Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

Book update: The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers hit its five-month mark last week, so my publisher sent over a sales snapshot. About 640 copies sold at retail across the US and Canada, plus another 360 through direct and bulk orders. Roughly 1,000 copies out in the world being read, dog-eared, and hopefully not collecting dust.

For a niche book about customer development and sales written by a first-time author, I'll take it. It's not lighting the world on fire, but it's finding the right people, which feels appropriate given the subject matter.

Onto the newsletter…

I have a confession. I hate EOS.

Not in the way you hate a bad product. More in the way you hate something that seemed like exactly the right idea, consumed a year of your life, and left you worse off than when you started.

If you're not familiar, EOS is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's a framework for running your company. Meetings, scorecards, accountability charts, rocks, quarterly planning. The whole thing. Thousands of companies run on it. Entire consulting practices exist to help you implement it. It has a book, a following, and a community of true believers.

And look, I'll say this upfront: I still use a couple of things I picked up from EOS. More on that in a minute.

But the rest of it nearly killed us.

When I look back at running the executive team at Predictable Revenue, I can see something clearly now that I couldn't see at the time. We operated in two modes: internally focused and externally focused.

When we were externally focused, we were thinking about our market. Our customers. Our marketing. How to make more customers successful. That's when things worked.

When we were internally focused, we were reorganizing. Improving operations. Redesigning processes. Building better dashboards. Making the company run smoother. And every single time we shifted into that mode, we lost ground.

I'm not saying operations don't matter. Of course they do. But there's a difference between fixing something that's broken and endlessly optimizing something that's fine. We kept choosing to look inward when the answers were always outside.

EOS was the pinnacle of our internal focus. We spent a year getting really, really good at tracking whether things were getting done on time. We had beautiful scorecards. Our meetings ran like clockwork. Everyone knew their role, their rocks, their quarterly priorities.

And we completely lost sight of the one thing that actually mattered: serving our customers.

I remember a conversation with one of our team members about company values. We were debating whether "customer comes first" should be a core value. She pushed back hard on it. Her argument was that it devalued the employees, that it sent the message that the team didn't matter.

I get the concern. I wasn't trying to say employees don't matter. But the reality is simpler than people want it to be. The only reason we existed was to serve our customers. If we don't serve our customers, we don't have employees. You can build the best workplace in the world, but it doesn't matter if there's no work to do.

I think I acquiesced too much in that conversation. I softened the language, found a compromise, moved on. In hindsight, I wish I'd held the line. Not because she was wrong to care about the team. She wasn't. But because "customer comes first" isn't a statement about who matters more as people. It's a statement about what keeps the lights on.

This is the trap that EOS sets for you. It makes the internal stuff feel like the important stuff. You're in meetings talking about your company, looking at your scorecard, checking off your to-dos. It feels productive. It feels like leadership. But you're not talking to customers. You're not in the market. You're staring at a dashboard instead of doing the work.

Kaz Nejatian, CEO of Opendoor, has this great line on the Sequoia Capital podcast Long Strange Trip. His point is that professional managers optimize for process while founders optimize for truth and outcomes. You can stare at dashboards and read reports all day, but you can't understand a business from a distance. You have to be on the field.

As Kaz puts it, he holds himself responsible for outcomes, not processes.

That's EOS in a nutshell. You can stare at your EOS dashboard all week. You can celebrate that every rock is on track and every to-do was completed. But none of that makes you a great CEO. It makes you a great administrator. You're optimizing for process when you should be optimizing for outcomes.

The best quarters we ever had at Predictable Revenue were the ones where I was spending 80% of my time talking to customers, partners, and prospects. Not in meetings about our org chart.

Like I said, the hiring scorecards stuck. EOS has this tool with two components. First is GWC: does this person Get the role, Want the role, and have the Capacity to do it. Second, you assess the candidate against each of your company's core values. Both components use the same simple scale: 0 means no evidence, 1 means some evidence, 2 means all the evidence you could want.

Here's how I use it: every person involved in the interview process fills out a scorecard after every single interview, even if they've already interviewed the candidate. Nobody is allowed to discuss the candidate until their scorecard is submitted. This removes a ton of groupthink and bias. You can't walk out of an interview and let someone else's opinion override what you actually observed.

And because every candidate goes through at least five interviews, you end up with a trend line. You can see scores shift across conversations. You can spot where the gaps are in someone's profile. A candidate might nail GWC but score low on a core value, or the reverse. That pattern tells you something a single conversation never could.

That's it. That's what survived from a year of EOS implementation. One tool. Out of an entire operating system.

In the early days of Predictable Revenue, planning was just my co-founder and me talking constantly. We were always thinking about it, always working through what came next, but there was nothing formal. No monthly plan, no annual plan. Just a high-level direction of finding product-market fit and marching toward it.

As the team grew, we started getting together once a month to loosely coordinate what needed to get done. Informal monthly cycles, nothing fancy.

Then one of our advisors told us we needed to do quarterly planning. So we tried it. By the time a quarter was over, the plan we'd made was completely irrelevant. The business had moved too fast for a 90-day horizon to hold up. We eventually brought it down to two-month cycles, which worked better, partly because our growth had slowed by then and things weren't quite as chaotic. But three months was still way too long.

The lesson is simple: the faster you're moving, the shorter your planning cycles need to be. A startup iterating weekly on product and talking to customers every day has no business locking itself into quarterly rocks. That's an EOS concept built for stability, not speed. Plan in whatever increment actually matches how fast your world is changing.

Here's where I'll give EOS its due. If you're running a company doing ten million in revenue and you have no plans to grow, EOS is probably a great autopilot. If your goal is to plateau gracefully, to keep the business running without breaking it, it's a solid system for that. It'll keep the trains on time.

But if you're a startup with any ambition at all, it's not the right tool. It'll pull your attention inward at exactly the moment you need to be looking outward. It'll make you feel productive while you lose touch with the only thing that matters: your customers.

Stay in the market. Stay uncomfortable. The dashboards can wait.

Collin

PS - thank you anonymous kindle customer from the United Kingdom. If you want to join them, click here to unlock the secrets to strengthening product market fit. Ok, it’s just a book and there are probably no secrets in it that I haven’t already shared here. But I’ll give you a high five if you buy it anyway.

PPS - more updates on VClist next week, for now I’m just building.