From Start-up Chaos to Scale-up Clarity

Activate exponential growth with this framework

Days blend into nights, relationships are ruined, hobbies wither, and self-care now lives in the back seat. I have unknowingly surrendered to the consuming force of the work of building scale at companies.  The companies change, but the struggle is the same. It now feels inevitable.  That relentless tug-of-war between the work itself and deciphering my true priority from hour to hour.  It feels visceral.  Life becomes a combative dance of deadlines and aspirations.  Between the urgent and the impactful. But the only way for this dance-battle to end, was to pursue what it truly took to achieve scale.  And to relentlessly live this every day, every week, and every month, until the magic happens. 

Introducing the $10k framework

Meandering on the internet for solutions to my struggle, I found Khe Hy.  Khe knows ‘busy’, specifically my kind of busy.  He abandoned a 7-figure Wall Street salary to teach personal productivity. I could immediately relate, I often want to abandon my job too.  He coined the term “$10k work” to describe the personal tasks that are ‘force multipliers’ of your potential.  I was hooked.

Image credit: Khe Hy, www.radreads.co

Every role I have taken in the last +15 years has been progressively more intense and I wondered how I could slow the unsustainable progression - it had to be finite. That I am consumed by work is not a fluke, I am consumed by life in general.  So rather than fight my nature, I choose to channel it more productively.  This makes me obsessive about my personal productivity.  And Khe’s $10k framework fed my obsession. 

I wanted to use the $10k framework for my life so as to surrender to my highest potential instead of busy work.  It felt right, like a good balance between the pull of my ambition against my personal sanity.  Every time I hear that a friend has collapsed at work, I hope and pray that our next meeting is not at their funeral - that keeps this balance urgent for me and for all of us.  

Image credit: Khe Hy, www.radreads.co

The $10k framework breaks down daily tasks into a 2*2 matrix of ‘leverage’ and ‘skill’.  Each task is measured for how much skill is required to complete it and how much future leverage it can create.  The critical outcome of leverage is its ability to deliver exponential, not linear, results.   Theoretically, you would identify and take action on your highest leverage and skill tasks (the $10k tasks) first before moving through the 2*2 to tackle lower-level ones. The framework was initially designed for personal productivity but the penny clanged loudly when I realized that it worked just as well for scaling up a business.  Productivity, is essentially, the transformative act of scaling oneself. 

Finding and naming your $10k skill is painstaking.  But the work is worth it.  And the rewards are immediate and deeply resonant.  It will feel like finding your superpowers.  And when my trusted friends, helped me find mine - Sagacity - I never saw myself in the same way again.  

Sagacity is an ability to possess a deep understanding and wisdom across various functions and simplify complex issues into concise and meaningful questions.  How does my Sagacity affect the way I drive scale? It directly affects how I solve problems, which growth strategy I choose, how I influence my teams and stakeholders to support strategic choices, how I adapt chosen strategy to stay ahead of the curve.  This superpower has served me everywhere I’ve been regardless of industry - I’ve done this in telecoms, fintech, digital content and agriculture businesses.  

It doesn’t stop there.  When combined with Writing and Public Speaking, both of which are also superpowers of mine, it means that I can communicate complex topics to others using simple and relatable terms.  

How am I doing with this article so far?  

Applying the $10k framework to scaling a business

In my version of the framework, I’ve replaced “Leverage” with “Innovation” and replaced “Skill” with “Execution” in Khe’s original framework.  My choice of axis pair emphasizes the balance between generating innovative ideas and executing them effectively to deliver them. Similar to when Skill meets Leverage, when a team fuses Innovation with Execution, it has a catalytic effect - in this case, on growth.  

I think about Innovation in an atomic way.  It has brought me ease and helps me keep my teams motivated.  Atomic innovation helps me break innovation down into fundamental building blocks.  And like building blocks, each one matters, no matter how small.  They form the foundation, are interconnected, are modular but fit into an overall design and have a cumulative impact.  As one drives innovation, this approach breaks down complex goals and allows the team making small incremental improvements.  It fosters a culture of experimentation that celebrates small wins of incremental innovation on the way to the bigger goal of exponential innovation.  

Atomic Innovation improves Execution because it reduces the friction.  Reduced complexity creates smaller goals and it is easier to track incremental progress, or adapt a plan to changing conditions which by the way mitigates risk.  All of this adds up to more wins and nothing fosters team collaboration better than winning together.  

To make the framework more meaningful, I’ve also changed the task $ value to match the narrative of a small company.  So rather than $10k tasks, we have $10 million activities to set our revenue aspirations.  If you’re a bigger company, go ahead and make $10k activities into $1 billion activities - set your own targets!

Here’s what I ended up with:

Unlike my personal force multipliers, my experience made it easier to $10M activities in a company.  During the Thrive Agric turnaround, where I led the turnaround of around a startup at the brink of a pandemic-induced failure and they’ve since gone on to 10X growth, I focused primarily on $10M tasks -  I engaged regulators to prevent us from being shut down, I engaged our financial stakeholders and shared the path to financial recovery.  I secured additional funding for the business, and redefined key functions to prevent a recurrence of the issues that led to the turnaround.  What I did not do was get into day to day operations beyond making sure they yielded the right result at the right time.  I had a team I could trust to deliver that.

Even imperfectly applied, using this framework stilled the noise of chaos and gave me clarity.  It revealed the true essence of exponential growth—the fusion of strategic foresight and diligent action.  It has become my guiding light as I lead my teams away from busyness and towards purposeful growth.  

Thanks Khe!

P.S.: Read more about Khe’s $10k framework here.  

P.P.S.: Thanks to

Tommy Dixon

for reading my rough draft 🙏🏽