A new service is exciting. So is a new market, a useful partnership or a customer who could open a door. It is easy to see what each opportunity might add to the business.
It is harder to name what it will replace.
Without that decision, growth plans can become a collection of promises made against the same people and the same week. Existing work continues, and new work starts. The owner fills the gap until the gap becomes the job.
A stop-doing list gives a growth plan room to happen. It identifies the work the business will end, reduce or deliberately postpone as it takes on something more valuable.
Put a tradeoff next to the opportunity
Consider an illustrative maintenance company adding a service for commercial customers. The owner expects the new offer to require six hours a week of sales and supervision during its first two months.
The plan could simply say “launch commercial service.” A more complete version identifies where those six hours come from. Perhaps the owner stops producing a report nobody uses, combines two supplier reviews and pauses an experiment in a different customer segment.
The owner might estimate two hours a week from the report, one from the supplier reviews and three from the paused experiment. That adds up to six, but only on paper. A couple of weeks in, check whether that time has actually come free.
These are choices about what deserves attention during a defined period. They are not necessarily permanent cuts.
The company may discover that none of the current work can sensibly stop. That is useful information: the new offer then needs more capacity, a smaller scope or a later launch. Six hours will not appear because the opportunity is attractive.
Ask what the current work contributes
Some activities continue because they once solved a problem. A report answered a question last year, and a review was added after a mistake. A customer exception became a standard step without anyone deciding it should.
Name the person who uses the output and the decision it supports. If the answer is unclear, investigate with the people closest to the work.
An owner may see a report as bureaucracy while the team uses one section to catch costly errors. Reducing it to that section could preserve its value with less effort.
Then make one of four choices:
- Stop work whose purpose has ended.
- Reduce the frequency or detail when the purpose still matters.
- Pause an activity that loses to a current priority, with a review date.
- Keep work that supports a necessary commitment or a valuable decision, and protect its time in the plan.
Delegating is a different choice, because the work still exists and someone still needs time to do it. Handing an unnecessary report to a colleague may free the owner’s calendar while making the business less efficient overall. Before automating a task, establish whether repeating it is useful at all.
When the value is uncertain, try a reversible reduction. A weekly internal report could run every other week for a month, with essential information still available. Check which decisions become harder, then decide whether to restore the report, simplify it further or stop it.
Let the old expectation leave with the work
Suppose the maintenance company pauses prospecting in one customer segment to develop its commercial offer. There will be fewer conversations with those prospects for eight weeks. The team should not be told to pause the work and then criticized when its former output declines.
Record that consequence, and tell people who depend on the activity what will change. If a report stops, explain where essential information will live. Address customer commitments before reducing a service.
The owner’s favorite project belongs in the discussion too. A stop-doing exercise loses credibility if it only removes activities owned by the least influential people.
Before the next initiative begins, identify enough work to free the time it needs, and confirm that the changes have happened. If those changes do not free enough time, narrow the launch, add help or start later. Do not count the same freed hour twice.
The test is whether the team can point to something that has actually left the workload. If everything is still there, the business has added an ambition without making room to deliver it.
