Small before big

One of the luxuries of being in a low-cost business or in having access to capital is that you can scale quickly. You can go from one salesperson to a hundred, one store to twenty, no franchises to a thousand.

In our rush to scale, sometimes we forget something essential: if it doesn't work when you've got one, it's extremely unlikely to work when you have dozens.

If a political candidate can't sway the audience with one speech, how will doing the speech across the district do anything but waste time?

If a direct mail letter doesn't work when you mail it to a hundred people, it won't work any better when you mail it to a thousand.

All a roundabout way of saying that obsessing about that tiny moment when someone decides to buy pays big dividends. Rejiggering or even overhauling a single example of what you do is almost always a better way to spend your time than in trying to double the number of places you do what you do.