Podcast Ep 122 | Fire Bullets Before Cannonballs: Jim Collins' Method for Validating Ideas

What does it mean to fire bul­lets before can­non­balls? Often lead­ers are too bold, or alter­na­tive­ly, too con­ser­v­a­tive. Instead of tak­ing too much or too lit­tle risk, the con­cept of fir­ing bul­lets before can­non­balls asks lead­ers to val­i­date an idea with a series of small, low-risk exper­i­ments. Once you have val­i­dat­ed your idea, then you can con­cen­trate your resources on a big bet idea.

From Jim Collins -

“The abil­i­ty to turn small proven ideas (bul­lets) into huge hits (can­non­balls) counts more than the sheer amount of pure innovation.”

No one is smart enough or expe­ri­enced enough to know what will or won’t work. Only the mar­ket can tell us that. Peo­ple intu­itive­ly say some­thing will def­i­nite­ly suc­ceed OR def­i­nite­ly fail. But we don’t know.

In this episode, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence talk about the fire bul­lets before can­non­balls con­cept, why it mat­ters and how you can use it in your business.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi, wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, com­pa­nies that last, com­pa­nies that peo­ple are proud to work for, com­pa­nies that out­per­form. As always, today I’m joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. How are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:32

Doing great Brad. Enjoy­ing sum­mer, look­ing for­ward to a few weeks off.

Brad Giles 00:39

Good to hear good to hear. I am also going good, things are nice in this part of the world. We’ve had a busy peri­od after the finan­cial year, which is June 30, for us, and then we reset. So it’s been quite busy. And now we’ve just had a moment after that to recal­i­brate. We always like to start with a word of the day or phrase, what might be on your mind today, Kev?

Kevin Lawrence 01:05

It’s just sun­shine. I was out at a farm­ers mar­ket this morn­ing. And this woman had the shirt on that said sun­shine and wine. That’s what it said — basi­cal­ly how sun­shine just lifts your spir­it. And it’s a metaphor in com­pa­nies where there’s always sun­shine, there’s always good news, there’s always good things, and we need to be remind­ed of it some­times. So sun­shine is the good news that warms us warms our souls makes us feel good. And that’s a won­der­ful thing to remem­ber at work.

Brad Giles 01:49

Every good, very good. Well, mine is com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed. And it’s a bit to do with this episode today. But it’s about inter­est rates. And some of the chal­lenges that we’re see­ing, like I’m just going from one meet­ing to the next meet­ing to the next. And it’s a the staff short­ages, or it’s, you know, input costs, like cost of goods that are increas­ing a lot through truck­ing, all kinds of words. There’s all of that and so it’s just about mak­ing val­i­dat­ing your ideas. It seems like with so many vari­ables chang­ing that you’ve got to make sure that what any of the changes that you’re mak­ing are going to be the right changes and we need to make changes in the business.

Kevin Lawrence 02:50

So tell us about the top­ic today.

Brad Giles 03:13

Yeah, this is a one of Jim Collins’ con­cepts — fire bul­lets before can­non­balls. And this is how we val­i­date our ideas. And it’s a phrase that you may have heard if you’re not famil­iar with Jim Collins work​.It comes from his books. Yeah, yeah, in par­tic­u­lar, Great by Choice. And so we’ve got a say­ing in Aus­tralia, and it’s don’t bet the farm and so what that means? We’ve got the same one here. Yeah. Okay. So it’s, it’s you need to not gam­ble every­thing. Because you may end up with noth­ing. You’ve got to make sure that you are val­i­dat­ing your ideas that you’re test­ing, and that you’re only tak­ing risks where you can afford to lose, or that you’re com­plete­ly cer­tain that it’s got a very high chance of suc­cess. So we’re talk­ing about this con­cept fire bul­lets before can­non­balls. And as a quick note, you can also refer to Episode 86. What is pro­duc­tive para­noia and why it’s a crit­i­cal lead­er­ship tool of the growth whis­per­ers. And then episode nine, elec­tric bikes cheat­ing ver­sus inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur to CEO we’ve got infor­ma­tion about this con­cept. But the key point here is we’re often told that we’re too bold or we see peo­ple that are too bold or too con­ser­v­a­tive. If you raise an idea with­in a group, some peo­ple are going to be like, it’s def­i­nite­ly going to work. Yes, it’s going to save the com­pa­ny. This is going to set us up for suc­cess. Or on the oth­er side, there are going to be peo­ple who are going to say it’s nev­er gonna work. It’s a load of garbage.

Kevin Lawrence 04:52

They’re all just opin­ions. They all have no freak­ing idea. They think they know and there’s this great thing is it, no idea or prod­uct ever sur­vives first con­tact with the cus­tomer, the mar­ket, the cus­tomers vote with on our ideas. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, peo­ple spend way too much time test­ing in the lab­o­ra­to­ry or the board­room. And they don’t get out there and talk to the damn cus­tomer. So it’s even inter­est­ing. We had a team meet­ing recent­ly or quar­ter­ly meet­ing. And we had a bril­liant, what seemed like a bril­liant idea that came out of the meet­ing, I was a very good idea. Well, I had a meet­ing that same night with the CEO. And I ran up by him. And he’s like, you know, your ideas real­ly good. But it actu­al­ly is more rel­e­vant here. For me, the pain here is for me, and I talked to anoth­er CEO the next day. And so as I’m cal­i­brat­ing the idea in the board­room sound­ed per­fect. You go and start talk­ing to peo­ple about it. And they’re like, Well, maybe what about this? What about that, and that’s, you know, that’s, that’s a lit­tle bit of mar­ket research. And then there’s the actu­al test. The key is that peo­ple don’t know what works, you nev­er know what works. Because often what works is counter intu­itive. Often, you’ll get bet­ter sales by increas­ing your price than decreas­ing your price. Right? Very often. And but that’s not how peo­ple think. So the idea this is, it pro­tects us from our egos. It pro­tects us from think­ing that we know and puts us back into sci­en­tist mode. Let’s test it. And see. And that’s the crit­i­cal piece here is let’s test it in the mar­ket with a bul­let a sim­ple low risk test, ver­sus think­ing that we know and gen­er­al­ly, espe­cial­ly in Hol­ly­wood has done a great job of por­tray­ing CEOs and suc­cess­ful peo­ple have been wild risk tak­ers. They’re not — not the suc­cess­ful ones. It’s excit­ing to do great big moves, big, bold, risky moves, just does­n’t con­sis­tent­ly work. It’s kind of like going to the casi­no and putting every­thing on black.

Brad Giles 07:07

And if you pick up a mag­a­zine, maybe or look online at any of the busi­ness, like the For­tune mag­a­zine, or any of those types, they’re going to be telling the sto­ries about the big risky bets that paid us, right, because it’s inter­est­ing, because it’s inter­est­ing, but works. It’s the relent­less focus on the bor­ing basics. And with­in that con­text, if you if you’re going to take a risk, you want to val­i­date that risk, you want to give it a good chance to work to prove itself and then take the big bet.

Kevin Lawrence 07:40

Yes, because as you get big­ger, those bets are more impact­ful. And I’ve seen many kinds, and one of the big ones peo­ple do is acqui­si­tions. There’s all this the­o­ry in the board­room about the pow­er of acqui­si­tions, it’s quite fas­ci­nat­ing, actu­al­ly, oh, and we’re gonna get this, after doing this almost 30 years, you get to see deci­sions all the way through their life­cy­cle. It’s your exe­cu­tion. And you get to see all the the­o­ry in you know, in busi­ness books, most busi­ness books ver­sus what actu­al­ly hap­pens. It’s very, very dif­fer­ent. And you know, and so even in this we take acqui­si­tions was very smart. I was in a com­pa­ny the oth­er day, and we’re doing some long term plan­ning. And we’re like, we should con­sid­er acqui­si­tions. Have a cer­tain point, every exec­u­tive talks with access, we think the big kids do, right? And it may or may not be a good idea, it depends. But some­body in the room was smart. Hey, let’s try a lit­tle one and see how it goes. Right? If we’ve got 30 mil­lion of extra cash, let’s spend two and try it. How do we do with it? Can we inte­grate it? Can we get the the­o­ret­i­cal val­ue out of it? Let’s try small ver­sus you know, we’re a com­pa­ny that does you know, 150 mil­lion in rev­enue and let’s go acquire some­one that does 200 mil­lion. Yeah. Because that’d be and peo­ple do that and let’s just give it all for one one for all one shot at it hope it works.

Brad Giles 09:12

Because that’d be cool. And that it would be very stimulating.

Kevin Lawrence 09:15

Way more excit­ing than dri­ving out effi­cien­cy of the per unit cost by 2.37 cents per unit. Like find­ing 2.37 per cents per unit of effi­cient or tak­ing our labor rate from being 14% of sales down to or labor costs right from 14% to 12.5 or even bet­ter our SG and a s GNA is run­ning at you know 14.5% And it should be 11 or, or how do we get more sales and do price increas­es to our cus­tomers like all this stuff?

Brad Giles 09:56

Which would you rather speak about at the barbecue?

Kevin Lawrence 09:59

Exact­ly do you want to tell your friend more than that? What do you want in your resume? Yeah, right. Yeah, no, I decreased SGMA from 14.42 to 12.1. Actu­al­ly, I would be impressed by that. So that vs I came up with a because we know rent, let’s acqui­si­tions, what pays, but you get these peo­ple doing acqui­si­tions. And no, and doing this and work­ing with pri­vate equi­ty and doing all this won­der­ful stuff. It just as a side note, that’s why, you know, when I see it, lead­ers in com­pa­nies start to get the awards from the soft­ware com­pa­nies. I’m like, Okay, we’re in trou­ble now. Yeah. One, we may or may not be over­pay­ing, but to the IT per­son is get­ting so excit­ed about exter­nal val­i­da­tion, that either they’re pump­ing him­self up for a career move, or they’re just lov­ing all the acco­lades. I just because I have also seen a few of those. Some­times they give you big awards, before the sys­tem breaks, because they know what’s com­ing. As long as I diverge.

Brad Giles 11:01

Let’s steer it back. I’m talk­ing about bul­lets before can­non­balls, that’s what is it? It’s a con­cept from Great buy a choice when a Jim Collins books attack. So first of all, you fire bul­lets, which is low cost, low risk, low dis­trac­tion exper­i­ments, to fig­ure out what will work so you can cal­i­brate your line of sight by tak­ing small shots. So that way, you know what will work or you val­i­dat­ed your ideas, then, once you have val­i­dat­ed your exper­i­ment, you can con­cen­trate the resources into a big bid.

Kevin Lawrence 11:37

And to clar­i­fy these exper­i­ments are done with real pay­ing cus­tomers, or real cash spent in your oper­a­tions on costs or oth­er things. These aren’t board­room exper­i­ments. This is not mar­ket research. This is actu­al­ly doing it in a small safe way.

Brad Giles 11:55

Yeah, yeah. So why does it mat­ter? Because when we were prepar­ing for this episode, you said this, Kevin, I thought it was just bril­liant. No one is smart enough or expe­ri­enced enough to know what will or won’t work. Despite what they say no mat­ter how good a sales­per­son they are, or how excel­lent at pre­sent­ing they are, no one actu­al­ly knows what will not work. Only the mar­ket can tell us that.

Kevin Lawrence 12:24

And the more I know, the more expe­ri­enced I get, the more you’ll hear that come out of my mouth. In meet­ings, I have the most expe­ri­ence of almost any­body in the room of scal­ing busi­ness­es in any room that I’m in, and more. And as I get in over time, I say that more and more often say, I don’t know what’s going to work here. The more I know, the less I know.

Brad Giles 12:46

That’s the sci­en­tists mantra, right? The more that I learn, the more I under­stand, the less I real­ized that no, yep. And so once you’ve and so where were we? Oh, we are at once you val­i­dat­ed your exper­i­ment, you can con­cen­trate the resources into a big bet. Thank you. So the big bet is Alright, now let’s spend the $30 mil­lion rather than the $2 mil­lion, and yes, go after that, or what­ev­er it might be. So the abil­i­ty to turn small, proven ideas or bul­lets into huge hits are can­non­balls counts more than the sheer amount of inno­va­tion that’s so impor­tant. Because inno­va­tion is such a catch word today or catchy word. We’ve got to have an inno­va­tion depart­ment the more ideas the bet­ter. But it’s actu­al­ly not true. It’s the abil­i­ty to val­i­date ideas effec­tive­ly, that mat­ters the most.

Kevin Lawrence 13:42

Yes, because peo­ple get excit­ed about all those new ideas. And tru­ly, we want to val­i­date the think­ing. So we don’t waste time and resources, chas­ing some­thing that’s not going to pay. It’s inter­est­ing, as you’re talk­ing about pure inno­va­tion. For those of you watch­ing a video, you can see behind me, there’s a mod­el behind my shoul­der of a Porsche 911 engine that allege that Porsche 911 engine has not changed that much over the entire time. And I think the first Porsche was in the 60s that I’m aware of, might be sim­i­lar. As in the 60s, I’m pret­ty sure they start­ed. The shape of the car has­n’t changed much. The engine has­n’t changed much in in design, the qual­i­ty of the com­po­nents, the per­for­mance, all that stuff has improved year on year on year, but they’ve inno­vat­ed on the same plat­form again and again and again and again and again. And again, mak­ing it bet­ter. And that’s lots of lit­tle tests and lots of lit­tle exper­i­ments ver­sus doing some­thing wild­ly crazy that we can do and should do.

Brad Giles 14:45

Okay, so I want to read this from this quick excerpt from Jim Collins web­site because it explains why it’s called fire bul­lets before can­non­balls. Pic­ture your­self at sea, a hos­tile ship bear­ing down on you. If you have a lim­it­ed amount of gun­pow­der, you take all your gun­pow­der and use it to fire a big can­non­ball. The Can­non­ball flies out over the ocean and miss­es the tar­get off by 40 degrees, you turn to your stock­pile and dis­cov­er that you’re out of gun­pow­der, you die. But sup­pose instead that when you see the ship bear­ing down, you take a lit­tle bit of gun­pow­der and fire a bul­let, it miss­es by 40 degrees, you make anoth­er bul­let and fire, it miss­es by 30 degrees, you make a third bul­let and fire miss­ing by only 10 degrees. The next bul­let hits ping, the whole of the oncom­ing ship. Now you take all the remain­ing gun­pow­der and fire a big can­non­ball along the same line of sight, which syncs the ene­my ship and you live. And so, so that’s where the phrase come from. And this is obvi­ous­ly an anal­o­gy to what he observed in these com­pa­nies that he ana­lyzed in the great buy­er choice study that these com­pa­nies were decid­ing to take these small bits before they took the big bits. So let’s move on to the prob­lem. The prob­lem here is pure inno­va­tion. Okay, peo­ple get excit­ed when you come up with a new idea. It’s excit­ing. And espe­cial­ly if you’re an entre­pre­neur, or work­ing in an entre­pre­neur­ial com­pa­ny, some peo­ple are just like idea fac­to­ries, right? They pump­ing out ideas all the time every week, almost. But there’s no val­i­da­tion. There’s sur­round­ed by all of these great ideas, but they nev­er val­i­date them. And some­times they bet on them because of their emo­tion. Okay, so cre­ativ­i­ty is the great thing about entre­pre­neur­ship. But it’s also the prob­lem with entre­pre­neur­ship, is that cre­ativ­i­ty, the brain loves it. But the dis­ci­pline is hard. The brain loves cre­ativ­i­ty and hates the dis­ci­pline. That’s real­ly why busi­ness is about a relent­less focus on the bor­ing basics.

Kevin Lawrence 17:21

Ideas are easy, ideas are every­where. They are high val­ue cre­ative solu­tions to prob­lems for sure. And ide­al­ly, cus­tomer prob­lems. But it’s the relent­less exe­cu­tion that pays. But when you get too caught up in the cre­ativ­i­ty, it’s chaot­ic. And it’s actu­al­ly real­ly dan­ger­ous for business.

Brad Giles 17:39

And I’ll tell you one thing, a bul­let is not call­ing some­thing low hang­ing fruit. Low hang­ing fruit is. You know, that’s one of the words one of the phras­es that I just hate because it’s anec­do­tal. It just says to peo­ple, this is the easy way.

Kevin Lawrence 18:09

It’s almost it’s an indi­ca­tion of being easy and lazy ver­sus strate­gic and discipline.

Brad Giles 18:15

Cor­rect. And, and so if you look at an idea and say­ing, oh, that’s the low hang­ing fruit, we should do that. That is not fir­ing a bul­let. That is not val­i­dat­ing the idea.

Kevin Lawrence 18:32

I got it. It’s just doing some­thing slop­py and easy ver­sus a bul­let is meant to test a high­ly valu­able hypoth­e­sis, an idea we have that can be notably ben­e­fi­cial to our cus­tomer, our­selves, what­ev­er it is, it’s test­ing some­thing of great impor­tance, but with small lit­tle chunks to prove it first.

Brad Giles 18:53

Yeah. So rather than say­ing that’s the low hang­ing fruit, you could say, alright, well, let’s test that by fir­ing a bul­let. We’ll just do a very small trial.

Kevin Lawrence 19:01

The oth­er thing with pure inno­va­tion is that usu­al­ly com­pa­nies ben­e­fit more from relent­less exe­cu­tion and dis­ci­pline than they do inno­va­tion. Yeah, peo­ple often over inno­vate. And when we’re start­ing with com­pa­nies, they got all this excit­ing stuff they’re doing. And for some com­pa­nies, that’s great. But usu­al­ly the val­ue cre­ation is dis­ci­plined exe­cu­tion of stuff they’re already doing that’s already good. And tak­ing that good­ness and mak­ing it great.

Brad Giles 19:27

Yeah, you look at the sec­ond, or you look at a com­pa­ny like Apple, and we think they’re great lead­ers at inno­va­tion. But most of the time, they’re just build­ing on oth­er peo­ple’s ideas.

Kevin Lawrence 19:39

And exe­cut­ing with great rig­or. The inno­va­tion is easy, gen­er­al­ly, unless you’re in deep, deep, deep sci­en­tif­ic realms. The inno­va­tion is the easy part. It’s the exe­cu­tion. So that’s why the bul­lets and ide­al­ly, your bul­lets are aimed at things that could be inno­va­tion and also We’ll just bet­ter exe­cu­tion, from the per­spec­tive of the cus­tomer, it’s all about ben­e­fit­ing the cus­tomer. The sec­ond thing I want you to do so the first thing is, is the prob­lem is with pure inno­va­tion. Sec­ond is it forces you to fol­low a process. And that’s the idea, rather than ran­dom­ness and chaos and doing what you want, and how excit­ed it’s a process that brings rig­or and dis­ci­pline, to your new ideas. And we’ll call it inno­va­tion, you know, and basi­cal­ly, I like to think about it as it forces you to prove it in the mar­ket­place, rather than prov­ing it in the board­room. And that’s dif­fer­ent. Right? And it’s almost like, you know, your child could be your kid, my son, he could be a great, you know, at sim­u­lat­ed video games ver­sus some stuff in the real world, it’s a dif­fer­ent skill. And so to take it from the­o­ry to prac­tice, yeah, it’s just it’s a dis­ci­pline way to make that happen.

Brad Giles 20:56

Imag­ine if you’ve got a lead­er­ship team in a room, and there’s one per­son who’s real­ly for the idea, and some­one who’s real­ly against the idea, then it by fol­low­ing a process and forc­ing every­one to get to a point where are we pre­pared to fire a bul­let? It takes the per­son­al­i­ties out, and then we will, we will let the sci­ence decide, we will let the process decide.

Kevin Lawrence 21:22

And if you do it, right, because these are small tests, you can often do both, okay. There’s two dif­fer­ent peo­ple have two dif­fer­ent ideas. And if we think those are our top two ideas, we can’t decide, well, let’s test both. It’s called A/B test­ing in the soft­ware world and mar­ket­ing, you test to see which pro­duces a bet­ter result. The key is you got to give it a fair test. And this is the key thing with bul­lets. In order to test a bul­let suc­cess­ful­ly, which is a dis­ci­pline, you also need a dis­ci­plined approach. So for exam­ple, I was with some­one that was doing a new test recent­ly. And they were using the dis­ci­pline of kinder­garten kids try­ing to do a very high val­ue test. Well, that’s not you don’t get good data back, if you don’t have tight con­trols and dis­ci­pline around the test. So bul­lets are tests, dis­ci­pline tests, but you need dis­ci­plined exe­cu­tion of those dis­ci­pline tests to actu­al­ly give it a fair shake, and to tru­ly be able to val­i­date it. And often, if some­one’s doing off the cor­ner of the desk, some­times we don’t tru­ly give it our all and it’s hard to judge whether it was failed exe­cu­tion of the idea or failed idea. So that’s why you got to set them up real good.

Brad Giles 22:41

So that point is it reduces the finan­cial risk of a big bid. It’s excit­ing to take a big bet and right, there’s no doubt about it. But it is excit­ing, because it comes with the risk that it’s going to fail us and it reduces the risk and there­fore helps us to endure the Great by Choice com­pa­nies com­pel com­par­i­son com­pa­nies also fired can­non­balls, but they were uncal­i­brat­ed. That’s the impor­tant point that Jim makes now untest­ed in the mar­ket to val­i­date that they would actu­al­ly work com­par­i­son com­pa­nies had uncal­i­brat­ed can­non balls fly­ing all over the place.

Kevin Lawrence 23:18

Right. And now the com­par­i­son is the under­per­form­ing com­pa­nies just to ground peo­ple back and Jim’s work in. We see it all the time. Yeah, we see peo­ple make these big bold, because I just had one today, came into my email over the week­end, I was look­ing at it. And this client worked with us firm to say what could our prod­uct be like in the future, they came back with a most impres­sive deck. Man, this stuff looks sexy. It looks slick. It looks smart. And let me read you my exact words I wrote to the CEO. I said, beau­ti­ful work. Let’s be very sure to debate this in a small strate­gic group before decid­ing on this direc­tion. It looks beau­ti­ful and com­pelling, and could be a very bad strate­gic move for the busi­ness. Not say­ing that it is a bad move, but that it could be I only know enough to be cau­tious and con­cerned and need more infor­ma­tion. Because it’s beau­ti­ful, sexy stuff that appeals to the ego. It looks like it was devel­oped by Apple. My God in my mind. I don’t even know if we should devel­op the prod­uct. Nev­er mind how amaz­ing it looks. So because it’s an absolute freak­ing can­non ball. Yeah, like when you go down this road. It’s, there’s it’s not a lit­tle move. point of it being is that but But I look at that pre­sen­ta­tion I’m going so many peo­ple would choose it because it looks so sexy and it’s so appeal­ing. But under the sur­face, it could be hor­ri­ble. We need to find a safe way to test it.

Brad Giles 24:58

And peo­ple might be lis­ten­ing, think­ing Yeah, but some­times oppor­tu­ni­ties just pop up like, we did­n’t know that the oppor­tu­ni­ty was going to arise to acquire our largest com­peti­tor, or that we would come up with this great idea. But it’s even when it’s not expect­ed, it is even more impor­tant to fire a bullet.

Kevin Lawrence 25:22

So one of my most suc­cess­ful clients said, Look, I’m nev­er going to make a deci­sion on the spot, a big deci­sion, I’m always going to sleep on every deci­sion and think it through thor­ough­ly. Now, if some­one caught wants to sell me their Rolex store, he was in retail, I am going to decide with­in about sev­en min­utes, we’re just going to work out the price. But if he’s sell­ing a Rolex store, I’m his buy­er. Let’s go. Right. So there’s cer­tain things that are no brain­ers. And then there’s oth­er things that are not but this per­son is already in retail under­stands retail under­stands lux­u­ry, all of those oth­er he’s fired bul­lets in that direc­tion, and he knows the space like the back of his hand or the back of his wrist in the case of watch­es. But the point of is, there’s some things that are no brain­ers. It’s just a mat­ter of bang­ing out the price, but it’s not a ven­ture into a new space.

Brad Giles 26:21

Let’s move on to the next one. It keeps teams focused on busi­ness as usu­al. And it helps avoid dis­trac­tions that can be dam­ag­ing, when you get a big oppor­tu­ni­ty come in, it can sud­den­ly dis­tract many peo­ple in the busi­ness. And then the busi­ness’s cur­rent strat­e­gy or finan­cials will be hit this and not it’s it can, it can not only cost mon­ey in that direc­tion, but it can also be cost.

Kevin Lawrence 26:49

Yeah, that’s why I’m very care­ful with com­pa­nies when they want to expand into new coun­tries and new mar­kets. It’s um, it’s excit­ing. And it’s, it’s like acqui­si­tions, excit­ing, and very dis­tract­ing. It bet­ter be worth it.

Brad Giles 27:02

It bet­ter be worth it. And then final­ly, some­times bul­lets work. Some­times you go from the 40, 30, 10 degrees, and then you get that pin. And then when that hap­pens, that’s when you’ve got to go for it.

Kevin Lawrence 27:18

You’ve de risked it. Yes. Because you know, it works. You’ve proven it works. It’s no longer a risky, bold move. It’s now almost sil­ly not to do it. Because, you know, it’s it’s like print­ing mon­ey. We’re going to invest sin­gle dol­lar bills and $10 bills come back.

Brad Giles 27:40

And why does that matter?

Kevin Lawrence 27:43

Because it’s proven. It’s an it’s gone from an idea to com­mer­cial suc­cess. It’s proven it’s got the seeds of com­mer­cial suc­cess. And if you’re try­ing to build an endur­ing, great busi­ness, you want to get­ting be get­ting a return on your cap­i­tal. It’s like if you are able to count cards, and if it were legal, if you’re able to count cards, and you know, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, there’s a 90% prob­a­bil­i­ty that you’re going to get that you’re going to be able to win the next hand. It’s you should take every dol­lar you have and do it, or most of the dol­lars you have and some peo­ple still won’t. So it’s, but lis­ten, can­ni­bals is being more con­ser­v­a­tive until it’s proven gen­er­al­ly than the aver­age pop­u­la­tion. And then more aggres­sive than typ­i­cal ones. You know, it works. So it’s both.

Brad Giles 28:43

Very good. So let’s have a quick sum­ma­ry. And then we’ll move to wrap up. So fire bul­lets before can­non­balls. So what is it? It’s a con­cept from Great by Choice. We do small, low risk, low cost low dis­trac­tion exper­i­ments to fig­ure out what will work and then we go for it. Why does it mat­ter? It mat­ters because this is risky. And this is dis­tract­ing. And it takes us away from a relent­less focus on the bor­ing basics. No one is smart enough or expe­ri­enced enough to know what will or won’t work. So the prob­lem with pure inno­va­tion is that peo­ple get excit­ed. And then peo­ple are like idea fac­to­ries, pump­ing out ideas, but there’s no val­i­da­tion and it’s all about the execution.

Kevin Lawrence 29:33

Yeah, what num­ber were on there, but num­ber two, okay. And final­ly, it reduces the risk of a big bet, which is Brad already talked about waste mon­ey and more impor­tant­ly, dis­tracts the orga­ni­za­tion. Num­ber four, keeps the team focused on the core busi­ness, not pulling them away by the excit­ing stuff that may not go any­where. And final­ly, when it works, then you got­ta back­up the truck­er cash and fire that can­non­ball. Go for it. And then because you know you’re gonna win.

Brad Giles 30:00

Awe­some, awe­some a good chat. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode about fir­ing bul­lets before can­non­balls. You may want to check us out on YouTube. If you just search the growth whis­per­ers Kevin has an inter­est­ing newslet­ter that he pumps out every week. And you’ll find Kevin at Lawrence and co​.com and I have the same newslet­ter that I pro­duce every week and you’ll find me Brad at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au Hope you’ve enjoyed the episode.