achieve any goal? And I thought the highest-leverage way to apply this was to entrepreneurship, where, in my mind, those who were most taking the right kind of risks, putting things out into the world that I thought deserved to be there, were entrepreneurs. And so I began working with founders and you know, small-business executives, teaching them frameworks both that I took away from my rise to the top of the poker world, as well as things that I had learned and observed in my years in the startup world, working closely with founders.
And I see that as kind of this barbell approach. On one hand, I am fortunate to work with some of the most successful startup founders in the world, and you can kind of see behind the scenes what is it that they're doing in their lives and in their companies that allows them to have outlier-type outcomes—you know, major exits. Some of them have seven-, eight-figure recurring run rates. But also just living lives that I thought embodied success, where they were balanced, they were free to pursue their hobbies, they had low stress, lots of purpose. Considering how much that they were working (it never felt like work to them), but they were still able to prioritize their health, spend time with their families. I thought if I could figure out what are the commonalities here, what techniques generalize across these founders, I could turn it into my own system that I could teach to others. And on a selfish note, that meant that I could add value to anyone that I met for the rest of my life. I could get myself into any room.
But I started to see that this was a way to play a very positive-sum game, in that I could create ripples in the world by taking what I had learned from working with these really successful entrepreneurs, and doing what I just think of as open-sourcing it. Giving all of this away, either through conversations like this one, or articles, or the workbook that I put out for free last year which I call Experiment Without Limits. You can download that for free on our website, at theforcingfunction.com/workbook. And it has all my secrets in there with step-by-step instructions on how to implement it.
And for me, I love what I do. I jump out of bed in the morning, because I'm essentially paid to learn. I am the third-party objective observer for a really busy founder who has way too much on their plate to remind them what they said is important, to uncover their roadblocks and create a plan together to remove those, and just to keep their eye on the ball, removing those obstacles that are preventing them from getting themselves and their company to where they want.
And that high level is what we call "peak performance." I really differentiate between productivity and performance. There are way too many productivity courses and coaches out there, and there's a lot of people who mistake the means for the ends. Obsession over tools, sort of what I call productivity-porn type stuff. And what I really focus on is performance, which I think of as "what is the most direct path between you and your goals?" And that's what I help to uncover for my clients.
Andy: It's funny you say that, because that's a lot of why I . . . I kind of shifted my show. So I launched this podcast a couple years ago as The Early-Stage Founder, and a lot of what we dug into were just kind of different strategies and tactics and tools for ways to grow your business. And I think you need to have the right tools if you want to build something, but at a certain point, you need a lot more than the tools. And I kind of got to the point with it where I just realized, "I'm not adding to the conversation anymore. I don't want people to think that they have to know the latest and greatest growth hacks or whatever it may be to get their business ahead. There's enough good content, great content out there on those topics. But like, you don't need to be on this constant treadmill of figuring out the next new thing." And so that's why I rebranded the show as "The Effective Founder," because it's not even just being efficient, but it's being effective. You're making sure you're getting the right things done.
And it's not that easy. It's not that intuitive. It's easier to kind of constantly be chasing things. So it's cool to hear you describe a kind of similar focus on performance, of getting the right things done in kind of the most direct route.
And so when you—Well, first, I guess, for listeners, I'll be sure to link up to Chris's workbook in the show notes. And this workbook . . . It's very literal, 'cause this is a book that you're going to work through. There's a lot of templates and forms and just kind of experiments that you will literally work through, but yeah. This is ninety-three pages long, this is something that is packed full of great information and great experiments to go through, so definitely check that out, but Chris, when someone comes to the Forcing Function, and they're looking to work with you and the team one-on-one, how does that relationship begin? Like how do you all diagnose where to even start when a new client comes to you for more hands-on help?
Chris: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I have the luxury of being able to be pretty picky with who we decide to work with, and the biggest thing is alignment of mission. Is this someone who I want to walk that path with them? Is what they're doing I think meaningful and achievable? And I like to say that my clients are going to be wildly successful whether I work with them or not, but maybe I can give them a few nudges along the way, accelerate that process. And that's what I'm generally looking for, is where is their North Star, and you know, is that a North Star that I'm interested in helping them achieve? Do I really genuinely care about it? Because a lot of the highest value things that I can do for someone do not scale. And that's really what I've built a business around, is doing the things that do not scale.
And the very first thing, when I start working with a client, I have a questionnaire that I've been iterating on for the last four years, which is what I think of as a discovery process. Because when someone comes to you, what they think is holding them back is never actually what's holding them back. And so it's lots of oblique ways . . . Sort of like, you know, you take a psychology study, and what they get you into the room, what you think you're doing, is not actually what they're trying to study. The same thing here is I'm asking questions to try to dig into what's really going on. I'm really, really big on systems thinking and trying to uncover what's the core cause. And as you were talking about, you know, effectiveness versus efficiency, it's usually because they're not doing the right things. Something I talk about a lot in the context of time management is that everyone wants the hacks to work more hours or to be more efficient within their hours, but no one talks enough about how do you decide what the most important, highest-leverage things are to do? And I think that's the best role that I can play, is uncovering those high-value, high-leverage activities and removing those bottlenecks, internal and external, that are preventing taking action in those areas.
And so what I'm looking for to start, you know, first the question that I'm happy to share with you guys—this is like, you know, almost feels like cheating—is I ask them, "Think back to the most productive time in your life. You know, visualize it. What was it like? And just list out, what were the five things that you were doing then that you're not doing now?” And it blows me away, because it's always stuff like, "Oh, I was waking up early." "I was doing my most important thing first." These are some of the things that I've seen work really well, generalized, across all my clients. "I wasn't checking email before noon." "I was working on my most important thing first." "I was getting a good night of sleep." "I was exercising regularly." All the things that seem obvious, but it's like, "Oh yeah, I know I should be doing that," but when you're faced with this delta between, "Oh, well here's when I was having the results I wanted, and here's where I am now. Well, why am I not doing those things? I know they already work for me."
And kind of the trick here is that the natural speed limit for growth is buy-in. Someone needs to be invested, and so that's always my challenge in the beginning, is I wanna identify that really low-hanging fruit to get them some wins, where I can kind of incept them with this experience that, hey, there's a shift in beliefs, that it is possible for me to increase my levels of output to perform at a higher level, and by having these early wins, having these smaller actions that see a compounding effect in their lives, well now I have the buy-in, okay. Now we can continue to experiment. Now we can do the fun stuff. But that's always where I start, is, you know, "What has worked for you in the past? Let's start there." After that, I'm really big on time tracking. So I have all my clients just track where their time is going and put an estimated hourly rate on all of those activities. And you know, you'll be surprised how many things you're doing that have an expected value of ten dollars an hour, or that you could pay someone ten dollars an hour to do.
And the thing is, there's a very simple arbitrage that can occur—everyone has these ten-thousand-dollars-an-hour-type activities that always fall into the "important but not urgent" category, and they live inside your brain so no one else knows about them, no one's asking about them, and you can really arbitrage by handing off or eliminating these low-value tasks you're doing and creating more space for the ten-thousand-an-hour-type tasks. And it's always something that's very counter-intuitive, is I usually tell my clients to work less. Not in like, "Okay, go hang out on the beach" type of thing, but if you're taking on fewer projects, I call this "more wood behind fewer arrows." You can put more of your attention and focus behind those projects. And so there should be more focus on, "What are the projects that are going to move my business forward the most?" And let's put the other stuff to the side. To operate in serial rather than parallel.
And there's also something that's really uncanny about just creating blank space, and not rushing to fill that—that's when you have the break-throughs that you can't really plan through or that help you reach the next stage. So that's always the kind of ripping the bandaid off in the beginning—
Andy: Yeah.
Chris: —”Well, here are the five projects that you're working on. Pick three. And any time that you bring up the other two, I'm gonna cut you off. I don't even wanna hear about them." It's really interesting that you can accomplish more by doing less.
Andy: This is something where it's not to throw away kind of the thesis I laid out about it, not the tactics stop mattering, but when we get practical with this, I feel like I can often, like intellectually, like, yes. That makes sense. I agree with those things. But then it's like, then half that . . . The day is over, and I have no idea what happened. And it's just like . . . I just feel like it's very easy, especially . . . Not that it ever gets easy for most business owners, or most professionals, even, but in those early days when you don't have a team to support you, and when there's simply not as many resources to go around, I just feel like it's so easy to get pulled in a hundred different directions. So, are there just ways you advise clients to be more mindful about this, or just try to catch themselves before things just go off the rails? Like how when it comes to the day-to-day part do you advise them to like actually implement these things?
Chris: Hundred percent. You know, simple does not mean easy, right? What sounds relatively straightforward is much more difficult to deploy in a messy life. So I always try to frame things in terms of an experiment, which is, "Hey, we're going to try this new behavior, this new way of working, this new schedule, whatever it may be, for a closed experiment time." You know, I default for thirty days, but it could be as short as a week. Right? Enough time to collect data for the experiment to run, and for this next period, I'm going to act as if I have a hundred percent conviction of its direction. And the nice thing is, at the end of that period I can say, "Well, that worked. How can I double down on that?" Or, "No, I didn't like that, that didn't actually work, okay, let's try something else.” Because you know, the days get very messy and it's important to simplify that.
So I always try to break it down to, "Well, what are these core habits, what are these things that if we do every day, the day just goes a little bit better, and let's iterate and build upon those. And so a really key photo that I have in—Experiment Without Limits is huge on systems thinking, and one of the really key concepts there is a feedback loop. And so I think—what I call "the improvement loop" is plan, experiment, reflect. I like to say that the speed of our growth, the speed of our learning, is proportional to the tightness of our feedback loop. How quickly we iterate between plan, experiment, reflect. And so we plan, we decide: "what are we going to do, and when are we going to do it?" Having that default in place makes it a lot easier to follow. If we wake up without a plan, we're just going to do whatever shouts at us the most. And so it's always important to do that important thing first before we switch over to reactive mode.
We experiment. We collect data. "Hey, are the things that we are doing leading us to the outcomes that we want?" So we can internalize the benefits. We're tracking, we're trying to be as objective as we can. And then once the experiment is over, "Hey, I've done this for a week, how's it going?" I reflect. “What have I learned through this? Are there aspects that . . . What's the E20 here? How can I make this something that's trivially easy to stay consistent with?” Or if I'm just seeing out-sized results: “Well, okay. If a half-hour of planning is having a big difference on my week, what would that look like to spend an hour planning?” And really, I try to shy away from what I refer to as a heavy lift—there's this tendency for someone to try to just make this huge change in their life. Right? Migrate everything over to a new system, go from not working out to now I'm gonna work out for two hours every day . . . Just something that is way dependent upon motivation and willpower, which is a very limited and time-sensitive resource, versus there's a lot of power in small compounding wins.
Every area of my life, I'm always looking for, "Hey, what is that next step forward? And how can I make progress there inevitable?" Right? If I can ensure that I am making small improvements every day, everything else takes care of itself. Right? Revenue, all the other scoreboards take care of themselves. All I need to make sure is that I'm continually learning, continuing, improving. And that, at a high level, is the system. “What do I need to have in place to ensure that things are moving forward?” It really reduces down to planning, deciding what is most important to do. And implicit in that is, "What are the things that I'm not going to do?" I think that step is often skipped. Collecting data. Right? Experimenting. Tracking my time, tracking results. What are the metrics that show if I'm on track or off track? And having that in place allows me to be a little bit more curious rather than judgmental about the things that I do.
And then finally on regular, recurring intervals, reflecting. "What are the things that I'm doing that are working? What is driving the most value? Where am I seeing the greatest outputs per level of input?” And then identifying ways to double down or stop based on that. You know, high level, at the abstract, this can be applied practically to like any level of your business or life.
Andy: Yeah. And for you personally, like what does the planning part of that loop look like? Like, are you literally writing things out every day? Every week? Like how do you actually plan and practice?
Chris: Sure. Yeah. I always try to focus on the principles rather than the wholesale tactics. I tend to be very analog. I just love the feel of a pen in my hand. And so every week and every day I'm writing out, "Here's exactly what I'm going to accomplish." And not like, "Hey, work on article." It's, "Here is the specific deliverable in GTD terms. Here's something that's going to be different in the world today." Maximum of five thirty-minute cycles, or Pomodoros, some of you guys might be familiar with. Like, what can I accomplish in that time period? How long do I expect that to take? And then actually budgeting my time.
So like, for example right now, we're talking on a podcast. When we're finished with this, at 1:30 to 2:30, I'm working on a newsletter that I'm sending out tomorrow, and based upon past time estimates I know that it's gonna take me about an hour to have the draft before I hand it off to a team to edit and add images. And so the more that I plan, the more that I simulate things that I'm going to do (it's always cheaper to make mistakes in simulation rather than reality), the more that my output becomes predictable. And the cool thing about that is by putting a number on something—"What is my percentage confidence level that I can accomplish what I set out to do today"—the more often that reality matches that plan.
That's the real power of this iterative process: I can decide what I want to accomplish today. This is not just some intention. Here's what I hope to accomplish, here's what I want to work on if I have time. It's like, no. This is what's going to be different in the world tomorrow versus today. And that's where that reflection comes into play. Say I set out to . . . You know, I used the newsletter example. Let's say I set out to finish this newsletter in an hour and it takes me an hour and a half, or I don't even get to it today. I get sucked into social media or email or all of the many other things we can be doing that are very easy to justify in hindsight but weren't actually on the plan. Right? That's why we have the plan, so we can't justify in hindsight as well.
Okay. "How did I fail?" It's not that this is a failure, unless I pay this tuition multiple times. Let's take this lesson into account. "Well, okay, I said I was going to work on the newsletter, but after I was recording the podcast I was tired and I wanted to take a nap." Well, okay, I need to account for that next time. Maybe I do the writing before the podcast, or maybe I make it harder to go take a nap. Right? I have it already up and I just immediately start. That's a lot of where procrastination comes up, is a failure to start. So maybe I just have that window up, and as soon as I hang up this call I just immediately start writing. Before I know it, I'm working on the newsletter. Right?
But every time that I have a result that I don't want, I knock that failure mode as a possibility, right? Put something in place that makes it harder for me to fail in that same way again. And that way, I create more and more opportunities to succeed in the future.
Andy: When I hear you talk about the improvement loop, I kind of go back to the poker days, where in the beginning of kind of the like online poker, when we entered things, you had the live pros who were at the top of the game. They were the ones with decades of experience, and they were the ones everyone viewed as the pinnacle of things. This was as good as you can get at the game. And then very quickly you had these young kids playing online just get dramatically better than them. Truly changing the way the game was actually played. And a lot of it to me comes back to this improvement loop, because when it comes to online poker, I think at the superficial level you're able to play more hands significantly faster than you could in a casino when you're playing one table. Online you can be playing twenty or more, and getting a hundred times as many hands per hour, and so on. So the experience racks up faster.
But what we all kind of realize is it's not just experience that gets you better, because all of us have our bad habits that we've done thousands and thousands of times, and it's not as though they're getting better just on their own. But it's really that being deliberate about it and viewing all of these feedback loops of like actual opportunities to experiment, see how it went, and then get in the next hand, or the next day, however you're breaking things down, and try it again.
And I feel like it's those feedback loops . . . That's kind of a great example that clicks for me, at least, of like how it plays out, where it's not just going through the reps, it's being deliberate about it, experimenting, reflecting, and then going in with a new plan and just kind of repeating that. I think that's where the edge comes from with what you're talking about. Is that fair to say?
Chris: Exactly. Exactly. This concept applies to everything. So I think that's the amazing thing about poker. When I'm playing twelve games at a time, I'm literally having my assumptions tested a thousand times an hour, and if I'm really paying attention and I take the time off the table to reflect on, "Hey, what are the decisions I would have made differently given the information I had at the time, what could I have known that would have caused me to make a better decision?" Always focused on this process. And that the result is only information that's reflected on how accurate were my models, whether it's of this strategy or this particular opponent. And I think that applies so much to everything that we do. So you know, talking about a business. I think there's so much . . . I talk about this in a post called "The Perils of Over-Optimization" There's so much tendency to try to perfect things rather than to put things out as quickly as possible. Something that's really referred to as the minimum viable product. But we should have minimum viable products for everything. Habits, systems, et cetera. That we put things out and we use the feedback that we get to quickly iterate and reorient to what we're hearing. Because likely our first guess is not going to be our best guess. And that's . . . When you talk about these generational gaps in poker, is that we . . . As the second generation, as I like to refer to ourselves, we're able to just reorient and kind of more approach this asymptote of correct strategy much faster, because we were getting more information and used that information to update our models.
And it's something I think about today, as you know, I'm a dinosaur in poker years. A lot of the players that I play at the high stakes now are twenty-one years old, and they're like I was at that age, and you know, they have poker dreams, and all of their friends have poker friends, and they're just spending a lot more time in the gym than me. So how do I maintain my standing while playing half as much while studying a quarter as much?
You know, I have some of my old dinosaur tricks, but I need to reorient to this new way of playing faster than they can just to keep up. I think it's a really important thing to think about as a founder: speed of implementation kills. That's something that I've really seen as a commonality in the successful founders that I work with, that they are just relentless about taking action immediately.
Most decisions really don't matter. They're completely reversible. I think of them as chicken-or-steak decisions. It's like, "Well, am I gonna spend hours thinking about whether I'm gonna have chicken or steak for dinner?" Well, no. I'm just gonna pick one, and if I like one more than the other, maybe I'm more likely to pick that one in the future. And it's the same way as just like, "Let's take our best guess" in models that I share with clients: "How do you come up with your best guess so you can have enough conviction to move forward?" And then, "What is the market telling you?" And we're constantly trying to shed light on these invalidated assumptions through market feedback. But that's the extent to which planning is useful—you know enough to have a best path forward. But then you collect data and see, "Okay, how can I reorient there?" And when I talk about performance as being the most direct path, this is a constant, iterative, course-corrective process towards that North Star, which is likely to shift over time. But you're not going to be aware of that if you're not at least moving in the right direction.
Andy: When you're working with clients, it seems like a lot of what you have to do is overcome a lot of the natural momentum that they've had going in maybe the wrong direction, and getting quick wins and kind of getting those 80/20 wins right out of the gate is a good way to get the buy-in from them to keep going. But still, when things in life come up that can kind of shake us out of these new routines and get us back into the old ones, what happens then? How do you typically work with clients to get back on the path if they have fallen off? Like how do you get those noobie gains that they got in the early days to stick and actually compound and just kind of keep them there? Because like you're saying, it's a never-ending journey, so I feel like a lot of us can probably relate to whether there's productivity hacks or some of the things that are more superficial, but like we've tried these things and they worked for a bit and then something changed and they went out the window and we didn't get back to it. So like, what do you recommend to your clients to kind of overcome that?
Chris: Yeah. It makes me think of the graphs of startup success, where everyone kind of goes through the trial of sorrow. Right? You start in the beginning and it's like, "Oh, this is wildly successful, everything is different now. I set up this new system, I have this new morning routine in place. I am unstoppable." And you know, everyone sort of extrapolates out that success indefinitely. And something that I've had to learn by experience is to, one, kind of temper those expectations . . . This is something I just talk about all the time, is raising the floor. Everyone wants to think, "Well, what's the next move? How do I do even more?" It's like, well, first raise the floor. First, make sure this win you have is something you can stay consistent with over time, because that's the foundation you're going to build upon. And until that foundation is solid, it's really difficult to build.
The kind of really brief theory of habit formation, it's like this gravitational attraction zone, in that you're constantly expanding this list of contexts under which the habit still occurs. So everyone's like, "Oh, when circumstances are perfect, you know, things aren't super busy at work, I'm not stressed, I don't have any major launches, yeah. I take time for myself, I plan, I'm really diligent in keeping up with my habit systems." Well, as soon as crap hits the fan all that stuff goes out the window, because it's a super shaky foundation. So I'm like, "Hey, when things are going well, like, raise the floor. Let's make this something that you can stick with when things aren't going so well and things get busier, as you know, they will.” There's just a natural regression to the mean.
And so part of it is preparing clients for that inevitability. Like, "Hey, there's going to be a time where this is a lot harder to stick to, and that's where this really counts. And that's where you know, we can really diverge in our outcomes, is if this becomes like a, 'Hey, I'm back to where I started, you know, my old momentum,’ then you're going to continually oscillate between these extremes. But hey, if you can use this as a learning experience to build upon, well, sky's the limit. I mean, we can go exponential at any moment.” And that's the really key moment.
And so I've actually had to kind of pare back my instincts. I mean, you can kind of hear me, I just wanna give away the kitchen sink now. I'm trying to share as much as I can, but actually having them not succeed as much in the beginning, to kind of create a gentle ramp up, because everyone wants to keep at that same trajectory, and because our mood is something we naturally extrapolate on, if that speed of progress starts to decelerate a little bit, right . . . We naturally hit diminishing marginal returns, someone gets demoralized, and then they're at risk of falling off altogether, which is the most costly thing of all— is—you know, constantly resetting to zero. So, yeah. I'm thinking about what is the sustainable pace that we can keep at so that we keep building and behind us we're solidifying the foundation that we've created, so when that natural regression happens, we don't fall all the way back to where we were at the start, but we only just take one step backward.
And I think that's something that's really key to think about as a business founder, is like, cleaning up after yourselves. So you finish a launch, you put out a new product, put out something that's really successful, do a post mortem. Extract as many lessons as you can from it. And what can you put in place to make that outcome more likely next time? It's so tempting to immediately move on to the next thing, but no. Take a moment to celebrate, think about what you learn, and let's put something in place so that this becomes our new normal. There's a lot of power in slowing down, being more intentional. And, right, it's like it all comes back to this planning, experimenting, reflecting. I think that's really the key. And I think we get into it a little bit at bottlenecks, I think that really ties in there, is knowing which stage of the cycle that you're in, and only doing activities that are within that cycle.
Andy: Can you expand a little bit on that?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So high level, if there's one concept that really ties everything that I think about together, it's this concept of bottlenecks. And the really profound red pill that comes from bottlenecks is that most of what we do is a complete waste of time. That's a bit contrarian way to put it, but just thinking that any given time there is one thing that is holding us back more than anything else, in our life, in our business. If you imagine a long chain one of those links in the chain is going to be the weakest link. And so if we want to strengthen our positioning, if we want to improve any process, we need to focus on the weakest link on the part of the chain. And so constantly we are doing things that don't overall raise the tide of the system, because we're focusing on the areas that aren't actually holding us back. Right? I think a lot of things as this kind of chain of interlocking processes. And so understanding where a small improvement has out-sized outcomes. Right? This is what I refer to as leverage.
And so the way to identify this bottleneck, in operations management terms, is identifying a huge pile of work in progress in front of that step in the process. Or as a founder, it's like, "What is literally everyone else on your team always waiting on?" For you. Like, you are the bottleneck of the business, as the founder. And so what is that thing where if only you had more time to act upon, your cycle times were a little bit faster, literally everything in the company would move a little bit faster. Identifying that. And the first thing is you elevate the constraint, it's called. How can you create a little bit more capacity there?
And so, I'll give a recent example. A client that I'm working with, he had assigned himself . . . You know, a really big part of removing these bottlenecks is removing things of ownership that the founder has, handing them off to other members of the team, so they own it. So something that was your number five or number six focus can become someone else's number one or number two. Clear forcing function there.
He was owning sending out invoices to his clients. And so the invoices should have been going out on the first of the month, but because he was so busy he was sending them out on the fifteenth. And so he was literally extending his cash flow by two weeks unnecessarily. If anyone has a business that really wants to compress these cash flows, you can see how costly that is. It was literally like decreasing the growth of his company by fifty percent, just because you know, he hated filling in invoices. But his big fear there was, "Well, what if there's a wrong decimal point? I want to make sure that these invoices are going out correctly." Well, how much time per month are you spending on these invoices? He's like, "Four or five hours." Well, have someone do the initial four hours, and then you can just check their work. And so taking this down to something on the second of the month, he just checks them and they go off, increases cash cycle by fifteen days, and now he's able to hire new employees who've taken other things off his plate, and it's just taken everything he does off to this new level, because he attacked that bottleneck.
Right? It's like, "I don't have the money to hire because money isn't coming in fast enough." Well, what's that thing that's holding money coming in fast enough? It's you. So just get out of your own way. So yeah. That's kind of how you identify that bottleneck, is like, "Where is progress waiting on you?"
Andy: Yeah. And this is where you talked about kind of work in progress and the value of visualizing your work, whether as Kanban or whatever system, you can just see you break down the steps of a process and just see where things visually are piling up. And when you do have it in whether sticky notes or a Trello board or Notion or whatever, like when it's visualized, it's much easier to be like, "Oh, okay. This is where it gets stuck." But like you can do that less literally for smaller tasks. Like I'm sure for the founder, it wasn't as though he had a sticky note for every invoice and he was like, "Oh, there's a ton of invoices." Kind of by just probing mentally, just by getting through his routines that he could get to.
And I know for me, a lot of what I've done on the marketing side of things is writing. And it's that first draft that takes me forever. And when you're able to get in someone who can just do a draft that I might throw out eight percent of it, that is the bottleneck for me, is just me getting my thoughts on the paper, because I'm not a trained writer, and I'll try to get it perfect before even writing anything, but it's like, no. Have someone start a task for you, and if you want to be more of a perfectionist you can come in and edit it. And then I think like as a founder, you'll start to realize, "If I can just get them to get it eighty percent of the way there, it's not worth it for me to spend my time getting it the last twenty percent, because what I view as the polishing touch probably isn't necessary, it's just my opinion." And—
Chris: Could I double-click on that?
Andy: Yeah.
Chris: So I love this. I think it's a really good way of putting it. Just a couple things you said that I really want to highlight and emphasize. You know, first, understand the things where eighty percent is good enough. It's like so many things, so many projects, that last twenty percent takes eighty percent. Right? So if you have a really good idea . . . You know, define this in the beginning. What is 'done'? When is this deliverable? When can we move on? What does that look like? The more you can be on that direct path towards that, avoid activities that aren't towards that, and when you hit that point of 'good enough,' like, “let's put this out and start collecting market feedback,” you can move on to the next thing. But because we don't define that upfront, we go way past the point that we need.
And this classic thing that I see—this happens a lot in terms of procrastination—is starting off with a blank page. So, what can you do to have this work pulled out of you, where you have something to edit rather than craft from the beginning. Something that I do as well with articles is just, "Hey, just pool in all the notes, all the things that I've said on the subject, into a document." Well, it's way easier to take apart things that I've said before and turn them into something that's relatively intelligible, but put me in front of a blank page and tell me to write on something, it's like, "Oh, that's so paralyzing."
And that blank page mentality applies to so much. And so this is a big part of handing off ownership—these things get pulled out of you, rather than you being the one who needs to push them forward. Like I said, a really key part of removing yourself as a bottleneck in your business is externalizing your own knowledge. The more that you keep things in your head, the more every single process needs to go through you. And it's this really big dichotomy that I see for founders: you can be rich or you can be king. But you can't be both. And so if you want this company to scale beyond you and grow to the size it can, you need to hold off control. And so being aware of all of those places where you're unnecessarily holding onto control, because you're your own worst enemy there.
And the final thing that I will say there as far as this blank page mentality is like, just start with the super basic process. I said everyone falls into this perfection mentality, but it's like as you're doing something . . . So for me, I just have this piece of paper next to me. I just like write out those steps, and I literally take a photo of it, and I drop it into a document. And so my project manager turns that into a digital thing that we can search later. And then every time that I'm doing this thing, I have that up in my other window. And the thing is every time that I touch this process, the more dialed in it becomes. The more I realize, "Hey, there's a way to hand this off or to streamline this, to improve it, to have a better result." But it requires having that really crappy rough draft of, "I have something that I can manipulate."
And this is something that I see all the time. A really big exercise that I do with clients is, "Let's create some SOPs for the key processes in your business." And all the time someone's like, "Oh, there's nothing that I do twice." And it's just like, "Hey, for the next week, every time you do something, just have a piece of paper, write out those steps, and if you go back to that, if you do something similar, turn that into something digital and send it to me." And I'm like, "When you have five, let me know." And it's like, "Oh, that's gonna take me forever." I usually get that in like two days, and a client that I started with, two weeks ago I assigned him that, he just sent me a screenshot of his notion, and now he has a hundred SOPs.
It's like, once you bring your awareness to "I am literally doing the same thing the same way over and over again” but not even just taking a moment to think, "Hey, is there a way I can do this better? Do I even need to be doing this?" There's a lot of power, a lot of time, a lot of leverage to be unlocked there.
Andy: Yeah. These ideas are so valuable. And this brings me back to kind of what you talked about, like with things oscillating and falling off track. And it kind of made me realize, like ultimately what I feel you're getting at is trying to view this as though there isn't a single . . . I view it in kind of binary terms, where I'm either on track or I'm off track, whereas I feel like a lot of what you're saying is the track moves, and you're trying to make sure that your mean is increasing as you go along. And things aren't normally distributed. Things aren't going to be the average every single time, so you're going to have some below-average and some above-average moments, but as long as you make sure the average is trending up, you're still moving forward. And it's that kind of uncertainty and that kind of . . . Just, those oscillations can be really hard to accept as a type-A person who wants things to always be great. And I feel like the peace of mind can come from trying to look at the bigger picture and measure the progress overall rather than in any given sample, because that's just gonna drive you crazy, I feel like.
Chris: One hundred percent. I couldn't have said it better. And it's the same personality traits that make us successful founders, if they are inverted, also allow us to become our worst enemy. The things that, hey. We have really high standards. We think differently. We just wanna go out there and make things happen. Well, all of those things can turn against us in a second, because we over-extrapolate on these recent results. This dichotomous all-or-nothing thinking is really, really endemic among founders. And so, as I say, it feels counter-intuitive. It's just like, hey. Think about . . . Everyone's like, "Oh, I wanna have this 10x outcome." It's like, the way you have a 10x outcome is tons and tons and tons of incremental improvements, because you don't know which of these experiments is going to pay off. But just think about, how can I just know where I am?
I'll use a basic poker metaphor, it's like, we're playing a hand, we're on the turn. We make a bet. It's like, "Well, as long as these cards don't come, I'm great. I'm gonna shove all in." And just already counting his chips. They're already my . . . I know he's gonna call. I already own them. Oh, what do you know? One of those two cards come. Inside straight. And because we're soul-reading this guy, we automatically know what he has, and it's like, "Oh, well I'm so frustrated, I'm gonna call anyways." Well, no. The world has changed. We reorient to this new reality. If we backslide, we aren't anchored to where we used to be. It's like, "Well, given where we are now, what does it make sense to do?" And so in this situation, hey. The card that we knew was bad for our range versus our opponent's range came, and so we have to fold.
And this situation comes up all the time, is it's never a straight line. But the more that we are calibrated to where are things right now, the more we are able to make the first correct move forward. Because it's not like, where we wish we were or where we think we should be, but here is where we are now. And given that . . . It's one of my favorite phrases, is you know, "The future flows logically from a hypothetical present." It's like, if we have a really clear idea of where we stand now, our next steps are pretty obvious. But it takes standing still and thinking, "All right. Here's the situation. Given that, let's accept it, and say, ‘all right. What do I do now, given this as true?’" But hitting that pause and slowing down actually allows us to move in the right direction with that next step much more often.
Andy: It's kind of taking the cliché of "play the hand you're dealt" a bit further.
Chris: Exactly.
Andy: Because it's not as though it starts with the hand. So many factors change after you're dealt that hand, and it's playing each moment, each decision, as it is, right now. And I know Phil Galfond has talked a lot about this. Kind of a big name in the poker world. But it's just . . . When you're reviewing, when you're going back and doing that retrospective, look at the decisions that led up to something, but in that moment you can't change what decisions you made or what decisions an opponent made or what cards were dealt to get you to the current spot. You just have to accept that and take that with some stoicism of just, "Here's where I am right now. I can be pissed off about how I got here, but like, I'm here. What is the best way forward?"
Chris: Yeah. And I think that's really the end game of all this—altering thought patterns. Right? Everyone wants to interact at the behavioral level, but all behavior is driven by thought. And so if I can help someone see things a little bit differently, where they . . . You know, the more they catch themselves, the earlier and earlier that intervention will occur. In meditation, we call this expanding the gap between stimulus and response. It is like . . . Something happens, and rather than having this automatic reaction, pause. Say, "All right, this has happened. It's inconvenient. It's not catastrophic, it's just a little bit inconvenient. But it's happened. I have to accept it. And given that, you know, what makes sense to do next?" You know, increasing that gap, having that pause is really, really nice, because it allows us to take that next step forward. And I think that's kind of the key to decision making: just being a little bit more objective about reality. And like you said, it's a constant iterative process.
Every time we make a decision, we look back and say, "Hey, given what I knew at the time, how could I have been a little bit more objective there? What did I miss? What information could I have sought out that would have helped me to make a better decision?
It's crazy how often we become over-invested in a certain outcome, and we actually avoid information that would cause us to have a different decision. This is why I call the difference between curiosity and judgment: because we have an experimental mindset, we don't take anything personally. But like, we're constantly looking for ways that we could be wrong. But not in like an, "Oh, I need to pivot this company," or like, "Oh, maybe I'm not the right person to be doing this," but just like, hey. Let's be curious about this. I don't need to do anything now, but I'm collecting data, and there will come a time when I can change course.
So yeah, I think if I can do anything for a client, if it's something that I can do that will carry on and compound, call it creating an inflection point for the rest of their life, is just creating this pause when they make a decision. And maybe they think things through a little bit differently. The conversation that they've had with themselves, the first question that they address . . . Maybe it's a little bit more productive. That's really my hope. And all of these productivity techniques, those are sort of the gateway drug to, you know, what is the right way to think? Because that's really what drives all of it, is our mindset.
Andy: I think that is a perfect note to end on, but before we wrap up, I like to just ask all of my guests a few rapid-fire questions. And so I'm going to go through them quickly, you can interpret them however you want, your answers can be as long or as short as you want. But the first question is just, if you had to choose one: e-book, audiobook, or physical?
Chris: I'm gonna cheat a little with corollary here. So for systems purposes, I'm very big on Kindle, because I am able to highlight and take notes and have all of my knowledge be searchable. What really has accelerated my learning speed is externalizing my knowledge, being able to build bridges between those isolated islands. I try to remember as little as possible. And so I really gravitate towards Kindle for that ability to be able to go back to things that I've read in the past and draw those connections that might not have happened at the time.
I think a lot of the impact of what we read is that context that we're currently in, and so returning to things that I thought were important in a different context often can unearth new insights.
That being said, for just pure aesthetic experience, there's nothing like holding a physical book in my hand. But that friction of digitizing notes from an analog format is enough for me that a lot of times I don't take any notes when I read a physical book. It's for pure enjoyment. So if I had to pick one, holding all the world knowledge in my hand in my Kindle is the one I would go with, but I'm still waiting for someone to recreate that pure aesthetic experience.
Andy: I can completely agree with that. And then the last one is: outside of work, what's something you're currently trying to improve at or learn more about? I know that for you, you kind of seem at least to have a life that blends work with kind of everything else, but if you can think of things that don't as directly impact kind of performance and work, just what is something you're kind of enjoying learning about?
Chris: Yeah. I mean for me there's very little separation, because I love so much of what I do, and I somehow find a way to get paid for things that I love learning about naturally. The conversations that I wanna be having about, you know, what can I do to support you on your goals, and how can we get there together? I mean, honestly, that's a big part of why I started this, is just to have those conversations which I enjoy so much, and to turn a lot of my consumption, you know, things that I learn about, into production. Things that I can share with others.
You know, if—The first thing that comes to mind for me is happening this year. I've really been trying to prioritize mental health. I thought that was something that really fell off for myself and a lot of people. We just didn't quite know how to deal with this new source of stress and just feeling a complete loss of control. And so some things that I've been really trying to go deep on that I enjoy for their own sake, but I see a lot of benefit . . . You know, first, just spending more time on my body. I've gotten really into yoga. Particularly the Katonah variety. And just being hyper-sensitive to the signals that my body is telling me, and remembering that I am a person in a body.
I typically spend a lot of my time sitting in a chair in front of a computer. It's very easy to forget that, but becoming more embodied has been huge for me. I also . . . You know, I've started a daily meditation practice that's been a habit that I've had loose intentions for but haven't been able to stick with for a number of years, and just being able to observe myself has been a really powerful experience, and you know, one that I think is going to continue to expand hopefully for the rest of my life.
Andy: Well, Chris, this chat has been so much fun for me. I know listeners are going to get a lot out of it. If they wanna hear more from you or just see what you and the team are up to, where are the best places for them to go to do that?
Chris: Yeah, thanks for that. There's a couple places that I usually direct people to. So our company is called the Forcing Function. That's theforcingfunction.com. I mentioned early, the best way to kind of get a really good sense of the things that we work with our clients is our peak performance workbook, Experiment Without Limits. You can download that for free at theforcingfunction.com/workbook. With all this stuff, I mean I touched on a lot today. It's really hard to know where to get started. And that's where this concept of a bottleneck comes into play. What is your biggest opportunity to reach the next stage? And we created a quiz which I call the "Performance Assessment," which is also free to take. That's theforcingfunction.com/assessment. If you take that, I'll give you personalized feedback of what I think is your best opportunity to improve yourself or to reach the next stage in your business. So, I highly recommend that as far as like, "This would be my recommendation, how to get started."
And then finally, depending on when this episode's coming out, we're doing group performance training for the first time, calling it "Team Performance Training," and you can see that at theforcingfunction.com/team-training. And this is the first time that I'm presenting my entire system for peak performance as a kind of group coaching experience. So bringing twelve founders together, many industries, but the same goal in mind. You know, "How can we make this transition from founder to CEO reach the next scale in our business?" And this has been kind of the culmination of four years and five hundred coaching calls, which really . . . That blows my mind. That number seems really high to me, but I added it up the other day, and this is the best of what I've learned. So you know, we have three of the twelve spots remaining, so if that's something that's of interest to you, please reach out.
Probably the best way to get hold of me, because I'm a little bit quiet on social media these days, it's just a little bit of a noisy place, is via email. And yeah, thanks again for having me, Andy. This conversation was a blast, and I look forward to continuing it offline.
Andy: Yeah, no. Thanks for the time. I really appreciate it.
That's all I've got for you this week, but if you want to check out those show notes, just head over to effectivefounder.com. You'll find links to anything we mentioned over there, so definitely check that out. And if you have any suggestions for guests, or just feedback for me, please shoot me an email at andy@baldacci.org. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll talk to you next week.