''' Perfection is a disease that kills more businesses than incompetence ever will.
Most founders are stuck. They aren’t stuck for a lack of ideas, or talent, or even capital. They are stuck in a cycle of deliberation, revision, and consensus-seeking. They are chasing a mythical, flawless version of their product, their strategy, their next marketing campaign. They are fetishising perfection. I sold my last marketing agency for north of £10M not because we had the most perfect execution, but because we were ruthlessly, unapologetically fast.
In an economy where AI can spin up a competitor in a weekend, speed is the only durable competitive advantage. Your operating cadence — the rhythm of how you plan, execute, and review — isn’t a footnote to your strategy. It is the strategy. Everything else is just commentary.
This isn't another repackaged list of productivity hacks. This is the unfiltered, unvarnished weekly operating cadence that I use to build agentic AI products at Creative Marketing Group. It’s not for everyone. It’s for founders who want to win.
The business world is flooded with ‘best practice’. It’s peddled by consultants, taught in MBA programmes, and fossilised in corporate handbooks. The problem? Best practice is, by definition, a look backwards. It’s what worked for someone else, in a different market, at a different time. Adopting it wholesale is like trying to win a Formula 1 race by driving a Ford Mondeo. Safe, reliable, and guaranteed to leave you inhaling fumes.
High-growth firms, particularly in a volatile space like AI, cannot afford to move at the speed of consensus. We must operate from a set of first principles that prioritise momentum above all else.
A good decision now is infinitely better than a perfect decision next month. The market provides feedback faster and more honestly than any internal committee. We value making a choice, shipping it, and letting real-world data tell us if we were right. In my old agency, we once spent six weeks debating the nuances of a new service offering. By the time we launched, a smaller, faster rival had already captured the narrative. Lesson learned. Now, the default question is: "What is the fastest path to a real-world signal?"
My contrarian take is this: most meetings are a form of collective procrastination. They are where ideas go to die. The default mode of communication at my companies is asynchronous. We use tools like Slack and Loom to communicate with high fidelity but without the tyranny of a shared calendar. We have exactly two, 30-minute internal meetings per week. The rest of the time is for deep, uninterrupted work.
When I see founders with back-to-back meetings, I don't see importance. I see a catastrophic failure of system design. You are not the CEO of meetings; you are the chief architect of output.
Gut feelings are for choosing a restaurant, not for running a business. Every decision must be anchored in data. If you can’t measure it, you cannot improve it. This isn’t about building sprawling dashboards that no one reads. It’s about identifying the 3-5 core metrics that actually drive the business and reviewing them relentlessly.
For our product Competable, which uses AI to tear down competitor funnels, we don't look at vanity metrics like sign-ups. We track the number of competitor reports generated and the percentage of users who change their own strategy based on the insights. That’s it. That’s the signal.
This is how these principles translate into a weekly rhythm. It’s a simple, repeatable loop designed for one thing: sustained, high-velocity output.