Marie Forleo, founder of Marie Forleo International, runs an eight-figure business training company with her distinct personality front and center. In the beginning, she worried about being her quirky self in videos and writing because at the time that wasn’t seen as the norm in the business world, or even in the world of other leaders she aspired to connect with, like Oprah. Funnily enough, though, it was specifically her quirky self that her audience related to so strongly, and when her platform grew to reach more than 250,000 subscribers in 193 countries, not only did she appear on Oprah, but Oprah named her a leader for the next generation.

But for all creative jobs we would pay one incredible employee at the top of her personal market, instead of using that same money to hire a dozen or more adequate performers. This would result in a lean workforce. We’d be relying on one tremendous person to do the work of many. But we’d pay tremendously.

This is the way we have hired the majority of employees at Netflix ever since. The approach has been remarkably successful. We have exponentially increased our speed of innovation and our output.

Find the lead domino: the one initiative that, when pursued, makes it easier to accomplish everything else. Or identify the constraint — the choke point or bottleneck — and address it first. For more on how to choose this “critical” constraint, read my favorite biz book of all time titled The Goal by the late Eli Goldratt. Scaling up is all about eliminating constraints — in the business and for customers.

At ProService Hawaii, a human resources firm based in Honolulu, President Ben Godsey determined that in the 2014 fiscal year, his Critical Number was getting 600 referrals. This was a major stretch goal. The company, which has $311 million in annual sales (2019), had previously averaged fewer than 200 referrals a year, despite its focus on developing a great service culture and innovative products — indicated by a Net Promoter Score (NPS) consistently above 70% (on par with Apple).

Our pet peeve is when a company’s leaders think it should grow regardless of profit. This is just reckless, unless you’re a venture-backed firm pioneering new territory. For everyone else, we recommend getting profitable with the work you have, proving you can get to 15% profitability (based on our adjusted Simple Numbers), adding labor to knock profit back

to 10%, and then growing to 15% again. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

I was speaking by satellite phone with my client and friend, the polar explorer Ben Saunders, as he was trying to retrace his friend Henry Worsley’s path across Antarctica. The sastrugi—the parallel wavelike ridges carved by the polar winds into the surface of icy snow—were tougher than he’d imagined, and he was close to giving up.

The possibility of giving up wears on him. In 2016, his friend, his mentor, Henry, stopped one hundred and twenty-six miles short of his goal of being the first person to cross the Antarctic peninsula unaided and unassisted. Overcome by exhaustion and airlifted out, Henry died in Chile. Ben’s trying to complete the journey, to finish his friend’s quest. He’s been cursing each ridge, he told me; each ridge means he can’t really ski but must painfully step up and over.