The founders who worry me the most aren’t the scrappy ones…
Not the bootstrappers, first-timers, or the ones figuring it out on the fly.
No.
The ones who worry me the most are the smart, hard-working, capable founders.
Because here’s the thing:
Capable people build complex businesses.
Not deliberately, but because they can.
And somewhere along the way, “I can do this” becomes their reason for doing everything.
I call this the Curse of Capability.
And almost every talented founder I know suffers from the Curse of Capability.
It’s also the reason why I love investing in “lazy” entrepreneurs.
They don’t suffer from it.
The best founders I’ve ever backed have a quality that looks like they’re not trying hard enough.
But in reality, what they’re actually doing is finding the simplest path to a lot of money and walking along it.
This quality is…
Knowing how to find the easiest possible way.
That’s it.
This is their entire plan.
But when I step into complex businesses, the ones run by the hustling founders, the first thing I nearly always have to do is cut the complexity.
I remove as much as possible to simplify things.
Because I believe that to do great things, we must do fewer things.
So I’m going to give you my favorite framework that helps you simplify a business… the 1-1-1 framework.
I even broke it down on a recent podcast:
The 1-1-1 framework means:
One traffic source
One conversion method
One delivery channel
Let me give you an example:
Maybe you get leads through paid ads.
They convert on a one-on-one call.
And they deliver the work inside a community group.
But most people don’t have a 1-1-1 framework in their business.
They have something closer to a 4-3-5.
With four traffic sources they’re mediocre at, three conversion methods they’ve never actually measured, and five delivery channels no one fully understands.
So when something breaks, they have no idea where to look… they just start guessing.
They burn more ad spend, have more failed calls, and more churned clients.
Nobody wins…
But now, when something is breaking down, you go back to the 1-1-1 framework.
It helps you to find the problems fast and fix them.
This is why you want growth by subtraction, not multiplication.
And it’s why I love investing in “lazy” entrepreneurs so much.
They’ve already done the subtraction.
Now if you liked this post, then you’ll like this one too:
Absolutely, this is fantastic, the best business don't run on a complicated format but instead a simple one, if the format isn't simple enough it couldn't be used effectively, and that how you grow.
This is exactly why I believe most founders never fully develop their right hand leader. They think it is faster to do it themselves. And they are right in the short term. But three years later they are still answering the same questions, approving the same decisions and wondering why they cannot step away. Because they all rounder, never have time to build more and stuck in the same loop.