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- Brex founder Pedro Franceschi on the one question CEOs should constantly ask themselves
Brex founder Pedro Franceschi on the one question CEOs should constantly ask themselves
Pedro urges founders to ask themselves, “What’s the one thing that’s limiting your rate of growth right now?”
He explains why this is so important:
“People typically say, ‘There’s many things,” but there’s not. By definition, there is one thing in any system that limits the rate of progress for the whole system — it’s called the ‘bottleneck’ — and once you find the bottleneck, the highest leverage thing you can do is increase the throughput of the bottleneck.”
Pedro recommends reading “Toyota Production System” by Taiichi Ohno to understand this concept more deeply. And he gives Brex as an example:
“In 2021, our bottleneck was that we didn’t have an enterprise product so we were limited in the kinds of customers we could serve. The reality was that as customers matured and got to a certain scale, the Brex product we had back then didn’t scale for them anymore.”
When Pedro asked himself, “What’s the one thing that could change the trajectory of the business?” he realized it was building an enterprise product:
“You can have the best sales team. You can have the best marketing. But if the product is not truly great, you can’t unlock the next growth phase of the company.”
So that’s where he focused nearly all of his time and energy:
“I said, ‘I’m going to spend 70% of my time building that product.’ And I just delegated everything else… It took us a year to build something that worked, and that’s how we ultimately closed customers like DoorDash, Coinbase, and Robinhood that would not have traditionally come to Brex.”
Pedro continues:
“The highest leverage use of my time as the founder and CEO is to spend my time making that one thing go faster. And a lot of anxiety in building a company comes from [not being able to decide] what truly matters… When you don’t hedge with 4 or 5 different priorities and instead just focus on that one thing that will truly move the needle, there’s an almost zen-like state that’s very liberating where you can just focus entirely on one thing.”