608: (Solo) Why Short-Term Wins Can Quietly Kill Your Business

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Hey guys, Nathan here. Welcome back to another episode of the Founder Founder podcast. These are short bite-sized episodes where I share my lessons learned, building founder, everything I've learned from interviewing over 100 billionaires, doing this stuff for over a decade now. And what I want to talk to you guys about today is this idea of winning deep, not shallow. And why playing the long game ultimately is the best way to play any game when it comes to business and having a long-term strategy.

1:21Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:35This is something I've been thinking about a lot because I've made a lot of mistakes at Founder. And a lot of those mistakes, if I was to really boil it down, comes down to short-term thinking. And I want to give you some examples here around how I've kind of thought short term and why it's actually hurt me in the past. And every time I've played the long game around winning deep, not shallow, has actually ended up way better off. So let me give you an example. Because I think oftentimes when you're starting a company, you're thinking so short term, right? You're thinking, oh, well, I've got to get this sale and I launched this product and I do this and I've got to get this marketing channel and I've got these ads right.

2:13and then I can just keep growing, growing, growing, growing, growing. But what you find is before you know it, you get caught up in this hamster wheel where unfortunately you're just spinning and you just keep spinning. And you can be caught up for years in that hamster wheel, winning shallow. Like, oh, I did this awesome Black Friday launch. How good is that? You know, we made an extra 50 grand in net profit or whatever it is. Like, how good is that? But then you realize, okay, well what's happening next month and then oh okay then oh now i need to do a christmas thing oh i'll do this launching campaign oh bang all right yes we beat last year now we made an extra 20 grand okay what's happening next month oh january and you see where i'm going with this so it's so important and this episode is a message for you to take a step back and reflect yes you can have short-term plays but what are your long-term plays as well so let me give you some examples.

3:11So sometimes when you're trying to grow your business and, you know, perhaps you have some challenges, it's easy just to go short-term thinking, all right, I can cut some costs here, that gets us back into profitability. Okay, I can do this promotion here, that'll bring in some short-term cash. Okay, I can do this partnership deal, that's going to actually get them to promote me and I'll promote them. Like, oh, okay, I can pay this influencer this amount of money. You see I'm going with this. But then if you actually step outside, from my experience, the things that I've found have yielded the greatest results is looking at your business and going, okay, well, we've got these things happening right now, which is BAU, but what are the moves?

3:53What are the strategic moves that we are going to make over time that we believe will yield really great results, but they're going to take time to come to life. So I'll give you an example. There was a time when our Facebook ads just got absolutely destroyed. We lost a lot of money, like very, very quickly. We lost, I think it was like close to half a million dollars in one month. It was crazy. And so naturally I'm just like, all right, well, I've got to recoup. I've got to rebuild. You know, like we lost a lot of money. Let's just do this promotion. And then it's like, oh, okay, the promotion did well.

4:28Yay. How good is that okay now let's do this other promotion and you can get caught up in this short-term thinking around oh okay i've got to make profit i've got to do this i've got to do that but what i wasn't doing was it i it got me it snapped me out of this long-term thinking like what were the products what were the moves who are the people that we're going to partner with what was the long-term thinking right so the immediate was we want to bring cash we immediately want to do sales promotions all these short-term things but where i was falling short i was caught up in this hamster wheel, what I should have been thinking, and obviously over time I worked this out, was like, okay, well, what do we want our products to look like?

5:04What if we launch the subscription model? It's a lot of work. It's going to take us six months to build that platform. But when it launches, it's going to pay its weight in gold. And so now more than ever as a business, as a brand, I'm looking at things going, okay, we've got some short-term plays over here, like this promotion here or this thing going on here. But what I'm really interested in is winning deep. So for us, as an example, we're upgrading our whole FounderCourse platform. It's gonna be a crap ton of work. We're not gonna see an immediate massive wave of sales in the next month. It's gonna take us at least six months of work to get it to a place where it's in a really, really, really good spot.

5:47We're gonna launch this custom tailored app. We're upgrading our onboarding. We're upgrading the whole experience. We're upgrading what it means to become a member. And I'm super excited about it, right? And we're investing a lot of money into this, like a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money to upgrade this platform. It's gonna take time, at least six months. It's gonna pay off, but we won't get those returns until six months from now. And some people would be like, well, you could do this, you could do that, you could do that. And I used to think that way. But now more than ever, when it comes to business, I'm looking to win deep, not shallow.

6:21And that is something that Gary, one of my leadership coaches and mentors, someone we interviewed on this podcast, taught me. How do you win deep, not shallow? So what are some other ways of winning deep, not shallow? Looking at your team, looking at leveling up your team, looking at coaching, looking at having clear vision, values, a clear strategic plan and getting buy-in and taking your team on a journey instead of just holding them accountable to like short-term thinking. You look at the founder podcast, we're putting in a lot of effort, energy, and tension. How do we win deep there? Because we know the bigger we build this show, the more people like you guys that are listening to this will want to work with us, right?

7:01We don't see the immediate sale. So you can't win deep though on everything. You have to choose, you know, what are two or three strategic bets that you want to make over a three, six, nine, 12, even two, three year period that you know or you believe that if you get this right, it's gonna take time to build it. It's gonna take time to create it. It's gonna take time to bring it all to life. But if you do that and you do it well, it'll pay its weight in gold and returns. Another example is sometimes you just don't know what you don't know is slowing you down. and I think when it comes to business you can look at what other companies are doing and you can draw inspiration and you can say hey if we do this thing we believe this will happen or we run this amount of tests this thing will happen but you don't truly know and if I'm being honest I didn't even know like what was happening in my market until I actually kind of stepped outside of it and assessed the landscape because I had an ego and was just like all right now I'm going to go deep.

8:08I'm going to look at what other people in our space are doing, how they're serving their customers. And I wasn't close enough to the customer. And only through getting close to the customer and really looking at the intent of our customers and how we can help them succeed, that's when I realized, okay, we need to win deep, not shallow. We need to stop guessing what our customers want. We actually need to speak to them more than ever. We need to look at anyone in this space, in the online education space, who is doing exceptionally well and why are they doing exceptionally well? What products are they selling?

8:41How does it work? And then I've just started to really play out and build a plan long-term and short-term. So the summary here, guys, is when it comes to business, you always want things yesterday. You always want things yesterday. You always want that win. You always tell yourself, okay, when I get this, this will be amazing. So it's got to happen yesterday. But sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. You really do. And as a founder, I know this is a difficult thing to hear. But the key message for you to take away right now, watching, listening to this episode is in order for you to win in business, you have to win deep, not shallow.

9:18Stop that short-term thinking. Yes, you can have a little bit of it. But what are you doing that is going to win the long game? Pausing before you ship a product to really understand what customers are telling you, fixing what's not working in your back end, looking at leveling up your team, playing the long game with your team, or simply stepping back to reflect, is this still working or is it still aligned? And if it's not, let it go, play the long game. I can't stress this enough. This has been such a big aha moment awakening for me when I started to realize that I was just playing short-term games, winning shallow and not winning deep.

9:55And the more that you can focus on winning deep, I promise you it will pay its weight in gold. So guys, the takeaway here is constant motion isn't the same as progress. The founders who win long term are the ones who are willing to pull back, reset and aim with intention. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and a little rant of mine and I'll catch you on another episode.