How To Use Company Resets To Predict When Your Business Will Break
Every business breaks.
The question isn’t if it will break, but how often. As companies grow, they become bloated, confusing and chaotic. Yet most leaders fail to plan for the business maintenance that is crucial to the success of the business.
Instead, we’re surprised when the business breaks. Chaos takes over. We scramble to fix it. And then…it happens again.
But what if you were able to predict when it was going to break?
How would that change how your business scales?
How would your team work if they weren’t caught in an avalanche every few months, but instead could see it coming?
My first experience with a company breaking was at my first startup. We grew too quickly and things broke - a lot. The company was in a constant state of firefighting. But what I learned from that experience is that when a company is growing, it is essential to slow down to speed up.
Today, I’ll walk through how to leverage Company Resets to predict where and when your business will break.
Our Business Was Breaking, And It Was Killing Us
We had just begun to feel the power of an acquisition fly-wheel when our tech imploded. It couldn’t keep up with the volume of customer sign ups. Then an automation that sent forms to the health insurers broke, which flooded our support team with angry customers. Our support team scrambled to solve what they could, but without the tech working, they were drowning. Engineering had to fix the tech fast carrying tremendous pressure.
Team morale plummeted. Everyone felt a constant sense of overwhelm. I was so exhausted. Things kept breaking, and I couldn't go fast enough to keep up. We were pushing against a wall.
Surgically Pull a Team Out Of Chaos
Each time something broke, it felt like being pounded on by massive unruly waves. Just as we came up to catch our breath, we’d get pummeled by another wave. If you’ve ever surfed you might relate to this. When getting caught by the ocean, your instinct is to swim harder to get out of it. But eventually you’d exhaust your energy...and drown.
So as the next thing broke, I did the only thing I knew to do when slammed by big waves. I stopped pushing against it.
Our team was facing a recurring pattern, but if we kept pushing, we wouldn't find the pattern. I needed to surgically pull the team out of chaos.
I decided to take a full week to do what I call a “Company Reset”. It went so well we scheduled one every three months.
Slowing Down To Speed Up
My job as the CEO is to build the machine. When the machine breaks, my job is to fix it. We needed to stop to turn the chaos into predictable processes.
A company reset is a scheduled break from the day-to-day operations to take a step back, analyze where things are breaking, and put systems and processes in place to prevent it from happening again.
You take stock of the business without interruption. We planned for one week of complete focus. This is a full company effort, which means we don't close deals, we don't ship products. All projects are put on hold. It’s a focused week where the entire company comes together to assess the business and make changes.
For us, it started out as one week out of every three months. At one point the company was growing so fast that we took three days every month for a reset. As we reached scale and redundancy, the breaks were less frequent, with less impact on the business.
Controlled Chaos
A business isn’t a gamble. It’s a bet.
It’s scientific - peppered with experimentation that includes data, instinct and insight. A company reset creates a scientific approach to building a machine. It gives the team permission to not only make a mess, but to notice it.
Imagine if your team could experiment quickly to find solutions without worrying about the mess created during the experiment.
How quickly could you iterate? How fast could your engineering team build something if they only had to figure out if it will work, at the tiniest of scale…in the messiest state?
Experimentation takes center stage as the foundation of the business, rather than it being the unruly sideshow. Growth becomes scientific and intentional, rather than unpredictable. This is controlled chaos.
Controlled chaos is key to maintaining team morale, momentum, and focus. I love hearing the team explain why something has to stay ugly or messy until the next reset. Controlled chaos allows us to accept the messy situation because we know it won’t be forever. It’s only while we’re doing our big messy experiment, or until we reach a specific stage in the experiment.
Everyone feels calmer with controlled chaos.
Predict When Your Business Will Break
Predictability is critical in scaling a business. If you can’t predict when things will break, you can’t plan for it. And if you can’t plan for it, you can’t prevent it.
With a company reset, you find the breaking point before it happens. They give everyone the chance to look at the business with a clear head to see what’s working and what’s not.
The more frequent the resets, the easier of a lift they are on the team. You’ll start to notice patterns that break your business. Understanding the pattern makes taking preventative action much easier.
So when the business breaks again, the impact it has on your business is significantly reduced. In most cases, the team will have already anticipated it and will have put some action in place to give the business a softer landing.
As you assess the business, you continually put systems and processes in place to prevent it from happening again.
Putting It All Together
Like any machine, your business machine needs regular maintenance to scale.
Contrary to popular belief, firefighting won’t help your business scale. Staying in that mode for too long can slowly kill the business.
Company resets give the team an opportunity to take a step back to routinely, and intentionally, analyze the business. Intentionally slowing down growth builds momentum to leap into the next phase. Your team gains leverage by predicting when the business will break, so it can accelerate with precision, rather than luck.