The first call of a new engagement, I don't talk much.

No slides. No pre-built diagnosis. Just a few questions and then I get out of the way—because in my experience, the founder will eventually tell you exactly what you need to know if you give them enough rope.

Jessica runs one of the most respected creator businesses in her niche. Millions of followers. A partnership list full of brands you'd recognize in under a second—global household names. In her space, she's a genuine authority. The kind of name you'd look up if someone dropped it in conversation.

She got on our first call and I could tell she was circling something. The way founders do when they know the answer but they are nervous about saying it out loud.

So I let her talk.

What she told me was that nothing was actually wrong.

Brand deals flowing. A course. A new newsletter that already surpassed 40,000 subscribers. A membership. On big, global stages keynoting. Every single one of them a real opportunity. Legitimate money, nothing you'd call a mistake.

Until she started having panic attacks. Real ones.

Think about that contrast. Her inbox full of Fortune 500 brand inquiries. Millions of people watching her content every week. A following most creators would spend a decade building.

And she's on a call with me, trying to explain why she can't sleep.

When I asked what wasn't working, she struggled to answer. Because nothing was failing, exactly.

Everything was just...running. Simultaneously. In every direction. With her personally in the middle of all of it—writing scripts, filming, editing, posting, handling brand deal approvals, writing speeches, etc. You get it.

"I don't know how to prioritize, and I can't build the company while I'm tied all these brand deals" she said. "There's just too much."

But it wasn't a prioritization problem.

None of these projects were a bad idea. A community people loved? Sure. A newsletter? Smart. The B2B product she'd been sitting on for two years? Probably the most valuable thing on the docket.

But none of them ever had her real attention.

Because why spend months developing a B2B product when a brand deal just popped up that's immediate, certain, and lucrative?

She wasn't disorganized or unmotivated. She was operating inside a system where every immediate opportunity beat every important one. The urgent winning the fight against the important—and it wasn't even close.

I've seen this so many times I have a name for it:

Random acts of growth.

It looks and feels like momentum. Revenue ticking up and to the right. Always something moving. But the trajectory never curves into something that compounds.

I've watched it manifest across dozens of companies. A client spending 41% of revenue on siloed marketing vendors—each one running their lane, none accountable to the whole, the CEO drowning in data that told no coherent story.

Different business. Same wiggly line.

The pattern is always identical: individually rational decisions that collectively produce no compound effect.

You end up with a complex series of gears that may or may not be getting you closer to your goals—when all you really need is, in the words of Archimedes, "a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it."

Motion without momentum.

Somewhere in our diagnostic session, she told me—completely unprompted—that what she really wanted to build was the B2B product. A way to package her expertise for companies at a scale she'd never been able to reach before. The revenue potential was the most consistent the business had ever seen.

I'm not going to pretend I was cool about it.

"'I won't lie,' I told her. 'I nearly cut you off.'"

She laughed. That laugh of someone who's been carrying something for two years and just put it down for a second.

But that moment only solved half the problem.

Knowing the destination isn't the same as knowing where to start. She'd known about the B2B opportunity for two years. Knowing it hadn't gotten her there. Something kept winning the competition for her time before she ever got close.

That's the real diagnostic question—not where do you want to go?, but what has to move first for any of this to be possible?

The first domino wasn't the B2B product.

It was one person. Someone scrappy and process-minded, capable of running content production without her in the room. One hire that could give her 2-4 hours of her day back. Hours she could finally redirect to what she actually wanted to build.

So that's what we did.

And then something interesting happened.

With that time back, we didn't just redirect it to the B2B product. We built AI agents to source fresh content and write scripts every morning—doing the job 10x better than the manual process ever had. We started a rebrand. We began negotiating higher-end brand partnerships, because when you're not scrambling to say yes to everything, you can afford to be selective.

She's doing less. And the business is growing faster.

That's the part nobody talks about. The first domino doesn't just unlock one thing. It changes the kind of company you're building—one organized around subtraction, not addition.

Most founders think growth looks like more. More revenue streams. More products. More campaigns. More team.

Jessica thought that too.

But the move that changed everything wasn't adding the B2B product. It was removing the thing that was keeping her from it.

The brand deals weren't the enemy. They were always going to beat the important thing in a fair fight. The fix wasn't to stop taking them—it was to build the infrastructure that made the important thing competitive. So the right work could finally win.

Subtraction created the space. Singularity did the rest.

Because here's what actually creates hyperbolic growth: doing one exceptional thing, for the best people you want to serve. Not ten okay things for whoever shows up.

So I'll ask you directly:

What's the thing in your business that keeps getting outbid?

What's your version of the brand deal...the immediate win, the certain paycheck...that beats the important thing every single time?

That's your first domino.

Name it. Remove what's blocking it. Do it exceptionally.

Everything else is just a wiggly line.

—Chris Piper