They’ve sold you the idea that entrepreneurship is like flying at cruising speed. They’ve sold you that you need to be extremely productive to be an entrepreneur. They’ve sold you that the more hours you work each day, the better your company will do.
They’ve sold you the idea that you must measure your company in terms of productivity. And because they sold you this, you spend 24 hours a day working on your business, day and night, on vacation, in the shower, in the bathroom, with your girlfriend, your wife, your child, your friends, your mind never stops thinking about entrepreneurship. It knows no other way.
And since life gives back exactly what you put into it, every day you come up with new ideas and opportunities to keep being productive and continue moving forward without pause.
For a long time, I’ve had airplanes tattooed on my hands. On my right hand, representing the right brain, is a Boeing 747, the most iconic airplane in history. On my left hand, representing the left brain, is the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus 380.
The Boeing 747 was the world’s largest passenger aircraft for 36 years, until the Airbus 380’s first flight in 2005. It revolutionized aviation, making air travel affordable for millions and changing how humans perceive and experience travel.
Three key decisions changed everything forever:
1. An aerodynamic design with an elevated cockpit, which freed up the front section to carry passengers or cargo without requiring a redesign.
How many times do we redesign projects that become obsolete simply because we didn’t think them through properly?
2. The use of turbofan engines, which were much more powerful and, at the same time, more fuel-efficient than previous-generation engines. This allowed the aircraft to fly farther while consuming less fuel.
How much could you save in your business if it were 100% structurally efficient? How many unnecessary things do we know about but never take action to remove?
3. A digital cockpit, in models like the 747-400, which reduced the number of required cockpit crew members from three to two, lowering labor costs and improving flight automation.
How many processes in your business could be automated where human hands are currently doing the work?
The key lesson from this iconic aircraft is that productivity is essential, but without efficiency, resources are wasted and projects can easily fail.
HOW TO APPLY EFFICIENCY TO YOUR BUSINESS
We all make around 35,000 decisions per day, you, your friends, your partners, I myself, every human makes about 1,500 decisions per hour.
I have been an entrepreneur for 23 years. I believe I have faced almost every challenge an entrepreneur can experience, from multi-million-dollar fines, which I still deal with today, to legal processes that could have led to jail time.
Looking back, only a handful of decisions have truly changed the game and led us to success. Pareto’s Law proves that 20% of decisions generate 80% of results.
HOW TO MAKE TRULY EFFICIENT DECISIONS
I will share just one decision as an example, one that changed everything. It came after launching a technology platform similar to YouTube in Spanish. We analyzed our data, took the time to think about the most accurate and efficient decision at that moment in time, based on the information we had.
We decided to manually translate millions of videos with native translators into seven languages.
On one of our high-traffic websites, we discovered that users were searching on Google in their native languages, but all content in that niche was only available in English. We decided to translate, manually, AI didn’t exist back then, millions of videos into seven languages, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and German.
This decision led us, two years later, to become the global leader in that content niche, attracting 24 million visitors per day and earning a Financial Times certificate as one of the 1,000 fastest-growing companies in Europe in 2018.
Not only that, but it also capitalized our business to the extent that we could sustain it, which still receives six million daily visits today, and finance the project of our lives, SIROKO. After eight years and over 40 million euros in revenue last year, SIROKO has no investors and no external stakeholders, we, the team, make every decision ourselves.
A single decision can lead to an invaluable and unimaginable future as an entrepreneur.
But to make these great decisions, the small percentage that changes everything, you must have a clear, up-to-date picture of your business every day, every week, every month.
Measurement, analysis, and interpretation of your business results are the holy grail, the key that opens and closes everything.
It is the gateway to making decisions based on efficiency, not just productivity.
It ensures that your company carries the DNA of the Boeing 747.
The first step every entrepreneur should take is to wake up every morning, look at a dashboard, and have data that is so simple that even a six-year-old child could perfectly understand what is happening in the business.