Welcome back to the second issue, and what a time it is to be alive! The AI Super Tsunami is picking up speed, and I am sure everyone is feeling a little excited, a little overwhelmed, and a little unsure of what their next move should be. So here is the plan: give yourself 11 minutes of learning, motivation, and opportunity today. Don’t mark this unread to come back to it later or star it for this weekend. Just dive in and start breaking stuff!  

I used to think working harder was the answer.

When we were stuck at ten million dollars in revenue, I genuinely believed the problem was effort and that if I just put in more hours, pushed the team harder, and ground through the list longer, eventually something would break open for us. What I did not see, and it took me longer than I want to admit, was that the real problem was never how hard we were working. It was how slow we were moving.

We were losing jobs we never even knew we lost. A client would call, nobody would get back to them for hours or even days, and they would sign with someone else before we even had a chance to show up and make our case. We were not losing on price and we were not losing on quality. We were losing because another company simply got there first, and that realization, when it finally hit me, changed how I think about almost everything in this business.

Speed is not about being reckless or skipping the process or cutting corners on the work. It’s about understanding that time is the one thing every client, every candidate, and every opportunity has in common, and when you respect someone's time more than your competitor does, you win. 

I built our systems around that belief. Our sales process, our hiring response, our proposal turnaround, all of it is designed to move before the window closes, because I learned the hard way that the window closes faster than you think, and the company that moves first does not have to be the best. They just have to be there.

What Musk and Bezos figured out that most leaders never will

Jeff Bezos built Amazon around a simple belief. Most decisions are reversible. And if a decision is reversible, the cost of moving slowly is almost always higher than the cost of being wrong and correcting course fast.

He called them two-way doors. You walk through, it does not work, you walk back. The trap most leaders fall into is treating every decision like a one-way door, when 90% of them are not. That instinct to slow down, form the committee, run the analysis, and wait for certainty destroys more value than a bad decision ever could.

Bezos was obsessed with eliminating what he called institutional "no." The idea that large organizations naturally slow down because layers of approval, process, and risk aversion compound over time. His solution was not more meetings. It was designed to enable the company to make decisions at the lowest level possible, as quickly as possible.

Elon Musk approaches speed differently but arrives at the same place.

His obsession is with eliminating friction at the root. He calls it first principles thinking. Most people accept constraints as fixed. They look at how something has always been done and optimize from there. Musk tears it down to the fundamental question: what is actually true here, and what is just an assumption we inherited? When SpaceX asked why rocket parts cost what they cost, they found that the materials were a fraction of the price. The cost was in the process, the middlemen, and the legacy assumptions. Strip those out and you move faster and cheaper than anyone thought possible.

At Tesla, he became famous for walking a factory floor and asking one question about every step in the process: Does this need to exist? Not “can we make it faster?”, but does it need to exist at all? Sometimes the best way to increase speed is to remove steps in the process.

Walk your own operation like Musk walks a factory floor. Pick one process you run every week. Write out every step. For each step, ask a simple question: Does this need to exist, or did we just never question it?

Most of the friction in your business is inherited. It came from how someone before you did it, or how you did it when you were smaller. The company you are building today does not need to carry the constraints of the company you were three years ago.

Then apply the Bezos lens. Look at your decisions this week. Which ones are reversible? Move on those immediately. Save your deliberation for the ones that are not.

What Disruptors do differently

They do not wait for permission to move. They design their businesses so that the default is action, and the exception is waiting.

Technology just changed what fast even means.

OpenAI is now using a project that took engineers two weeks just one short year ago as a benchmark in job interviews. With AI assistance, the same project takes 20 to 30 minutes. If a candidate does not know how to leverage AI tools, they take multiple weeks. The baseline for speed has shifted permanently.

Your competitors are not going to announce the day they catch up. They will just be there. The time to build speed into your systems, your culture, and your decision-making is before you feel the pressure, not after.

Disruptors move before the urgency arrives.

Use this with your team to identify the single most important problem, roadblock, or friction point worth fixing in your business right now.

Step one: Name the constraint. What is the one process, bottleneck, or repeated frustration that slows your business down most right now? Write one sentence. Be specific.

Step two: Break it down to first principles. Ask three questions about that constraint:

Step three: Apply the Bezos door test. Is a potential solution reversible? If yes, move in the next seven days. Do not schedule a committee. If the solution is irreversible, spend one more week on the decision and then commit.

Step four: Name the owner and the date. Every friction point that survives this audit gets an owner and a deadline. Not a conversation. Not a follow-up. An owner and a date.

Run this weekly with your leadership team. One friction point at a time. Fix it. Move to the next.

One line takeaway - Most of the friction in your business is inherited. “First-principles” thinking is how you stop paying rent on problems you no longer have.

Six months ago we had a problem.

Our sales team was spending too much time managing the back-and-forth of design work before proposals could even go out. That lag was costing us speed in exactly the moments where speed matters most: a client is interested, they are ready to move, and we are asking them to wait.

We started working with Your Haven in July of 2025. What they gave us was not just design capacity. It was a system that let our sales team stay in front of clients while the design work moved in parallel.

The result: comparing the second half of 2025 with the first half, we saw a 22.5% increase in sales. Our team closed more because they spent more time selling and less time waiting on drawings.

Your Haven builds for the trades. They understand our timelines, our clients, and what a proposal needs to look like to close. If your design process is a bottleneck in your sales cycle, this is worth a conversation.

Use AI as your pre-meeting decision engine

Before your next leadership meeting, spend 3 minutes with ChatGPT or Claude doing this one thing. Paste the prompt below, fill in the brackets, and let it work.

Copy and paste this prompt:

“I need to make a decision about [describe the decision in one or two sentences]. Here is what I know: [share what you know]. Here is what I do not know: [share what is unclear]. Here is what is making me hesitate: [share your concern or doubt].

Give me the two strongest arguments for moving on this now. Give me the two strongest arguments for waiting. Then tell me the one piece of information that, if I had it, would actually change my decision. Finally, tell me whether this decision is reversible or irreversible, and what that means for how fast I should move.”

Disruptors use it to think faster and more clearly before they walk into the room.

One line takeaway: The best use of AI is not to replace your judgment. It is to stress-test it before the meeting starts.

Two conversations worth your windshield time this month:

Speed without direction is just noise. But the leaders who learn to move fast on the right things, while their competitors are still studying the problem, are the ones building something durable.

Reply and tell me: what is the one friction point in your business right now that you know needs to be fixed but keeps getting pushed to next quarter? I read every response.

Leanscaper Operations Intensive: Reply “Leanscaper Florida” If you have not been to an event and want free tickets!

Nothing replaces a handshake. If you are in the area, come say hello. I would love to hear what you are building. See you all there!