Are you too focused on race day? 🏎️

Hi there 👋,

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to watch Formula One live in Zandvoort. 

It was such an exciting weekend; the rain pounding down, the off-track slips, countless red flags, the buzzing of the crowd.

And once again, Max Verstappen won.

Despite switching from his dry to wet tyres too late, going off-track during qualifying, and the intense rain throughout the race, he won.

Why?

A lot of people think it’s boring or unfair that he has such an advantage (and were happy to see him lose last weekend in Singapore).

But I don’t, and it isn’t because I’m Dutch, I swear.

Red Bull keep winning because they worked so hard on their foundations.

They have an incredible car, a talented driver, and a strong mechanical and engineering team surrounding him.

When asked on the F1 Nation podcast  - I’m really giving away how much of an F1 nerd I am - how Red Bull has such fast pit stops, the answer was practice and precision.

Basically, most of the work to succeed happened long before the day of the race.

It’s too easy to blame external circumstances when things go wrong.

But your best chance of winning, or growing in our case, is dependent on everything you’ve built up before.

So it’s time to learn more from Formula 1.

Hustling on race day will only get you so far

There’s a time for hustling, but there’s also a time for building and planning.

Mission-critical elements and time-consuming processes need to be turned into a systematic structure that can keep running.

Too much hustling and creativity can result in half-built solutions, and a heavy reliance on slow, manual processes.

Back when I was the Head of Growth at Heights, I was always busy with race day. I was constantly building workarounds, like:

• Manually processing data instead of getting dashboards

• Pushing developers for quick fixes rather than ensuring we got a more flexible CMS

• Working with subpar attribution data rather than using an attribution tool like TripleWhale

It was exhausting and holding us back. 

Growth got easier once I started building instead of just racing.

How to know if you need to prepare more for race day?

Here are some signs that you need to spend more time preparing, and less time racing:

1. Some areas that are mission-critical for success don’t have strong processes in place, e.g. stock management for a physical product, measuring attribution is difficult to do.

2. You’re too dependent on one individual or one channel, so if something goes wrong or not as planned, you’ll run into issues.

   I will admit that in our Red Bull example, a lot hangs on Max, but that’s more of an industry issue.

3. There is a lot of repetitive and slow work, which takes up your time. You end up acting reactively rather than proactively most of the time.

Having the right people, processes and products in place will make growth 100x easier.

Learn more about whether it is time for you to focus on your foundations or hustle around obstacles in order to scale up your startup.

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a resource to check out related to the week's topic.

Whilst I have two conferences to share and recommended my best recommendation for you to implement the above is the following challenge:

Write down at least five things that didn’t go as planned in hitting your growth target this month.

Even if you did hit it, there must be things that didn’t go as expected.

Then try to reverse engineer it: What pre-race preparation could you do to stop these things from happening again?

If you’d like to hold yourself accountable for it, why not send your list to me? Maybe I can help you to work out what prep is required before the big race.

Conferences to check out

In case you missed my rather public apology letter to growth yesterday, this week I’m sharing why you shouldn’t equate growth and marketing on Experimentation Nation’s online conference.

Sign up here to get free access to my talk and 36 other incredible talks covering topics from Shopify checkout experiments topic to matching your ad and landing page.

The other one is in person, in London, has sold out completely each time (are you hyped yet, I’m hyped, look at those gold shiny letters): Experimentation Elite.

I have a brand new talk on why your failed experiment is your biggest opportunity.

I will be sharing some major failures, very publicly on stage, strange to be hyped for that I know, but we really do need to talk about failures more as it is a key part of growth.

So definitely get a ticket for the 7th December if you can and hope to see you there.

I also have a special discount code for Growth Waves that will give you 15% off: ExWomenRock15 (I get zero kickback on this, just hoping to see some Growth Waves readers there).

Now back to race day. The key lesson I hope you take from this week is that when it comes to race day, you need to be prepared, not doing last minute stretches or fixing your engine.

Find out what you can do beforehand to make your engines run smoother, so that you can get the best results.

Okay, I’ve run out of F1 puns, so it’s time for me to sign off!

I hope this can help you to become the Max Verstappen of your growth.

Daphne