Priority Lists
Although board meetings are not usually known for containing great wisdom, at one such meeting I heard a wise man say: “The value of a short priority list doesn’t come from the exact items on the list, but the fact that it is short.”
I strongly believe that this is true.
Almost every Toba portfolio company is using covid-19 as an opportunity to narrow their priority lists and focus on doing less but better. What’s amazing -- though not always expected -- is that by killing secondary-priority projects, avoiding good-but-not-great customer segments, and severing partnerships despite their still delivering a trickle of leads, companies somehow end up growing faster, not slower. Every. Damn. Time.
Their funnels fill up with high-quality leads to replace the low-quality segments that they will no longer sell to (even though sales reps protest that this would not be possible).
Product teams manage to ship a release in two weeks of focused work that they didn’t think could go live until November.
Focus on better clients means overall growth comes easier as churn goes down.
Customer NPS rises. Employee NPS rises too!
It’s weird and counterintuitive to think that walking away from opportunities can create, well, far more opportunities. But it’s very, very clear (from where I sit) that the companies who are able to crystallize an extremely short priority list (1-4 top-level goals) outperform those who think they need to be pushing forward 10 huge projects at all times.
I believe that opportunity cost is the most important concept in business. Any time you are working on anything but the few most valuable things, you destroy value.
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