By Dominick Miserandino, CEO, RTM Nexus
I was talking with Tim Zawislack recently about the operator mindset, and he asked how I developed the discipline to actually run a P&L instead of just chasing the fun parts of the job. My answer went back to my early days running The Celebrity Cafe, when I was getting invited to every red carpet, every fashion week, every launch party you can imagine. It was genuinely fun. It was also, for a long time, completely disconnected from whether the business was making money.
Two buckets, and they’re not the same bucket
I remember sitting at a $50 billion event in Manhattan and asking myself a simple question: what’s the return on this? Not in a cynical way, the joy was real, but joy and revenue are two different buckets, and I hadn’t been separating them. Flying to San Francisco to test drive a Lexus, touring a Krispy Kreme factory, these were genuinely cool experiences. They were also not moving the business forward in any measurable way. The moment I started asking which bucket a given opportunity actually belonged in was the moment my operating mindset kicked in.
This isn’t an argument against the fun bucket. You need both, otherwise the job becomes miserable and unsustainable. But they need some relative sense of balance, and most operators I coach have let one crowd out the other without noticing. Usually it’s the fun bucket eating the revenue bucket’s time, because the fun bucket comes with better invitations.
The most common mistake I see in coaching founders
About 95% of my advice to startup founders comes down to some version of this same lesson: we all get swept up in the excitement of the moment; the meeting request, the sponsorship offer, the exciting new opportunity, and lose sight of whether it actually connects to revenue. I’m dealing with a founder right now who’s deep in a fundraising cycle. Fundraising is necessary, I’m not arguing against it, but by the time some founders finish raising, their actual product has drifted out of alignment with the market, because every hour went into the raise and none went into the thing the raise was supposed to fund.
That’s the trap: not doing the wrong thing, but doing a necessary thing so completely that it crowds out everything else that was also necessary. The fix isn’t to stop fundraising, or stop taking meetings, or stop going to events. It’s to keep asking, honestly, what does this actually lead to, and does the answer match what I intended.
The double-down problem
I saw a version of this constantly on the retail side too. A company gets genuinely good at one channel, say Google SEO or a particular social platform, and that success becomes the whole strategy, because it’s the easiest thing to defend in front of a board. What’s working? Let’s double down on that. It’s the natural language of budget conversations, but I’ve also watched a business’s revenue drop 90% overnight because a platform changed its algorithm and the company had put everything on that one channel. You bet it all on red, and it came up black.
The instinct to double down on what’s working isn’t wrong on its own. The mistake is never testing anything else while you’re doing it, so that when the thing you doubled down on shifts, and eventually it always does, there’s nothing else in place to catch you.
Know which conversation you’re actually having
One pattern I’ve noticed since moving from media into retail: people often debate the wrong altitude of question without realizing it. I’d watch conference floors full of serious debate over the most optimal 3PL provider, and then get a call an hour later from someone who just needed to know how to sell more shirts today. Both conversations are legitimate. They’re just not the same conversation, and conflating them wastes real time. When you’re running a $100 million retailer with dedicated teams for each channel, the granular debate matters and deserves real attention. When you’re running a $1-10 million business, and that’s most of the calls I get, the answer usually needs to start much higher up: what’s actually going to move revenue this month, not which platform is theoretically most efficient.
The practical version
If you’re building or running something right now, the exercise is worth doing deliberately: look at where your time actually went this month, and sort it honestly into the bucket that builds the business and the bucket that just feels good. Neither bucket is bad. But if you can’t tell which bucket a given meeting, event, or initiative belongs in, that’s usually the sign that it’s time to ask, and to be honest about the answer even when it’s not what you were hoping to hear.
Related reading: AI Won’t Fix Marginal, It Will Accelerate It, on using technology to strengthen business judgment rather than replace it.
This piece grew out of a conversation with Tim Zawislack, available here.