What will the first 90 days cost?
Mostly attention, not budget. The real cost is one owner's 20% and an honest scorecard meeting. If you are writing a big check in the first quarter, you are doing it backwards.
Mostly attention, not budget. The real cost of the first quarter is one owner’s 20% of a week and the honesty of a single scorecard meeting. Almost everything else you need, you already have, because the licenses are usually sitting in a drawer and the point of the first 90 days is to use them, not to buy more.
So resist the instinct to make it expensive. Writing a big check feels like commitment, and commitment feels like seriousness, but at a sub-100-person company the serious move is the cheap one. Do not buy a platform in the first quarter. You have not yet earned the signal that tells you which one you need, and once you have shipped a workflow or two, you may find you never needed it at all. Run each request through the five moves before any money moves.
The genuinely expensive version of this is the one you are trying to avoid: buy the platform first, adopt it never, and spend the next year explaining a line item that changed nothing. Spend attention this quarter, not budget. If you want the week-by-week version, it is The First 90 Days.
Cheers,
-Titus
Get it in your inbox.
New Issues, FAQs, and Case Studies as they go out. Each one names something, explains something, or hands you something you can use on Monday. Subscribe, and I will send each as it goes out.
Prefer the tool you already think in? Here is how to read it in your chatbot.