Working Smart vs Working Hard
Think Big. Evaluate your Processes. Increase your Return on Effort.
“Rise and grind”, “get shit done”, “move fast and break things”, are just a few of the mantras that at this point are cliches, but nonetheless dominate the thinking among many individuals and organizations.
While a sense of urgency has surely led to self-improvement, innovations, and high-growth companies, there’s an aspect of this thinking that is counter productive to the individual, as it can prioritize quick results over long term efficiencies.
Before my current job, I used to work as a sales rep in the HVAC industry, where my customers were owners of residential HVAC repair businesses (exhilarating, I know).
The majority of my customers were “one man shows” working a minimum of 6 days a week, and doing all the sales, marketing, operations, accounts receivable, and more for their company.
I remember thinking to myself “damn, these guys seriously bust their ass to earn a living”.
I left that job to work for a startup, where I’ve since heard a saying amongst angel investors that made me realize a big restraint on my former customers businesses.
The saying tells founders to think big, because it takes the same amount of time to build a successful small business as it does to build a massive one.
“You can spend 80 hours a week building a great bed & breakfast, or you can spend 80 hours a week building Airbnb”.
The point is that hustle alone can’t grow a small company into a massive one if the idea is too small.
This is step 1 to working smart: make sure you’re thinking big enough!
Secondly…
While an HVAC repair biz will never generate the amount of revenue a company like Airbnb does, you can absolutely still make a very comfortable living off of it.
So, why did so many of my former customers fail to scale their businesses beyond themselves as the only employee?
The answer again is not a lack of hustle, but a failure to take a step back and put the processes in place that would’ve allowed such growth.
Example: hire someone to answer the phones!
The urgency to “get shit done” always got in the way of them hiring for roles to create these efficiencies.
They were too busy working in the business, to take the time to focus on the business.
News flash folks! HVAC business owners aren’t the only ones in business that are guilty of this. A story about a little known CEO named Jeff Bezos offers proof…
While his urgency has undoubtedly been a huge reason Amazon is the behemoth it is today, an example from the earliest days of the company demonstrates why it’s necessary to consistently step back and evaluate your processes.
When Amazon first launched, Bezos and an early handful of employees packed customer orders on their hands and knees on a concrete floor.
Bezos was hustling and willing to do the grunt work to grow the company, but one day in the midst of a packing frenzy he suggested they needed knee-pads to survive the amount of time they were spending on their hands and knees.
One of the software engineers finally spoke up and said “Jeff…we don’t need knee pads, we need packing tables”.
Jeff refers to that as one of the smartest ideas he’s ever heard.
The result? Amazon’s productivity doubled that month.
Aside from this being proof that Jeff Bezos is not a business robot, but a human who is capable of flawed thinking (or perhaps this is the cyborgs only miscalculation 🤔), it demonstrates that in that moment, Bezos was too busy working in the business of packing orders to focus on a more efficient packing process as a whole.
For a startup in the late ‘90s trying to convince consumers that the internet was a dependable medium for commerce, every order counted!
If his software engineer didn’t speak up, who knows how long they would’ve gone before enabling a process that doubled the amount of orders they could fulfill?
Thus, it’s important for all of us to regularly take a step back, check our blind spots, and evaluate our processes both professionally and personally. Some examples:
Health/Fitness
If you’re doing a workout regimen to build muscle, have you looked into the most effective ways to build strength through exercises and maximize muscle recovery through the right diet? Or are you driving to the gym and just picking things up and putting them down?
Career Goals
If you have career milestones you say you want to reach, are your current routines and habits putting you on the path to actually accomplish them? Or is your life on track to be the same cycle of Monday – Fridays with the weekend in between?
Relationships
If you’re in a relationship, have you taken time to think about what bothers your partner? Do you monitor when your mood/actions shift toward the things that bother them? Or do you just go through the motions and allow the same fights to occur over and over again?
All of these questions give food for thought as to what areas of our lives need to be evaluated. What processes are you using knee pads for, but with a little cognitive effort can be elevated to packing table results?
Look, I get it - it’s easier to go through the motions with something than to stop and evaluate how you can do it better. And if we’re talking about something like exercise, doing something is of course always better than doing nothing.
But the point is, if you’re going to be dedicating hard and long hours to something - a business, a relationship, etc. maximizing the value you get out of it will make you happier in the long run.
So whether you’re running a small business, running Amazon, or trying to improve a specific area of your life – the smarter you work will be the most important factor in how much upside you capture.