How I’m thinking about strategy, problems, and projects

Hey 🙂

Here’s the model I use, and it’s dead simple on purpose. I look at the business as three departments: demand, sales, delivery. That’s it. How do we get customers. How do we convert them into clients. How do we deliver a world-class product or service once they’re in. Everything sits in one of those three buckets.

The illusion we have — and I think a lot of small teams have this — is that because there’s quite a few of us, we think we can work on all of it at once. We can’t. The more focused we are on one problem, the more likely we are to actually move it. So I ask myself, constantly: what’s the single biggest challenge in demand right now? In sales? In delivery?

Strategy, to me, is a response to a problem. Not a plan you sit down and design in the abstract — a response. And the solution to a problem is what I call a project. So a project isn’t a nice-to-have or an idea I liked, it’s literally “we are currently working on a solution to a problem we have.”

Goals come after that, not before. Vision sits way out there — it tells you the direction, the gap between where you are and where you want to be. But the goals that actually move things come from the strategy and the projects themselves. For example, we put a case study offer out this week to get 50 new customers into the group coaching program. That’s not the big goal of the company. It’s the goal of that project, which sits inside a bigger demand project, which rolls up toward the vision. It’s layers. You’re pulling on a thread, and if you follow it far enough it connects back to the top, but the specific goal has to make sense at the project level.

The thing I’m trying to protect against is that there are a thousand and one ways to grow a business, and ideas are cheap. Genuinely, ideas are the easy part, especially now with AI. What’s hard is figuring out the actual problem worth fixing. So I think of it like a watering well. I only lower the bucket when I’ve got a problem to solve. If an idea isn’t coming through the lens of a real problem we have right now, it’s not urgent to me, even if it’s a good idea. It goes in the parking lot.

The other trap is watching competitors. At this stage of the business, there’s almost no value in it. You’re looking at their fully baked cake and comparing it to our flour, eggs, and milk. It’s not the same thing. If we’re studying someone else’s business trying to figure out what to do, that’s a sign we don’t have a strategy — we don’t actually know what problem we’re solving. Stealing tactics isn’t a substitute for that. Building the group coaching program right now, I could go study the top five programs in the space and pick up some tactics, but none of it tells me what transformation we actually want for our clients. That only comes from looking inward.

So that’s the whole thing, really: look internally, find the real problem, turn it into a project, let the goal come from the project, and let the projects — not the vision, not the competition — be what we actually spend our time on.

I wrote most of that down after thinking out loud with the team on a call this week. And because I don’t just want to think this way, I want to actually run the business this way, I started something new alongside it: a weekly Friday drop-in for anyone working on a project. Here’s why.

Why I set up the Friday drop-in

We had our first one this week — Pathfinder Projects: Drop-in Session with Marr. Wanted to write down why, mostly for myself, so I remember what I was trying to do here when I look back on this in six months.

I’ve been tracking projects on a spreadsheet for a couple of months now. It’s messy, it’s ugly, I go in every week and update the status and scribble some notes. It works, but only just, and I know it could be better. So part of this is honestly just a forcing function for me — showing up every Friday keeps me accountable to straightening things out and keeping the whole project management side of the business moving.

But the bigger reason is this: I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t want to be the one dictating what everyone works on. What I want is for people to find a project that actually lights them up. If I just handed out assignments, I’d get compliance. I want intrinsic motivation instead. So the session exists to close the gap between “here’s what the business needs” and “here’s what you’re genuinely interested in” — and to help people find the overlap.

That means a few things need to happen in collaboration with the team:

• People need to actually hear what the problems are. Not everyone has the same picture I do of what’s urgent in demand, sales, or delivery. Half the value of the call is just narrating that context.
• Ideas need pressure-testing. For example, Cam’s been sitting with the leadership “magic model” in his own head for weeks — that’s the risk with working solo on something, it lives in one person’s head and never gets pulled apart and put back together. The call is where that happens.
• People need somewhere to say “I don’t know what to work on” without it being awkward. Erin came in this week literally saying she wasn’t sure what the need was or where she’d fit. That’s a completely fine thing to say in this room.
• I need to be reminded that collaboration beats individual output here. There’s a version of this business where four partners all try to do everything at once — that’s the illusion I keep coming back to. The real unlock is people working together on fewer things, not more people working alone on more things.

So the shape of the call is loose on purpose. No prep required. Come with a stuck point, a draft, a “what should I even be doing” — all valid. I’ll help scope it, push back on it, coach through it, whatever’s needed. Some weeks it’ll be me presenting a project idea and literally asking the team to tell me if they want it or not.

If someone doesn’t have a project right now, that’s not a problem to fix before showing up — it’s exactly what the session is for.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.