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Hi {{first_name}},
There’s a strategic filter I’ve kept in the back of my deck for years, and it comes from Alex Hormozi. Three words, strict order: more, better, new.
More: do more of what’s already working before you do anything else. The offer that converts, the channel that pays for itself, the customer segment that keeps buying. Pour into it until it’s genuinely saturated.
Better: once the volume lever is maxed, improve the thing itself. Raise the close rate, tighten delivery, lift the margin, sharpen the pricing on the proven product.
New: only after more and better are truly exhausted do you earn the right to chase something new.
The three words are unremarkable. The order is the insight, because nearly every company I’ve seen runs the list backwards. New is exciting. New gets the strategy offsite, the budget line, the enthusiastic hire. There’s a quiet status game in most organizations where launching something beats scaling something, even when the math says otherwise. Meanwhile the proven winner, the thing that has already survived contact with reality, sits underfed because it’s boring.
Here’s how it usually looks in practice. A business I’m evaluating has a service line running at half capacity with a waiting list, a referral channel producing its best customers that nobody has systematically worked, and a new initiative consuming most of leadership’s attention with zero revenue to date. The growth isn’t hidden. It’s sitting in plain sight, starved.
The underlying logic is about risk, not creativity. What’s already working is proven demand: no discovery risk, no adoption risk, known economics. What’s new carries maximum uncertainty on every dimension. A rational allocator funds the sure thing first. Most attention allocation runs on novelty instead, which is why the framework has to be enforced deliberately. It doesn’t happen by default.
One honest caveat: new isn’t bad, it’s just third. Every more eventually saturates and every better hits diminishing returns, and businesses that never plant anything new eventually harvest a bare field. The discipline isn’t avoiding new. It’s making new prove that more and better are actually done.
If you’ve been following along, this stacks neatly with the rest of the toolkit. The three levers tell you what creates value. Minutes versus months tells you how fast to move. More, better, new tells you in what order. None of it is complicated. All of it fights the same enemy: attention drifting to what’s interesting instead of what compounds.
The exercise for this week: list every growth initiative currently consuming time or money. Mark each one more, better, or new. Then look at the ratio and ask whether it was chosen, or whether it just happened.
Talk soon,
Matt
P.S. When I’m not writing this, I’m buying and operating founder-led businesses for the long term at Eidolon Capital. If you’re a founder thinking about your next chapter, or you advise one who is, just hit reply. I read every note.