Hey Reader,
When Marie Kondo empties a wardrobe she doesn’t start by folding shirts; she dumps every last sock in a towering heap. The shock therapy matters more than the folding method: only when you stare at the mountain do you grasp the cost of keeping it.
Your business needs the same ritual.
Open Whatsapp and count the zombie channels. Audit your calendar—how many “must-attend” meetings could disappear tomorrow without anyone noticing? That hidden pile is burning payroll, taking up your time and grinding decision-making to a halt.
Growth by deletion, not addition
Warren Buffett has owned fewer than a hundred stocks in his entire life—and still beats the benchmarks. Apple sells just four core iPhone models yet captures more than half the industry’s profit. Patagonia’s entire line fits on one wall of their HQ showroom, but their revenue per SKU dwarfs bloated competitors.
Complexity masquerades as ambition, but it’s insecurity wearing a PowerPoint suit.
The more noise you create, the less conviction customers feel. Show me someone who “does it all” and I’ll show you a team working weekends to keep plates spinning that never should’ve been in the air.
The silent tax of “just one more”
Every new initiative drags behind it a string of overhead—support tickets, onboarding guides, marketing funnels, sales pages. That friction compounds until momentum stalls. Start-ups rarely starve; they die of indigestion.
Conversely, subtraction creates two freedoms:
- Sharper focus inside. When the backlog shrinks, real priorities surface. Stand-ups get shorter, sprint goals get clearer, morale spikes because progress is visible.
- Quicker decisions outside. Customers buy from curators, not catalogues. Tell your audience, “This is the only jacket you’ll need this season,” and they’ll pay a premium because you removed their homework. Cognitive tax evaporates; conversions climb.
Data beats sentiment every time
Run a simple experiment: delete a vanity metric from your dashboard for 30 days. If no decision suffers, that metric was theatre. Repeat until only levers that move revenue remain. Patagonia once surveyed staff to grade every product on environmental impact and sales margin; anything that failed on both axes vanished. They grew faster the next quarter.
3 ACTION TIPS
1. Quarterly Purge Day – Block one morning per quarter. Cancel one recurring meeting, retire one profit product, and delete one dead metric. Book it now.
2. Joy-to-Profit Grid – Score every recurring task 1-5 on joy and 1-5 on profit/impact. Anything ≤3 on both? Kill it this week — no sentimental exceptions.
3. Public No-List – Post your “stop-doing” list on IG, FB or LinkedIn. Accountability prevents procrastination …
Preach focus, practice austerity, profit on purpose.
We've got this …
