The 97 › Strategy 15 › Week 3
The point
There is a sequence to growth and almost everybody runs it backwards. The instinct, when a business is not producing what its owner wants, is to go and get more — more leads, more traffic, more salespeople, more markets. More is the most expensive answer available and it is almost never the right first move.
If your conversion sits at two percent and you double your traffic, you have doubled the cost of a two percent conversion. If your follow-up is broken and you add half again as many buyers, you now have half again as many people falling through the same hole. Scaling a flawed operation does not fix the flaw; it multiplies it, and it multiplies it at full cost.
So: maximize first, multiply second. Maximizing means taking every element already in motion — every process, every conversation, every step a buyer travels — and lifting it to the highest level it will go without adding a single new input. You already have traffic. You already have buyers. You already have people who bought once.
Every one of those improvements is free. Not cheap — free. They cost attention rather than money, and each one compounds against everything you do afterwards, which is why the order matters more than the effort.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Confusing settled with maximized. A process that has run unchanged for four years feels proven. It is merely old, and nobody has examined it since the day it was built.
The test: Ask of each step: when did we last change this, and what did the number do? If the honest answer is 'we have not changed it', it is not maximized.
| Who | What happened |
|---|---|
| Highest and best use | Jay's own framing — the same hour, the same asset, the same relationship, put to the highest use available rather than the first use found. |
| A retailer's queue | Point of sale unchanged in six years. One question added at the till moved average transaction eleven percent, at no cost. |
| An e-commerce checkout | Four fields removed. Completion rose more than any advertising spend that year had produced. |
| A consultancy's proposal | Four days to produce, sent as an attachment. Cut to a phone number with a range and a caveat, and the win rate moved. |
| A gym | Ninety-day retention was the whole business and nobody owned it. Assigning it beat every acquisition campaign they ran. |
| A publisher's welcome email | Written once, never tested. It was the most-read message the business sent and the least considered. |
| A B2B sales team | Same leads, same script, close rate eighteen percent against a best-in-class thirty-four. Identical cost, half the yield. |
| A restaurant group | Table turn measured for the first time. The constraint was the kitchen pass, not the dining room, and no amount of marketing would have found it. |
This week
Walk the sequence a buyer actually travels: how they first hear of you, what they meet when they arrive, what they are asked for, what they are offered at the point of sale, what happens in the first week, at ninety days, and when they go quiet.
For each: when did we last change it, and what did the number do?
Find the one with the highest volume and the longest silence. Change one thing about it this week — and measure it, because an improvement you did not measure is a preference.