Die eine Gewohnheit hinter dem Wachstum von Acquisition.com

0:00Every big business decision that we have made at acquisition.com over the last how many years, we use something called a memo system. And a memo system is crystallized, written down documentation of a thinking process of how we're thinking through a higher stakes decision. And so, everything that you have seen from, you know, ACQ, uh the the the content that we content cadence that we that we're on, um the book launch, um Scale Advisory, uh every subcomponent of like, you know, the playbooks, all of these things, even feature sets that we're adding to ACQ.ai, all of these things first exist as memos.

0:39All right? And so, they're memorandums. And we do that to memorialize the thinking process so that they can be disseminated throughout the organization. And so, as you're like, I'm getting a little bit ahead for some of you guys, but as your organization grows, one of the most difficult things to translate throughout the org is shared thinking. Because as you get two, three, four levels of leadership away from ownership, that's when people kind of like go rogue. They start their own mini cultures within your business, mini contexts. And so, if you've ever had rolled out any new change in a business, this will probably be for people who have at least one layer of management, and it wasn't rolled out by your managers or leaders well, it's typically because they did not provide adequate context. And so, how do we do that? How do we operationalize context of decision-making within a business? So, at acquisition.com, we use memos. And so, everything is memos. And that's because it forces everyone in the business to slow down and actually think about what decisions they want to make and the costs and benefits. And you have to be willing to defend your memos to other intelligent people.

1:40And because of that, you have to start anticipating what you think your naysayers and the people who might be against your ideas might say, and then start pre-solving those problems ahead of time in the memo. And so, when you do this enough times, it clarifies your thinking, you get very good at thinking. Now, what I have done and the what I do is that I write my memo and I also have a memo prompt that I take my memo, I pair it with my memo prompt, and a data source, and I my best memo of all time, and I say, "Hey, make this look like that using these instructions." And then it outputs a cleaner version of my memo and any other questions that I did not think about that I can make my memo more complete.

2:22And so in my memo prompt, it'll have, "Hey, make this look like that and bring up any potential blind spots that I have that I haven't uh considered." Now, it might bring me 20 questions that I didn't answer. 10 of them might be irrelevant. Five of them might be obvious I'm not going to include, but five might be good and then I weave those back in and then that makes a very robust memo. My goal as founder is that when I want to have a new initiative, I I I want to have I want to have one-hit-KO memos, which is like I have thought through every angle you could possibly imagine for this not to work and I'm telling you this is why this will work. And so think about it as a real-world sales letter except with far more details of how we're going to execute this, how we're going to implement it to your team to sell them on your ideas. And then this becomes an artifact that you can literally track throughout the history of our company.

3:16Like anybody who's new who comes in, guess what they can do first? They read the memos cuz they know all the decisions that we've made, why we're making them, the context for those decisions, and they can see the direction of the company and how good we are at executing against those things. And what you'll find is the more you adopt this, the first thing that will happen is that you'll realize that a lot of the people that work for you aren't that smart. And so, if you're like, "Man, if I try to get my team to write memos," it's like, "Right, that's probably cuz your team's not that good." And it's probably why the business isn't big.

3:45Right? If your team is not capable of articulating even why they think they should make a decision, do you want those people making decisions? Right? Real. And so, um, the memo system is one of the is one of the core heartbeats of how ACQ works and how we scale decision-making across the org and how we get buy-in across all levels of the company so that everyone knows in intricate detail what the plan is for every single thing that rolls out because we have written documentation of why this is doing this way, what the considerations were, what risks we believe, why we're willing to take those risks, and how we're willing to mitigate them.

4:28Word? And to be fair, we're not the ones who invented this. Bezos is one of the first ones who like at least that that we found out the whole memo system from. Um, I'd say the only difference that we have versus Amazon um is that Amazon begins their meetings by everyone reading the memo. Um, we we kind of uh send memos out ahead of time, people put all their comments in, and then we get to the meeting, we pull up the memo, and then we basically handle the comments.

4:56So, that's how we do it. Um, but I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it their way. I think Bezos said that like when we told people to read the memos ahead of time, many people didn't, and then that would be a waste. Um, we don't have enough big memos that people aren't reading them ahead of time. So, people people do read them, they put comments beforehand. So, that's that's how we do it. So, didn't want to melt minds, but I have a memo like and my memos are assets, right? They are data sources that I can create future memos from. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish, I've now done multiple times, and so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as head count increases that you need to get through, and I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link is in the description. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you offer.