You can’t win a game you aren’t in.

If you think about this another way, our principle job as leaders is to make sure we stay in the damn game.

My COO likes to regularly tell me - you need to survive long enough to win.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

First, are we really talking about luck?

I’ve got a weird amount of very successful entrepreneurs in my life, and one thing they all have in common is they’ll tell you they have been very lucky.

This runs counter to so much business content on the interwebs, where talking heads love to tell you that success is about mindset, habits, and strategy.

Truth is, success is mostly about surviving long enough to be lucky.

After last weeks Briefing issue (seriously - why aren’t you a subscriber yet???), I received a lot of replies from entrepreneurs feeling a little stuck in their business right now.

This is incredibly common, which is why I wrote an entire issue of the Briefing about it.

I’m not a fan of war references, but building a company is a battle. No question, it’s one of the more difficult paths you can choose in life.

Here’s an example from one of my own businesses.

Pela Case has been stuck around this $25-$30M / year range for a few years now. Part of the reason for this is we ignored it for 2 years while we focused on building Lomi.

At the end of 2022 we decided to spin Pela Case out of the main company and dedicate a team to this business. It needed focus and attention it wasn’t getting.

So 2023 was largely about stabilizing the company and finding what I call the “organic baseline” where it was profitable.

The organic baseline is where a business can survive without pouring tons of cash into advertising to force growth.

Now, if you were to look at the financials for Pela Case the last few years, you’d see a pretty boring, uninspiring business.

Fast forward to today, and because we’ve been focused on fundamentals we were able to stay in the game long enough to find new growth opportunities.

Today, we’re working on several large partnerships that have the potential to 2-3x our business in the next couple of years.

We’ve also taken this time to build new products, one of which is the ability for our customers to upload any image they want to make a custom 1 of 1 phone case. Just in time for mothers day and fathers day gifting season!

Three years of hitting a growth ceiling, and we’re now finding new paths up the mountain.

We stayed in the game. Now we need to execute on this new found good luck.

That’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the read!

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Onward,

Matt