Introduction

What makes some companies work and others not?

Not just theunicorn-status kind of work. We mean work in the fundamental kind of way—where the company is solving real problems for customers and seeing repeatable, sustainable growth. Where things are working for you, where the business almost seems to run on its own. Where, as the operator, you have such a keen understanding of how your business works that it’s almost as if you have a crystal ball into the future. It’s when you can call your next shot in the business, and then it actually happens.

When we (Amos Schwartzfarb and Trevor Boehm) first started working together, we would talk about this question: Considering the companies you’ve worked with, what is the difference between those that succeeded and those that failed?

Amos had a simple answer: “With every company that I’ve been a part of that worked, I could see in advance how we were going to succeed before we did.”

His secret was that he could visualize not just what the business could become, but also how it could get there. In other words, he had adata-driven model for how the business worked. It was like he was seeing the business as one big machine, with a series of levers that, if pulled in the right way and in the right order, would spit out cash as predictably as an ATM.

We’ve been thinking and acting according to these terms with our own companies and with the companies we’ve invested in now for over a decade. And we’ve seen, even if only intuitively, every successful serial entrepreneur we respect does the same. They don’t blindly trust their gut and launch into some massive undertaking or chase an industry or venture capital (VC) trend, accruing gigantic risk in hopes of cashing in on some technological or hype wave. Instead, they start with a core belief about whom they want to serve, what that person needs, and why they need it. Then, action by action, they start piecing together a theory for how they could capture value while serving them, using data to test and expand their understanding every step along the way. Put simply, they identify the levers of control in their business, and then they move those levers.

The Framework for Building Repeatability in Your Business

The goal of this book is to take that process of finding the levers and creating repeatability in your business—what we’re convinced every successful entrepreneur does to reach his or her success—and make it a playbook for anyone. We’ve laid it out as a simple framework that any entrepreneur can use, whether they’re just getting started or are millions of dollars—or hours, or scars—in.

We wrote this book to take business builders of all kinds out of the world of constant hustle and uncertainty into a world of clarity and control. We don’t promise that if you use this process you will have a successful business. We do believe that this process will give you the shortest path to finding