Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

Growth

Overlooked

by

It’s easy to feel unappreciated and overlooked. For all the talk about teamwork and collaboration, most people, most of the time, are not thinking about you (to test this ask yourself: “am I thinking about them?”). This isn’t their fault.

They’re thinking about all the tasks they have to do to move a project forward, to take care of things at home, to improve themselves. So unless what you’re doing greatly improves or severely limits the chance of one of their things, your thing will probably go unnoticed.

But it doesn’t have to.

You’re allowed to ask for help when you need it. You can propose a different solution. You can make it clear that your needs aren’t being met and then suggest a way to change that.

If you decide to do that, have a plan and be ready to sell it. Make sure your thing becomes aligned with their thing, and definitely be ready to raise your hand, discuss it, and compromise.

In the end, the only person responsible for you being overlooked is you. What are you going to do about it?

Editing

by

As soon as we learn our first words we start telling stories. We tell stories to our families, our friends, and to strangers. We tell stories to ourselves.

The stories come in all shapes and sizes: short, long, fast, slow, tense, funny, sad, and on and on.

Stories can create connections and end relationships. They can build start-ups, get dogs adopted, or inspire a congregation. Stories can pass the time or pass on legacy.

Stories can be planted in peoples’ minds and they can grow there, for better or worse.

It’s worth considering what stories are planted in your mind and whether or not they’re helping you. You may not always be the original author of those stories, but you are certainly the editor and you decide what goes to print. So how a story got planted and what it says isn’t really the point, the point is that it’s relatively easy to make useful edits — a first step in giving yourself a happier ending.

The opportunity

by

The opportunity that you’re imagining has parameters that all fit your life at the right time, in the right place, for the exact right amount.

You expect it to be obvious; a no-brainer that allows you to keep being the same person tomorrow as you are today: a house in the right neighborhood that’s the right size, a job like the one we have now but with a bigger paycheck and a better boss, a business idea that’s so unique and so compelling, it’s a guaranteed success.

So when we look for opportunity we have this tunnel vision, and rather than recognizing that we are limiting our field of vision to a perfect situation (one that is unlikely to ever come along), we think there just aren’t any opportunities.

But the problem isn’t lack of opportunity, the problem is that the opportunities available to you don’t look exactly like what you expect.

The house is a little small or stretches our finances, that job means relocating and a long distance relationship, that business idea means just being the most customer-centric veterinarian.

That’s why it’s hard to buy low and sell high. That’s why it’s hard to time the housing market. That’s why your career change is stalled. Because in order to do those things, you have to do something that is different from your expectations.

Seeing opportunity requires us to be flexible, to pay attention to adjacent disciplines, to talk to someone different, to behave in new ways, to be a little uncomfortable, to shine the light of our unique perspective in different directions. If we can do that, we open our aperture and can see that opportunities are everywhere.

The best part is that my opportunity isn’t yours. You’re different than me. We know different people. We see different things and we are moving through life in different stages. We have different experiences seen through different lenses and are comfortable with different degrees of risk.

When we look for an opportunity to help, to build, or to grow, we use all of these differences to be able to identify an opportunity and understand what it means for us.

So when an opportunity presents itself, know that it won’t be exactly what you’re looking for at exactly the right time. But pay attention to the ones you notice, they might be trying to tell you something.

The death of big growth

by

An oak tree doesn’t promise how tall it’s going to be when it’s a seed. It doesn’t predict the number of branches it will have or how many leaves it will lose in autumn. It doesn’t promise the squirrels any certain quantity of acorns. It just grows. And while early on, the growth is very visible, no one expects a tree to keep growing until it’s as tall as a mountain. At some point a tree’s growth becomes invisible and simply regenerative. Then the growth stops.

As with all cycles, we’re coming around to a new period – one more affected each day by inflation, war, and possibly recession.

For at least as long as I’ve been working professionally, big growth companies (like tech giants) have enjoyed cheap debt and consumers whose idea of scarcity is waiting the full two years to buy the next iPhone.

The companies that middled (or worse) during this time are likely to be toast in the next year or 2. Their funds will dry up quickly and investors will turn their sights to something less shiny, more predictable, and ultimately familiar.

Companies that grew quickly will try to get that magic back because big growth is all they know. But if they’re not in a commodities business that can make a cheap offering to cost-conscious consumers, or find ways to normalize their operations, or choose projects to ignore while they focus on shoring up fundamentals, they will continue to have to make sacrifices to protect their margins and please their shareholders.

We can learn from the big growth folks who used to do pretty much anything that even looked like growth – hiring for hiring’s sake or spinning up new projects, spending money because money was cheap and seemingly endless.

Yes, there is still capital, and investors will need to deploy that capital, but they may be more hesitant. They’ll be looking more closely at the relationships and business models to vet opportunities with a new, more pragmatic lens.

This is good news if you’re pragmatic and thorough, if you’re thoughtful and patient; now is your time to shine. But don’t expect big growth. Those rules have changed.

Start small. Deliver exceptional products and services. Get a couple of people so excited about your work that they ask you solve more of their problems. Then figure out how to streamline those operations. Yes, seek growth, but not by ‘big growth’s’ rules.

This still works, it’s only in the necessity of big growth that big spending is required. Big growth incentivizes managers to ‘grow’ – not to build great businesses.

If you work very hard, and if you’re lucky, you may hit a regenerative phase. Just don’t start promising the squirrels how many acorns you’re going to produce.