One of the key skills for startup CEOs is figuring out what's important and what's not. a fancy word for this is called strategic thinking. So, I worked for a number of years with my wife, she was my, my business partner. And, okay, I'm not going to delve into all the things that that went wrong. But one of the things that did went wrong is that she was amazingly good on a tactical level. So every every day, she could see what needed to be done by Matt bangbang.

On a strategic level, she had no freaking idea. That's why we had different roles. I was generally in charge and she, she she made sure that the business worked for rock from day to day. And when I say she had not no idea, so faced with four or five problems, she looked and think I know something about that one, so I'm going to work on it. And okay, that's that's a reasonable heuristic in in a number of places, but for a business, we we base, it needs to start from the point of, okay, which of those problems is going to hurt the business most? Now?

Which one do I need to solve fastest? Which one is going to be the most expensive to solve? Which one? Haven't I got the resources to solve now, but I might have it in six months of time, which month, which one seems really dangerous and really important. But actually, I could just ignore it. And hopefully, if things go right there, the flames will go out.

And it's not going to be a problem because of what I'm doing on this on this other problem. And so this is one of one of the key things to do is like, what are the issues facing me? And where do I need to focus my attention? So for a lot of startups, and I've seen this time and time again, a CEO will be in might have five to 10 things that are worrying him that the decision Stress, stressing him out. And many, many people will will just spend lots of time agonizing about all of them. So it's very important to sort of quickly decide how important is this problem?

Yeah. And it's a discipline. So when you get a problem is like, do I need to spend any time solving this myself? Can I delegate it to somebody else and let them do it? If they've brought it to me? Why have they brought it to me?

Is it because they're, they don't know what I'd say they're afraid that I will tell them off for making a decision. In which case the problem isn't the problem that they brought to me. The problem is one of the way that I'm managing my team. But going through each of those problems, prioritizing it, thinking about the the risks, the cost, the benefits of it, and it's very simple. Write down the problem in two to three sentences. Yeah.

Is it gonna kill me if I do nothing? Is it gonna kill me in three months? Is it gonna kill me? Six months. That's on the negative. Yeah.

Alternatively, on the positive, yeah, if I saw, where is it going to bring me more sales? Is it going to help me keep customers? Is it going to help improve the conversion rate? Yep, you can go through each of those. If he's not going to be doing any of those, or if it's going to be taking a lot of time to do that, then why do I want to do that? Yeah, cut through the crap cuts through the mental noise, and just be focusing on the stuff that you need to be doing.

So strategic thinking is often really a term for the clarity is that what is really, really important for my business. So another, another example, so I was working with a founder laughs last year, he's hugely energetic. Matt, actually, pretty much. Most founders are really, really energetic and he was going off to meetings. He was going off to networking. He was setting up partnerships.

The problem was we didn't actually have any customers. And one of our key resources was the CEOs, black book with all his contacts, which were meant to be the the first our first customers on it. And so the the CEO, just was not thinking strategically, he thought he was because he thought he was planning ahead. And so there is often this is really obvious why you're doing what you're doing, because you can see the real benefits. But because again, you're focused on one particular vision, you're missing what's really, really critical to the business. So what we actually went and did sort of the senior management team went to him and said, Hey, you are the guy who is able to cut through a lot of these problems.

These are the problems that you need to be focusing on, because those are the ones that are going to be deadly, delivering as fast growth. Did that we got back on course, and the growth went a lot lot better. That case, the CEO was not thinking strategically about what needed to be done. He thought he was, but in fact, his thinking was willing. So going back, always that be looking back in your diary when you're planning out your week. What is really, really important is what I'm working on.

Does it seem important, or is it not as urgent as it actually is? Stephen Covey has a very good mechanism. He says, okay, divide things into important and not important and urgent and not urgent. And generally, the CEO should focus on important and urgent things first, yeah, those are the files that have got to be put out. Yeah, he can't do anything. And then he focuses on the important but not urgent, because those are generally things that guy to really move the needle and get you heading in the right direction.

When ality a lot of the strategic thinking is focused on the not important but urgent stuff. Yes. I mean, one example from last week, yeah, I spent three or four hours chasing business cards from a provider who couldn't actually get them delivered. And that was an absolute waste of my time. I thought it's important to get business cards so we could get customers. But in reality, I sort of just said sunk costs, order it from somebody else and get somebody to get the refund from that.

And I could have done that in 30 minutes and I'd say three hours. So focus on what needs to be done and get out there and do it.