Andy Lykens

Innovating and operating through growth

The death of big growth

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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.

Ducks

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Tomorrow, you’ll get started. You’ll finally have enough information. You just need a little more time. A little more knowledge. Less fear. More courage.

Tomorrow that person will be helpful. The world around you will organize itself in way that the stars, your stars, are aligned.

Then you’ll have the insight. The pattern will finally be clear. The ducks will be in a row.

If you’re waiting for tomorrow, then you can be sure of 2 things:

1. It will never come

2. You will waste today.

A row of ducks, after all, is imperfect. So you may as well start today, because the only thing tomorrow has that today doesn’t, is your attention.

The ceiling and the walls

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Most people know about the ceiling, but whether you realize it or not, the walls are there too.

We don’t hear much about the walls because we’re often looking up, hoping for height, when perhaps a little breadth might do the trick.

The ceiling may be high, and the walls are harder to move. But hard isn’t impossible, and the walls can still close in on you.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you can design your room however you choose – after all a beautiful space that people appreciate will do more for you than one smeared in frantic, haphazard colors of protest.

But if your ceiling is low, and your walls are close, and then someone starts to critique your design, the second thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to live in someone else’s house, you can build your own.

Hints

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It took me a while to trust my gut. After I’d make a choice, there seemed to be something there that would agree or disagree. It’d be wrong to call it a whisper that grew louder. It feels more accurate to call it an ambient sense that, once I paid attention to it, became a trust-worthy hint.

Interestingly, as I trust it more, and as I concurrently learn and develop skills, so too do the hints seem to improve. I also learned I don’t need more information or more hints to do a thing, but I do find that hints stick around if ignore them. If the hints are sticky, that tends to mean I need to take action on them.

Sometimes the hint is that I should call or text someone. Sometimes it’s that I should step away from a reaction. Still other times the hint has a grandiose plan or a minuscule inclination – either way the outcomes are interesting.

If you’re like me – you know hints don’t make things easier. Hints aren’t short-cuts and sometimes they cause introspection that is both necessary and scary.

These days though, I’m glad to get hints either way.

Try it

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We hear a lot of stories about success, most of them condensed so they fit into a convenient, episodic, narrative we can easily consume. Most have distinct beginnings and endings. All of them have hindsight bias.

In reality, we can’t possibly understand the totality of these experiences. There are emotions and details that are omitted for one reason or another. Rather than beginnings and endings, all of these people decide to try something and then make choices in the middle of the resulting situations.

There are many times at which the answers are not clear no matter whose story is considered. There are times when what seems obvious in hindsight started as a hunch, perhaps being followed stubbornly against the wisdom of others.

If you erase luck and privilege, and decide not to glaze over details, you’ll uncover a lot of average people simply trying something they’re interested in, navigating uncertain circumstances, and largely being surprised at the result.

If you’re reading this you have at least some luck and some privilege. Maybe it’s time to just try it.

In the middle

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As long as we can remember, we’ve been in the middle of something. Often we’re hoping for the future to bring some outcome or arrival that has some finality to it. Or we may be lamenting about the past; things we wish we would have done or wish we could get back.

This will always be the case. There is never a moment of your life when you’re not in the middle of something.

It’s the hoping for the future and lamenting the past that we can decide to turn off when it doesn’t serve us. That may make it a little easier to decide what to do next.