Latest Subsctack: Doing less with less — but doing it well — is essential.

By John Wilpers, Co-founder and Partner, Katahdin Media Management

The manager who coined the phrase “Do More with Less” almost certainly did not have to do more with less himself.

The slogan was so transparently a manager’s glib “solution” to a financial crisis that it should have been debunked immediately.

But it wasn’t.

Instead, we burned out and lost valuable staff … and never actually ended up doing more with less. We just did more poorly.

The solution, then as now, is to do less with less, but to do it in a way that achieves the measurable goals we determine to be the most important to our success, instead of just volume for volume’s sake.

Doing less with less takes just four steps, but they’re tough ones:

1. Identify the key components of your mission and the KPIs by which you measure success
2. Give all of your products and services an ROI test to see which measurably hit those KPIs
3. Kill all those that don’t measure up
4. Start doing less: Reduce the workload to focus solely on high-ROI products and take the time to do them well

Number three is the hardest, but let me address numbers one and two first.

Read John’s full substack here.

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If you will be at our FIPP World Media Congress in Portugal, meet us there. If you haven’t registered yet but can make it to Cascais, on the outskirts of Lisbon, from 7-9 June, visit the Congress website for more information and to sign up. Tickets are available until 25 May, after which a surcharge will apply.

John and his team at Katahdin Media Management does this kind of work with media companies all around the world. We’d be happy to chat with you for free about your challenges. Email me (john@katahdinmediamanagement) or text me (+1-617-688-0137).