Subscribe here | Unsubscribe here | July 17, 2025 | FIV #85 |
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✅ Today's Checklist: |
How to massively decrease your chance of failure The top AI stories and biggest news of the week The 5-stage framework for optimizing the customer lifecycle
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QUICK LINKS |
🗞️ AI news. The top AI news of the week (including Google Veo 3's global rollout). |
🤑 Fundraising. The 5 things the 4000 companies this VC said 'no' to have in common. |
📈 Growth. AARRR: The 5-stage framework for improving user experience and optimizing the customer lifecycle. |
👏 Personal development. YC on how to spend your 20s in the AI era. |
🛠️ AI tool. This agentic browser connects to your apps and does everything you want autonomously + 10 powerful use cases. |
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How to Prevent Business Death |
If it were up to me, I'd spend almost all of my time focused on growth: |
Sales Marketing Fundraising Partnerships Strategy & Innovation
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And most founders I know are the same because growth is fun, and pushing your idea/solution makes you feel alive. |
But after building 3 x eight-figure companies over the past couple of decades, I realize that growth without proper systems—what I call a proper protocol—often leads to wasted effort and an unsustainable enterprise. And blowing up your company is no fun at all. |
In a study conducted by FranNet that looked at 1,500 individual franchise owners, 91.2% of the businesses were still open after two years, and 85% were operating after five years. |
And the study analyzed owners between 2006–2010, which were some of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. |
Similarly, other studies have recorded that only 15% of franchises fail, putting franchises among the lowest failure rates of any type of business. In contrast, 2/3 of companies that make the INC 500 list of the fastest growing companies in America are out of business within 5 years of making the list. |
Why is this? |
Because franchises have a set of proven systems and processes that the franchisee is forced to follow. |
Well-established systems are the core of franchising. And the core of any successful business. Especially those that want to scale and experience sustainable growth. |
For franchisees, this begins with an operations manual which covers every aspect of operating the business; especially roles, responsibilities, logistics, procedures, and the brand-franchisee relationship. |
Training is mission-critical as well, and ideally, the training never stops. Did you know that the average military leader spends 1/3 of their career in training, whereas the average entrepreneur spends less than 5 days training (sometimes as low as 5 hours) per year? |
No wonder most entrepreneurs don't build enduring businesses. |
Now, my point isn't to go start a franchise—though this can be a great wealth-building option for those who want a lower-risk entrepreneurial option. Rather, my point is that systems thinking is an essential part of building resilient businesses that can scale without breaking (or even worse, imploding). |
And here's where AI can actually help you shortcut a lot of this. |
You can build your operations manual faster using tools like Loom, which record processes as you work and turn them into easy-to-follow documentation. You can use ChatGPT or Claude to draft your first-pass SOPs or onboarding scripts in minutes, and then refine from there. Tools like Notion can help you structure internal documentation and create systems that update dynamically as you grow. Need weekly accountability? Automate your weekly check-ins and updates with ClickUp's AI-powered summaries.
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And with the right systems in place, innovation can flourish. Examples include: |
Subway pioneered the concept of allowing customers to customize their sandwiches, which set it apart from other fast-food franchises at the time. Great Clips' no-appointment-necessary model catered to customers' need for convenience, making it easy for them to get haircuts on their schedule. Orangetheory Fitness introduced a unique workout model based on heart rate monitoring, which provided personalized and effective workouts for members.
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I'm also not advocating systems overkill. I've seen plenty of pre-product-market-fit companies exist in a state of paralysis by trying to launch perfectly when they should just be selling, iterating, and speaking to their customers. It's not systems then growth, it's systems + growth. These two must go hand-in-hand. The faster the growth, the better the systems need to be. |
In my experience, the most important base-level systems you need to sustain growth include: |
A Super Simple Strategic Plan (3SP) that outlines your company's purpose, values, differentiators, and vision so that everyone knows where you're going and why. A clear-cut weekly & quarterly goal system that ladders up to your strategic plan that is transparent to everyone and illustrates how you're tracking against each key business metric (that's simple & quick to update). A fixed weekly & monthly meeting & review cadence to ensure the company is making the adjustments it needs to in order to best position itself for goal achievement. Clear-cut roles & responsibilities for every person on your team (list everything that has to happen in order for you to deliver your product/service successfully and ensure every activity has a clear-cut owner). Value-maps for each key process in your company so that you can document excellence, train new team members easily, and automate as necessary.
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And yes—even these systems can be created with a heavy assist from AI. |
Want to build your value-maps or role responsibilities? Use Lucidchart or with AI-assisted templates. |
Want to speed up strategic planning? Use AI mind-mapping tools like Miro's AI facilitator to accelerate alignment. |
I'm blown away at how many eight-figure, "successful" companies do not have these systems locked & loaded in their org. When I see this I think "uh-oh...something, or everything, is going to break soon. Watch out!" |
Business success primarily comes down to doing the right things > the wrong things over a long period of time. |
The good news? With AI in your corner, you can do the right things faster, smarter, and more consistently. |
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Sean's Pick of The Week |
Can an AI Browser Actually Think With You? |
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I'll be testing out Perplexity's new agentic browser, Comet, and I'm genuinely curious to see if it lives up to the hype. |
The idea of having an AI that actively helps me research, summarize, and take action—right from the browser—sounds like a massive upgrade from just opening 15 tabs and drowning in them. |
I'm especially interested in how it handles context across tasks and whether it can actually reduce the back-and-forth that kills my momentum. |
If it can help me stay in flow while making smarter decisions faster, and do it all without compromising my privacy, it might just become my new default. |
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