Business strategy

Sharran Srivatsaa: grow your business with less work

Too many offers, channels and decisions? Sharran Srivatsaa explains how to simplify your business and find what your customers actually value.

27 September 20262 min read9 min listen

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9 min

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True scale comes from aggressive reduction, not addition. Most entrepreneurs instinctively move toward more—more products, more features, more complexity—thinking that variety equals growth.

Editor's note

Why this matters now

Another offer. Another social account. Another thing only you know how to do.

If growing your business keeps making your week harder, Sharran Srivatsaa gives you a useful place to start: look at what you can simplify.

His interview is for founders who have customers but too many moving parts. You might recognise the temptation to fix a slow month by launching something else, before finding out why the existing offer is stuck.

The source

What it says

Distilled from the original. The notes above and below are the editor's own.

Make one way of selling work

Srivatsaa calls his approach 1-1-1: one way to find customers, one way to sell to them, and one way to deliver what they bought.

Think ads, a sales call, and a service. Or posts, a checkout page, and a digital product. The point is to get one combination working before adding another.

He breaks a service business into three questions. Are enough people finding you? Can interested people become paying customers? Can your team deliver the work?

Those questions help you spot where to act. More visitors won't fix a sales process that loses them. More sales won't help if you can't deliver.

Find the thing customers would miss

You know why you added every feature and meeting. Your customers may only care about one of them.

Srivatsaa suggests asking what you could remove that would make the service stop being valuable. In his real estate business, agents valued getting time back. That gave the team a clearer reason to choose what to work on.

Ask your customers before adding more. Their answer might give you a stronger promise to put on your website, as well as less work to do behind it.

Stop being the answer to every problem

If every decision ends up with you, a bigger business can mean a bigger queue outside your door.

Srivatsaa talks about finding people who can take responsibility for the work. He also describes writing down the reasoning behind a decision before making it. That makes the problem, assumptions and proposed action easier for a team to examine.

His test for a business is whether someone else could run it. You can use that question even if you have no plans to sell.

Editor's note

What to do with this

Pick the part of your week that keeps coming back to you. What would someone else need to handle it?

Start there. One less decision waiting for you is a result you can feel next week.

For a similar look at keeping your offers focused, listen to Maria Wendt. If your customers are getting stuck after buying, try John Hu.

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The original

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