Ludus Novus · Marian van der Elst

The Seven Lessons

What twenty years taught me about why a business stalls, and why it's almost never the thing everyone is looking at.

1. A business is a sales process.

Whatever you do, there is a path a stranger walks to become a customer. For a practice it's referral, phone call, first appointment. For an online business it's post, sign-up, offer. For an agency it's conversation, proposal, contract. You have a path like that whether you call it one or not, and it is made of steps. The step where it's stuck is rarely the step that hurts.

2. Complexity is the feeling of not knowing which spot it is.

Then everything feels wrong at once. You have forty-seven things on the list, you do all of them a little and none of them properly, and the temptation to rebuild the whole operation gets loud. That is expensive, slow, and almost always unnecessary. One spot is stuck, not the business.

3. The business is rarely broken.

When something stops working, complexity tells you everything is broken. Usually a single element got changed: an offer swapped, a channel switched, a message rewritten, and the new element pulls in the wrong people or loses the right ones. Swapping back is cheaper than rebuilding. You only have to know which element it was.

4. The most expensive assumption is the one nobody checked.

In my corporate years I sat in a room where everyone agreed we should build. The budgets were cleared. One question had gone unasked, because it put the whole plan in doubt. I asked it, and the project stopped before half a billion went out the door. Your business has assumptions like that too, smaller but just as unchecked: that the list is dead, that your customers don't want to hear from you, that the old offer doesn't work anymore.

5. Look for the one obvious thing.

Lay the numbers of every step of your path side by side. Almost always one is missing, or one is so bad it's embarrassing the moment you see it. Usually it's exactly one. If you don't know your numbers, you are succeeding in spite of yourself, and that's a compliment: you got this far on talent and work. With numbers you get further, and the three you actually need are quick to find.

6. Take what worked and do it again.

Look at what brought in money over the last twelve months, a campaign, an offer, a message, a channel, and ask yourself why you aren't repeating it. I built a launch for a physician that did 120,000 euros in ten days, and the valuable part was that it was repeatable. Most owners never repeat their best campaign, because they're too busy running the business. That's normal. It just costs money.

7. Where the money is, you were usually most yourself.

This one is mine. When you find the place where it worked, you almost always find the offer you sold without bending yourself, and the people it was meant for. That's more than a number. But the number comes first.

If you read this and think you can do it yourself: do it. I mean that. If you notice you've been meaning to do it for months and the business won't let you, that's the reason I exist.