cometh the hour, cometh the channel?
Is WWII:Winston Churchill the same as Runway <6 months:Paid Ads?
Over the last two years, I had conversations with 100+ saas leaders. From founders to strategy officers to PMMs and more. A handful of those conversations were with teams facing “the hour.”
The hour when runway is short and the pressure to find a scalable growth channel is on.
A few found that channel. For some it came just in time. Others didn’t find it or it came too late. The cash was gone.
‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’ refers to challenging times finding their hero. I wonder if companies can find their growth channel hero.
Avoiding the hour altogether
There are stories of companies burning so much cash it makes my eyes water. One company I know of burned 8-figure cash reserves in a few years. They didn't find product-market fit or a growth channel that could scale.
For companies like that, the hour is nigh (yup, ‘nigh’). There was no urgency until it was too late. With that much cash in the bank, I have to believe it’s possible to avoid the hour altogether.
If you work with urgency.
The deadline effect
It’s important to keep pressure on a team. Sometimes we have to manufacture urgency.
Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill “the time allotted for its completion.” Another lens is The Deadline Effect. We work with focus when time is short.
Runway is a deadline. If it’s long, we have little urgency. As it shortens, we rationalize how it’s still long enough. When it gets single-digit short, maybe we panic or embrace the deadline effect.
The time for urgency is always now
We raised some capital for Accoil Analytics — not a lot, but enough to kind of get comfortable.
There’s this strange need to create urgency. To not wait until it’s either panic mode or a real deadline effect. How do we work with urgency when the deadline is far away?
Cometh the hour, cometh the channel
Urgency = Focus.
Have you ever felt that? When real urgency kicks in, the bullshit and fluff disappear. The busywork goes away and what’s left is precise activity.
If the time for urgency is now (because it always is) and if urgency is focus, then we have to choose urgency to drive growth.
I recently wrote about reviewing our growth channels. Choosing urgency made it easier to look at each channels' performance and focus on the 1-2 with big potential.
The same goes for new companies finding traction and 10-year old companies breaking through plateaus. Create the hour (urgency). Find the channel (focus). Grow.
Repeat until runway is a thing you used to talk about in the 'good ol' days.'
Peter
(491 / 500)
PS: It's leadership's job to create urgency without losing sight of the long term. Important to keep our eyes on the horizon, too.