It has been nearly eighteen months since Think and Grow started and let me say upfront we have had the usual screw-ups, stress and lessons that come from starting something new. However we did do something a little unusual when starting that I wanted to share.

Before starting the business one of the first things we did was sit down and tried to do a little bit of planning. We spent some time playing around with rough business plans, lightweight tools like business model canvas and even got into some basic spread-sheeting and forecasting. Within a few hours we realized that was all a complete waste of time, it didn’t resonate with us and frankly felt completely unimportant. Why? Because we did not care if we built a business that failed commercially but we refused to build a business that we would not love to work in.

At the time I had been doing quite a bit of reading and research and the Simon Sinek stuff really resonated with us. If you haven’t seen his talk Start With Why I would recommend watching it but in truth I don’t think that is where we drew inspiration from, I think Simon just articulated the thinking really well. Where we really drew from was the people we had met, businesses we had seen and through that knowing what we didn’t want to do as much as what we did want to do.

This thinking is captured in a Canva slidedeck we put together called “Getting Started”. “Getting Started” is the only document we have ever put together that articulates what sort of business we want to build. To date it has guided us and our staff incredibly well and I wanted to share this with my network.

Were we crazy? Stupid? Lucky? Love to hear what people think. You can view the deck below:

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