Earlier today, I had a chat with one of my favorite companies, Parallax, which gives you incredible, fantastic, deep insight into resource management - they give you the ability to accurately measure & forecast capacity and all sorts of other stuff.

They help you measure what you have available. During that chat, we really focused in on this idea of constraints in the realm of business growth. We talked about how too little available capacity limits your ageny growth. Regardless of how good your business development is, if your ability to deliver is limited, that's a serious constraint.

Conversely, too much capacity (meaning you don't have enough work) is its own kind of constraint because if you're burning too much on salary relative to your revenue, you may not have the requisite budget to drive growth through sales an marketing. So an excess of capacity is a constraint in its own way.

In 2002, talking about the military capabilities of Iraq and the presence of weapons of mass destruction, the then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said,

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know”.

Despite that being some sort of political spin, Rumsfeld was right. There are things you know, things you don't, and there are the things that you don't know that you need to know about. This idea is always juxtaposed in my mind with the quote that's attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker, "What is measured can be improved." Drucker is a seriously big thinker, very smart, tons of data, amazing insights. - and The Effective Executive is a business book that is worth reading.

But here's a question for you:

If there are things you don't know that you need to know, how can you effectively track them?

While many businesses are solving problems at lightspeed, their payroll systems seem to stay stuck in the past. Deel's free Payroll Toolkit shows you what's actually changing in payroll this year, which problems hit first, and how to fix them before they cost you. Because new compliance rules, AI automation, and multi-country remote teams are all colliding at once.

Check out the free Deel Payroll Toolkit today and get a step-by-step roadmap to modernize operations, reduce manual work, and build a payroll strategy that scales with confidence.

Download the Toolkit for free today

In business schools, they often use this thing called the case study method. It's where you get a set of circumstances, you get a problem, in essence, some context, and then you have to come up with the solution to the problem as if you are the company that is being described in the case study. It feels like it would be representative of what it's like to solve problems in a business. But that case study methodology intentionally or otherwise gives you the feeling that you have all the data that you need to solve the problem. In business, that is rarely true.

So jumping back to my discussion with Parallax, there are things that might seem one way, like excess capacity (more capacity usually ,means that you can grow!), that might be highlight a negative, like higher expenses without higher revenue likely means smaller growth budgets. And then Rumsfeld tells us that there's stuff that you don't know, that you don't know that you're supposed to know. And then Drucker tells us that only the things that are measured get improved. To make sense of all this:

Single-variable algebra isn't too challenging. Multivariate calculus is challenging. Now, imagine multivariate calculus where you don't even know what all the variables are. If there's an unknown quantity of variables, how the actual fuck are you ever supposed to solve a problem?

That's what it's like to actually run an agency today…multivariate calculus with an unlimited number of variables.

Jeff Bezos famously said that waiting until you had enough information to make a decision was too long. The benefit of certainty was completely outweighed by lack of speed. By making decisions sooner, you got to make more decisions, so you had a richer testing environment. You learn more faster.

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free

But if you are a CEO, especially a first-time CEO or a CEO who is running a business that is larger than you have a mental model for, which happens to a great many agency founders, the fear of making the wrong decision can be paralyzing. At this point, I have coached somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 agencies. I haven't counted recently; that number might be a little high or a little low, but that's what I think. Rarely did any CEO think, "I've got this shit locked down and know what I'm doing."

Think about it this way - if you are CEO, every day you are faced with an organization that is different than the one you were managing just yesterday. There's new people, there's new customers, there's new competitive pressures, there's new external factors that come into play and all impact your business. You can't possibly have all of the information that you need.

As much as I find Jeff Bezos of the last few years to be pretty distasteful (his editorial meddling in the operations of the once revered Washington Post kind of wore out my patience for him…and the whole “rent out Venice for my 2nd marriage thing” - ugh - well that sealed the deal), his approach to making more decisions rapidly is spot on.

nobody likes to be wrong. I know I don't. Unfortunately, I'm wrong a lot. Just ask my wife. She will be happy to tell you. But being wrong is actually okay. It gives you new information from which to make a better decision.

What can be really challenging, as we talked about, is the multivariate version of decision inputs. It's a lot. Especially if you remember that you are either running a business for the first time or running this particular business at this particular time for the first time. Regardless of how long you have been a CEO, or how successful you are, Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns are still there.

Throughout my coaching, I think the thing that clients want most often out of me is to help them understand the things that they don't understand.

In many respects, my job is to help my clients understand which knowns you have to pay attention to and measure, which unknowns that you are aware of that you need to manage, and then give you a framework for dealing with the unknown unknowns that are inevitably going to pop up the very minute you think, "Whew, I can take a breath today."

About a year and a half ago, I came out with a version of something I called the WTF Assessment. The idea is, after that assessment, you turn your muttering "What the fuck?" into something like, "What's the fix?" or "Which thing first?" or, ideally, "Wow, that's fantastic."

That assessment was good. It was more like a snapshot of where you were at that very moment. That can be informative, but I didn't really think that it added enough value.

I have been thinking, "I have got to make this better." A big problem was that those assessments were really time-consuming for me, and they required a lot of explanation.

It didn't seem like a terrific idea to really push people to invest their time (and mine) in to create a document that mostly confirmed what people already knew. The original WTF assessment just sort of corralled a lot of Rumsfeld’s known knowns into 1 slide deck.

This isn't full of known knowns. It's going to help you know some unknowns that you are aware you should know about. But hopefully, this assessment will give you insight into some of those crazy, squirrely, outrageously clever unknowns that you aren't even aware of.

The assessment is free. It’s a great value for the price. It identifies things like

The thing that I really, really like about this particular assessment is that it gives you five things that I hope will be revelations to you.

My hope is that it will be an unveiling of a few of the unknown unknowns & they will transform into a known known that you can measure and improve.

I hope that you find it useful!

See the top-performing Facebook ads in your niche and replicate them using AI. Gethookd shows you what’s actually working so you can increase ROI and scale ad spend with confidence.

See the winning ads

Our sponsorships are ads (obviously - duh). But some of the companies or services linked in our content may pay us a minimal commission if you buy something from them. Potential payment is never a factor in what we link to, and we have direct experience with every company or service where you can buy something that we mention in our content.