Treat your business like a tree.

Or don’t, and face the consequences.

Imagine you’re a little tree.

There’s nothing you want more than to grow into the biggest tree in the world. You’ll stop at nothing to get there.

Remember this tree. I’ll come back to it.

When you fixate on a goal, there’s a tendency to brute force your way to achieving it.

Whether that’s more sales, more followers, more whatever - when you fixate on a target like that, all your actions become optimised towards it.

This can be a good thing, but it can also be bad if left unchecked.

Optimising for more sales might lead you to dropping your price. It might mean taking on bad customers. Or it might mean creating new products for the sake of it. And you will eventually reap all of the consequences of these decisions.

Things can get even worse thinking this way. You might even consider hacks and tricks, or the slippery slope to outright fraud. Whether that’s literal fraud, or defrauding your own morals.

Now if you’re that little tree, you might decide to cut yourself in half and graft some metal pole to artificially double your height. Or whatever other strange way you could imagine a tree artificially getting “bigger”. Admittedly this is a weird analogy but let’s run with it.

The point is, there are severe trade-offs for this way of thinking. And I want to anchor you to it so I can show you a better way.

This better way is more of a frame of mind when thinking about business building than anything else, and I have personally found it immensely useful since my friend Ben Mosior introduced the idea to me.

It’s thinking about what conditions you need to create to achieve success, rather than the direct forceful actions you could take.

You could try and pull and stretch the little tree to make it bigger…

But you’ll likely have more success by nurturing the conditions for the tree to grow bigger.

Timely watering. Adequate fertilisation. Good ventilation. Lots of light. Thoughtful pruning.

Focusing on the conditions around the thing you want to improve. This way of thinking applies to everything. Your own well-being, your team, your ideas, your systems, products and services.

Creating the conditions for more sales might look like giving your entire team access to customer research and encouraging open exploration of ideas to help minimise objections and hesitations on sales material.

Or a step before that might be creating the systems that allows direct access for your team to speak to customers in the first place.

This way of thinking has you approaching problems more laterally rather than head on. It encourages more long-term thinking, which I think is always a good thing as that tends to encourage compounding results.

So tend to the tree. Don’t hack it down.

Anyway, maybe that was useful. Maybe not. Let me know in the comments.

Cheerio, Charles.