Wisdom Journey Podcast – Guest Appearance

Todd Hagopian Shares Practical Steps to Break Free from Business Stagnation on Wisdom Journey Podcast

On December 4, 2025, transformation strategist Todd Hagopian joined host Wisdom Okonkwo on Episode 77 of the Wisdom Journey podcast to discuss practical frameworks for escaping the growth plateaus that trap countless businesses. The conversation addressed one of the most frustrating challenges business owners face—the plateau that arrives after initial growth where additional effort produces diminishing returns. Hagopian brought systematic thinking from his experience leading turnarounds at Fortune 500 companies and generating over two billion dollars in shareholder value.

What Is the Wisdom Journey Podcast?
How Do You Break Free from Business Stagnation?
Who Is Todd Hagopian, the Stagnation Assassin?
What Practical Frameworks Did the Episode Discuss?
Where Can You Listen to the Wisdom Journey Episode?
Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Wisdom Journey Podcast?

Wisdom Journey is a business podcast hosted by Wisdom Okonkwo that documents his own journey through online income with radical transparency, sharing exact numbers, strategies that worked, strategies that failed, and the often-uncomfortable reality of building sustainable income streams. The podcast launched in late 2024 and has rapidly built an engaged audience by rejecting get-rich-quick mythology in favor of honest documentation.

This authenticity extends to guest selection. Wisdom Journey features conversations with entrepreneurs, business builders, and thought leaders who bring substantive expertise rather than mere motivational platitudes. Each episode aims to deliver actionable value that listeners can implement immediately.

Okonkwo experiments across multiple online business models including freelancing, digital products, and affiliate marketing. His willingness to share both wins and losses creates credibility that polished success stories cannot match.

What distinguishes Wisdom Journey from countless business podcasts is the host’s genuine curiosity. Okonkwo asks questions that serve his audience rather than merely showcasing guest credentials. The show releases multiple episodes per week, maintaining consistent output while preserving conversational depth.

How Do You Break Free from Business Stagnation?

Breaking free from business stagnation requires accurate diagnosis of where stagnation actually originates versus where it most visibly appears, followed by systematic prioritization using effort math to identify which activities produce disproportionate returns versus which consume resources without value creation. The December 4 episode explored what Hagopian terms Stagnation Syndrome and provided concrete tactics for escaping growth plateaus.

“Most organizations mistake symptoms for root causes, treating surface issues while underlying dysfunction persists. Often the presenting problem exists several layers removed from the actual constraint.”

Stagnation Syndrome manifests through recognizable symptoms including declining margins, employee disengagement, innovation drought, and leadership paralysis. Practical steps for breaking free begin with accurate diagnosis using frameworks for identifying where stagnation actually originates.

The discussion moved into prioritization methodology. Hagopian shared his approach to effort math—the calculation of which activities produce disproportionate returns versus which consume resources without corresponding value creation. This connects to his broader work on the 80/20 Matrix of Profitability.

Hagopian also addressed the psychological dimensions of stagnation. Leaders often resist acknowledging problems because doing so threatens their identity or exposes past decisions to criticism. Breaking free requires confronting uncomfortable truths about what has stopped working.

Who Is Todd Hagopian, the Stagnation Assassin?

Todd Hagopian is a business transformation authority known as the Stagnation Assassin whose career spans leadership roles at Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool Corporation, and currently JBT Marel, where he serves as VP of Product Strategy and Innovation. He has generated over two billion dollars in shareholder value through corporate transformations.

The turnaround at a recent company illustrates his methodology in action. Hagopian doubled the company

s EBITDA within eighteen months.

“Hagopian founded Cash Flow Acquisitions during the pandemic, acquiring and operating multiple businesses including a PVC lining company and a flooring retailer. He doubled his manufacturing acquisition’s value within three years before selling.”

His forthcoming book “The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox” launches in January 2026, the first of three books in a publishing deal with Koehler Books. Hagopian has been featured in Forbes over thirty times, covered by The Washington Post and NPR, and appeared on more than one hundred podcast episodes.

He serves on the National Small Business Association Leadership Council, reflecting genuine commitment to helping business owners access transformation frameworks typically reserved for large corporations.

What Practical Frameworks Did the Episode Discuss?

The episode discussed four practical frameworks for breaking free from business stagnation: the Stagnation Genome for understanding how organizations become stuck, effort math for resource allocation decisions, the HOT System for comprehensive transformation, and goal architecture for aligning individual actions with organizational outcomes. These frameworks provide systematic approaches that listeners can apply directly regardless of business scale.

The Stagnation Genome

The Stagnation Genome represents Hagopian’s taxonomy of how organizations become stuck. Understanding the genetic code of stagnation allows for targeted intervention rather than generic solutions that fail to address actual causes.

Effort Math

Effort math provides a decision-making framework for resource allocation. By calculating the true return on different activities, leaders can redirect energy from low-yield efforts toward high-impact initiatives. This proves particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments where prioritization determines outcomes.

The HOT System

The HOT System, or Hypomanic Operational Turnaround, offers a comprehensive transformation methodology. While developed from Hagopian’s personal experience with bipolar disorder, the system applies universally to organizations seeking sustainable change.

Goal Architecture

Goal architecture addresses how organizations structure objectives to drive behavior. Poorly designed goals produce misaligned effort regardless of team capability. Properly architected goals create natural alignment between individual actions and organizational outcomes.

Where Can You Listen to the Wisdom Journey Episode?

Episode 77 of Wisdom Journey featuring Todd Hagopian titled “How to Break Free from Business Stagnation: Practical Steps with Todd Hagopian” is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. The full episode provides detailed exploration of stagnation diagnosis and practical frameworks for escaping growth plateaus.

Listeners interested in connecting with host Wisdom Okonkwo can reach him through PodMatch or subscribe to his newsletter at wisdom.beehiiv.com for ongoing documentation of his entrepreneurial journey.

Todd Hagopian’s resources including transformation frameworks, masterclasses, and implementation guides are available at toddhagopian.com. His book “The Unfair Advantage” is available for preorder through major retailers ahead of its January 2026 release.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Stagnation Syndrome?

Stagnation Syndrome is a condition identified by Todd Hagopian that manifests through recognizable symptoms including declining margins, employee disengagement, innovation drought, and leadership paralysis. Most organizations mistake these symptoms for root causes, treating surface issues while underlying dysfunction persists.

What is the Wisdom Journey podcast about?

Wisdom Journey is a podcast hosted by Wisdom Okonkwo that documents his own entrepreneurial journey with radical transparency, sharing exact numbers, strategies that worked and failed, and honest reality of building sustainable online income streams across freelancing, digital products, and affiliate marketing.

What is the Stagnation Genome?

The Stagnation Genome is Todd Hagopian’s taxonomy of how organizations become stuck. Understanding the genetic code of stagnation allows for targeted intervention rather than generic solutions that fail to address actual causes.

What is effort math?

Effort math is a decision-making framework for resource allocation that calculates the true return on different activities. Leaders use it to redirect energy from low-yield efforts toward high-impact initiatives, particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments.

What is goal architecture?

Goal architecture addresses how organizations structure objectives to drive behavior. Poorly designed goals produce misaligned effort regardless of team capability, while properly architected goals create natural alignment between individual actions and organizational outcomes.

Podcast Transcript

Wisdom: Welcome to Wisdom Journey, the podcast where we explore the path of building an online business from the ground up. Here I share my wins, struggles, lessons, and experiments so you can learn, adapt, and grow alongside me. I also interview experts in their respective fields. Whether you’re just starting out or looking for new strategies to scale, this is your space to find inspiration and practical wisdom. I’m your host, Wisdom Conquers.

Today on Wisdom Journey, we’re joined by someone who has not only stared down stagnation but destroyed it. Todd Hagopian, known globally as the Stagnation Assassin, has generated over $200 million across four major turnarounds and created more than $2 billion in shareholder value through explosive transformation strategies at Berkshire Hathaway, Whirlpool, Illinois Tool Works, and more. But his story isn’t just about business. It’s about weaponizing adversity. After years of battling undiagnosed bipolar disorder, burnout, and near-collapse moments at the height of his career, Todd built a system to harness the creative, explosive focus of hypomanic thinking without the chaos.

That system, the HOT System, has become a road map for leaders, creators, and business owners who feel stuck, plateaued in success, and pushing with no results. Today, Todd is here to help creators and online entrepreneurs understand what stagnation really is and how to declare war on it in a practical, sustainable way. Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd: Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be great.

Wisdom: Todd, you call yourself the Stagnation Assassin. Before we dive into the conversation, how did you come to get that name?

Todd: I know you do a lot around branding and creating your own brands on this show, and it’s great to talk about this because sometimes you have to really think about who you want to serve. What I was seeing out there is there’s growth consulting and there’s crisis consulting in business. 10% of the companies are in this growth mode and they’re willing to pay for consultants to come in and help them grow real fast. Then 10% of the companies are dying and they’re willing to pay consultants to come in and fix them. But there’s this big 80% of companies that just are not growing and not yet dying, but they’re stagnating. They’re starting to lose their talent, they’re starting to forget how to innovate, they’re starting to protect their sacred cows and not do new things and think differently.

I was like, those are the people I want to serve. But the problem is those people don’t have the urgency. They’re not trying to grow at 20%. They’re not trying to fix their business before it dies. So how do you really get that message across that it’s a war and that you have to attack it right now? Otherwise you’re going to find yourself in that crisis consulting. That’s where the Stagnation Assassin came to be — where we started saying declare war on stagnation. How do you get that message across? We’re going to have an assassin for stagnation. We’re going to have a series of frameworks that can really attack stagnation in a meaningful way, but also just to convince business owners that this is something you have to take seriously on your way down or even as you start to just stagnate out. It’s really resonated across businesses.

Wisdom: I’m curious — we talk about stagnation, stagnation — what exactly is it and why do you think it’s so dangerous?

Todd: Stagnation is really, really common in businesses, and these things will sound really familiar if you’re in business. Things like “we’ve always done it this way.” Things like somebody leaves and we’re just going to either not backfill them or we’re going to backfill them with somebody younger and cheaper that can do most of what they were doing before. Things like the market’s grown at 7%, we only grew at 5%, but because of XYZ — coming up with excuses on why you’re not growing faster than the marketplace.

What stagnation really is is basically managing for yesterday when tomorrow’s in front of you. You’re not dying fast, but you’re slowly dying because you’re not innovating anymore. You’re not bringing in new talent. You’re not challenging the status quo. You’re not thinking differently. You’re trying to protect your old revenue instead of going after the revenue of tomorrow. That’s what stagnation is.

Wisdom: I love that. As someone who’s survived the burnout, breakdowns, and even a bipolar diagnosis, what’s the biggest misconception you’ve noticed people — creators, online business owners — have about feeling stuck?

Todd: People often feel like they have so much to do and that’s why they’re stuck. “I have so many things to do. How can I possibly get these all done?” What I try and teach people is there’s not that many things that you need to do. You might have a hundred things, but if you mapped them all out and tried to figure out what is going to drive the most profit, there’s probably only seven of those 100 things that are going to drive the most profit for you.

That’s the 80/20 squared principle. 20% of your activities are going to drive 80% of your results — that’s the Pareto principle that a lot of people in business know. The 80/20 squared principle is 4% of your activities is going to drive about 64% of your results. The idea there is out of the hundred things that you could choose to do, there’s about four of them that are going to make the biggest impact. What I think people make the biggest mistakes in when they’re trying to build their brand or build their business online is they’re worried about the hundred. What they really need to do is put all their time and effort into those critical four — those vital few.

Wisdom: I like that. One of the systems I mentioned at the beginning of the episode is the HOT System. What’s that and how can we apply it?

Todd: The HOT System is a series of frameworks that are bipolar-inspired business methodologies. It’s important to realize that these are not meant for bipolar people. These are meant for people who do not have bipolar who are willing to try to get breakthrough results by thinking differently. What I did when I got diagnosed as bipolar is I tried to systematize these so that I could continue managing that way even though the medicine had mellowed me out and knocked down my bipolar symptoms. I systematized this and was able to replicate it, and then I realized I could teach that to other people. That’s what the HOT System is.

It’s a series of methodologies. I’ll tick them off and then you can tell me which ones you want to dive into. First one is Grandiose Goal Setting. Everyone always says underpromise, overdeliver. I always say that’s for losers. You don’t want to underpromise, overdeliver. If you promise 6% and you get 8% and I promise 25% and I only get 19, I’m still going to get the promotion. I’m still going to get the next client. I grew two and a half times faster than you. You have to learn to set real big goals and not be afraid of that, but also get your team to buy into the goals and really go after these really grandiose goals.

The other one is the 80/20 Matrix of Profitability that I talked about — the 80/20 squared principle. And then the cool one is the Karelin Method. This is the Karelin Method of extreme productivity. The idea behind this is you have three metrics: activity — number of hours you work; efficiency — how efficient are you during these hours; and focus — how focused are you during these hours. The activity — we can all work more hours, that’s one lever to pull. The efficiency is things like systematizing, automating, using AI, outsourcing, or just plain killing different things that you don’t want to do anymore because they’re not helping your business grow. And then the focus is going back to what I talked about before — these four to seven things that are going to drive all of your profit.

Your calendar does not lie. Take a look at what your calendar says. See what you’re doing every day. What you’re going to find out is that’s what your priorities really are. If you were to take everything off of that calendar that doesn’t adhere to those top four and then fill your calendar with activities surrounding those top four things, you are going to be hundreds and hundreds of percent more productive. Because instead of a half hour on a hundred things, you’re going to be spending 10 hours on the four things that are the most important.

Then there’s some other ones that are more geared towards larger businesses, but the last one I’ll touch on that does gear towards small businesses quite a bit too is the orthodoxy-smashing innovation. This is how you can make more money than any other framework. You take orthodoxies, which are things that everyone believes are true inside of a particular industry, and you just ask a simple question: What if that wasn’t true? What would I do if that orthodoxy was actually false? Then you play it out, you strategize, and you see what that would look like. You will run into a couple of these orthodoxies that you just start realizing are probably not true anymore, but people have thought they have been for 20, 30, 40 years. This is where you can make more money than anywhere else in business — if you take an old boring business and you smash an orthodoxy and you start doing something different before anybody else does. It’s an incredible innovation technique that’s super easy but also extremely effective.

Wisdom: I love that. I want us to look at the 80/20 Matrix. I want us to double down on that a bit, because for creators and online business owners, they have a lot of things they could possibly be doing and most of the time it’s just them. Maybe they have a freelancer, maybe a virtual assistant. There’s so many things they could be doing at any point in time, and that’s the reason why a lot of them get stuck and stagnant. So how do we actually go about diagnosing and saying, okay, this is it, this is what I should just do now — beyond just the calendar method?

Todd: The 80/20 Matrix of Profitability is about looking at all the different activities or products that you have and all the different customers or customer segments that you serve. The problem with founders and small business owners — I’ve been a founder, am a founder right now — is that we often will chase the money. A new opportunity pops up, you run after it because there’s some cash involved. If I need to pivot my entire business to go after this $100, I’m going to go do that for a little bit because I need a hundred bucks. But what you really need to do is get down into what do you want to do and who do you want to serve.

What you do in a traditional sense, if you have customers and products, you would label from the highest revenue customer down to the lowest revenue customer on one side and you’d put the highest revenue product down to the lowest revenue product on the top. Then you do this matrix out. What you end up doing is you figure out your most profitable customer and product combinations. Then you have your A customers and your B customers who are also buying those combinations. You have your A customers who are buying your products that you don’t really like — the B products that aren’t very profitable. Then you’ve got this huge group of people who are B customers buying B products.

The problem with founders is we spend a lot of our time down in that quadrant where it’s the B customers — small customers buying products that aren’t really our thing, but we know how to do them. They cause a lot of complexity in your organization and in your time management. You end up spending a lot of time doing a product that you’re not really that passionate about for a customer that’s never really going to be that big, instead of spending that 30 hours going after a large customer in a product you are passionate about or that there’s a larger market for.

This matrix is all about treating the different quadrants differently. The top matrix where you have your best products and your best customers — that’s your bear-hug matrix. You bear-hug those customers and you try to get them to do more things with you because it makes more sense. It’s a lot easier to build that customer bigger than it is to try to go out and find a new customer. But that bottom matrix, you really have to think about whether you even want those people as customers, or whether you want to charge them a lot more for the added complexity, or whether you want to outsource that to somebody else and let them do the work. You might make a little less money, but you can invest that time back into the more important customers. The other two quadrants are about either raising prices or trying to move them from these products over into your core products. That’s how you use the 80/20 Matrix of Profitability — it’s really about segmenting customer-product combinations and really getting focused on who you want to serve and what you want to serve them with so that you don’t start to get all strung out on 100 different options.

Wisdom: Can you share a story where you turned around a stagnating business by changing the way they think, not just what they do?

Todd: Sure. Let’s talk about — I was making grocery store scales of all things. If you can think of just boring, boring businesses — grocery store scales. This thing is just about a $2,000 scale, it’s got software in it, and it weighs meat. We were trying to save some money so we could lower the price of the scale because we were getting beat by our competitors. We’re going through this process and I got to the load cell, which is the thing that weighs. They were like, “This thing’s $40.” And I said, “How much is a cheaper version?” And they said, “$25.” And I said, “Why are we paying the extra $15?” They said, “Well, it’ll measure out one more decimal point.”

I said, “Okay, tell me how that works.” They walked me through it — it’s a more precise scale, it measures out an extra decimal point. I said, “So what’s that mean for the customer?” They started going through it and basically said, “Well, a customer is not allowed to round up. The grocery store is not allowed to round up. So if they get to weigh an extra decimal point, the meat might be another couple pennies.” I was like, “Wait a minute. So you’re saying every single customer that walks up to the counter is worth six more cents?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And I said, “How many customers walk up to the counter every day?”

We started doing the math and realized that this $2,000 scale, if they replaced the old scale that was $1,500, they could save or make $50,000 more a year. So what we did is we took that and said, “Okay, we’re going to go to the market with this and tell this story. Instead of selling one scale at a time every time a scale breaks, we’re going to tell these guys that they need to replace all 2,000 scales in their fleet in their 500 stores.” It turned into where we used to sell $2,000 scales at a time, we started selling $2 million fleet renovations. All because of this random feature that we already had that no one knew had this benefit. We repackaged it, changed the go-to-market, changed the entire strategy, and actually did things that no one thought we could do — convince people to buy $2 million in scales at a time.

There’s one more cool story just so you can get the juices flowing. Then I was building shopping carts — another super boring business. You just take metal and you bend it into a shape and then suddenly it’s a shopping cart. Anybody can do this. What we found out is everyone thought it was a commodity. If mine’s $75 and yours is $74, you get the sale. That’s just how shopping carts were.

What we did is we actually went to the customer’s customer and did a survey. We basically asked all these shoppers — our customer was the retailer, Walmart. We asked the Walmart shoppers, what happens if you get a shopping cart with a bad wheel? What do you do? 17% of people said that they will stop shopping and leave. 81% of people said that they had done that at least once. So 81% of people that walk into your store have left at least once.

Then we asked some follow-up questions like, “What happens if that happens?” And people would say things like, “I never go back.” So we’d go to the grocery store and say, “Here are the data. If you’ve got a bad wheel in your fleet — you have 200 carts out there — if you have a bad wheel, somebody comes in, they leave that cart there and they walk out. That just cost you $80. Then what does your employee do? They take it and put it right back in at the front of the line and another person grabs it and another person grabs it all week long. You’re keeping these things in your fleet for 7 years.” What we did is we taught them that they need to replace every 3 years. So if we used to replace every seven and now we replace every three, our revenue just more than doubled. Same exact product. We didn’t spend one more dollar, but you double your revenue.

Wisdom: What are some signs that a creator is entering stagnation?

Todd: For example, if you were growing a lot before and suddenly you’re not growing at all, or you’re starting to shrink, or your comments have started to stagnate out — it’s the same group over and over again — or some passionate portion of your group is not interacting anymore. Those are all signs of stagnation. Another thing that creators can run into is algorithm stagnation. Something that they were doing before was working and now it’s not working anymore.

I’ve got 90,000 followers on Twitter. There’s been times where I stay at 72,000 for 3 months. There are other times when I go up a thousand a week for a period of weeks. What you have to look for is whenever anything’s changing, you need to really dive deep and figure out what you’re doing differently. It’s usually something you’re doing differently. It’s not usually the algorithm. Either you’ve switched topics or you’ve focused more on this product instead of that product and you have not spent that extra time to make sure that the SEO and your marketing is on point on the different things that you’re creating.

Usually what it comes down to is two things for creators. One, activity — they’re just not doing as much as they were before. It might be a motivation thing, they’re just not doing as much. Or two, they get away from what’s really important, which is adding value to your audience. It’s really easy for us to be like, “Oh, we can make eight bucks a week if every single tweet we put in our book,” or “This one product that we have, it’s so great because we’ll make more money the more times we mention it.” But if you start turning off your audience because you’re hammering that home too much, you’ll start to see your numbers change pretty dramatically. For creators, that’s always a tough one. You really have to stay true. The people that do it the best really do — it sounds corny — but they really do care about their audience, and those are the people they’re serving rather than trying to get the audience to serve you.

Wisdom: At the beginning of the episode, we talked about looking at your calendar and seeing what are the top three or four things that you’re doing that are bringing the results and just doubling down on those things. Now, there will be a problem if in the first place the things I am doing are not exactly the best of the best things. What I’m saying is that the best-performing task did not even make it to my calendar. So what happens is I will be doubling down, and even though they might be the top three or four things, they’re actually not the things I should be doing in the first place — they just happen to be the best in a class of bad options.

Todd: There’s a couple things. There’s the part about what are you the best at, and then there’s the part about what can only you do. You might be the best at writing copy or doing the SEO on your posts. You might be the best at that, but is that really the best use of your time? Or if you made a hundred videos instead of 20 videos and then you did all the work in the background behind them — if you made a hundred videos but you were to outsource all that back work that you could teach somebody to be the best at. Only you can be behind the video camera making the videos for yourself. Anybody can figure out how to market those videos on YouTube. Anybody can put a Facebook ad together.

What you need to do is spend your time on either doing the things that only you can do, or the second thing you can look for is a max-diff analysis, which is where you try to figure out what the customers want versus what they’re getting today. Let’s say everybody wants a 30-second YouTube video. Well, they’re getting a lot of 30-second YouTube videos today and they’re super easy to make. So there’s not a whole lot of gap between what they want and what they’re getting. Now, if somebody wants a 42-minute video, but there’s not a whole lot of people doing them, you can actually — even if that’s the fifth highest thing that they want — make a lot of money going after it because there’s a gap in the marketplace. It’s another thing to think about — not just what can only you do, but what are your customers wanting, even if it’s not their top three, that nobody’s giving them in the marketplace? Sometimes it’s the fourth or fifth thing, but it’s the most profitable thing for you because nobody else is going after it.

Wisdom: I know this question might sound like I’ve asked it before, but I need to raise the bar because I really want you to hit it. When you go for an assassination in these movies, you don’t get paid unless the person actually dies. It’s not like, “Oh, we shot him in the hand.” “Well, is he in the hospital?” “Well, I did—” “No, no, no. We hired you to finish the job.” I’m going to use myself as an example. Recently, I’ve had all these ideas, all these things I need to do. I’m at a point where it’s not like I have a business with customers. I’m actually starting — I’m actually creating a business. I’ve had these ideas and I’m not even talking about multiple ideas of things to do. I’m talking about, okay, this is the thing, this is it. But then I’m like, okay, there’s so much stuff I need to put up. I need to do this, I need to put this, I need to do this. I know the things to do. It’s not like I’m not clear. I know what to do. But then I’m like, I should just sleep.

Todd: It’s all about ranking. It’s really important to me to list out all the things — as you come up with these ideas, you make a list of all the things you’re thinking about doing and you start to come out with a grid. A good one that a lot of people use is the impact versus effort grid. Is it high impact or low impact? Is it high effort or low effort? What you can do with those 20 things that you are thinking of is identify the ones that are high impact but low effort that you could do really fast but will make a big difference. Then what are the ones that are high impact and high effort that will take a lot of work but at least you know they’re going to pay off.

If you start to look at those and bucket them, you could say, “Okay, I can do this one high-effort thing this week and then I’ll do these three low-effort things this week, but they’re all in the high-impact bucket. I’m going to get four things done that really make a difference.” Because what people will usually do is one of two things depending on what type of person you are. One, they’ll go after all the super easy stuff, even if it’s not high impact. “I know I can get it done, so I’m going to do it.” It makes no difference, but at least they’ll be checking stuff off their list. The other type of person is the opposite — they’re the ones that are like, “I am going to tackle the hardest thing first. I don’t care if it makes me money. I don’t care if it’s the thing I should do first, but it’s the hardest one.” Good for you — those are hard things to get going. But you really want to be purposeful. If you’re going to spend 40 hours on something, make sure it comes back and helps you start that business.

For example, I’m building a brand right now around some books I have coming out. I did this and I said, “Okay, this is what I’m going to spend my time on. I’m going to be launching books for 15 months. So I am only going to do things that will pay dividends for 15 months.” That tweet I just made is going to be in the ether for a minute and then no one will ever find it again. They’re not going to be able to go back and find this tweet a year later. But a YouTube video — they can search it, it comes up, it’s going to keep paying dividends. They actually get more popular later on because they have 200 views instead of zero.

A website — if I were to write three more articles on my website instead of three more newsletters on LinkedIn, that’s going to drive SEO to my website, drive traffic to my website, and then over time that’s actually going to get backlinks and then more people will find me. So you start thinking about all the different activities you can do and how much impact they will have. Those two examples, by the way, are the exact same effort. I could write an article on LinkedIn or I could write it on my website, but on the website it pays lasting dividends. So even though I have more folks on LinkedIn, the website’s going to have a larger impact on me over the next 15 months. That’s how I am building my brand — starting to look at those decisions and making sure — this is the key phrase — make as much money as you can every minute of the day. If you think about it in that way, then you’re always going to be thinking about, is this what I should be spending my time on right now?

Wisdom: While you were talking about the LinkedIn and the blog post, I just realized that sometimes you could get to a point where you could actually kill two birds with one stone — basically achieve two things. You could write the same post and post it on the newsletter, then post it on the website without having to go out of the way and do something else. I want us to take this question a bit further. I’m curious — I’m not sure I understand how the quadrants look. Can you walk me through the impact versus effort grid?

Todd: Let me walk through it. Give me an example of a business.

Wisdom: Let’s say a local newsletter brand, a local news brand.

Todd: Perfect. So you think of all the different things that you could do for that newsletter. Let’s say you could put that newsletter on LinkedIn, you could put it on Substack, you could put it on your own website. Let’s take those three for a second.

LinkedIn’s super easy. You’ve already got your folks on LinkedIn. So it’s low effort, but it’s probably low impact because you don’t own those email addresses. If everybody signs up for it, you don’t get email addresses. You can only hit them on LinkedIn, and they’re not coming back to your website because no one clicks off of LinkedIn and goes back to your website. It just doesn’t happen very much. So that’s low effort, low impact.

The Substack is going to be a little bit more effort because you’re managing a different area, but you do get their email addresses. It’s also pretty hard to get people to your Substack without having a base camp. So it’s probably a little bit higher effort but a little bit higher impact because you actually get their email addresses.

Your website is going to be the highest effort because you have to spend money, you have to spend time, you have to make sure your website works, you have to have somebody either design the website so you can make the article or you do it yourself and get the article up there. Then you have to do the SEO around it because people don’t just automatically go to your website like Substack or LinkedIn. So that’s going to be the highest effort, but it’ll also be the highest impact because once they come to you, you own their email address. You can bring them back to the website. You could add new stuff to the website. You could have calls to action where they buy stuff from you. So those are three different executions of the same exact article that have different impact versus effort equations. Does that make sense?

Wisdom: Yeah, it makes sense. Now for the next stage — someone who has the privilege of having members of a team. They’re not that big, maybe two or three persons. How do I segment it such that I know what to actually give the team to do versus the things the team should not even be working on because there are better things they should be working on?

Todd: The way I would look at that is you still do the same grid. You take the ones that only you can do, and then the other ones that are the high impact — even if they’re high effort or low effort, doesn’t matter — you match people up with their strengths. If somebody’s really good at something, you shove the high-impact ones into theirs, whether it’s low effort or high effort. It’s just the high-impact ones go to them.

Low-impact ones, or high-impact ones where you don’t have the skills on your team — which happens a lot when we have small teams, right, we just don’t have anyone who’s good at emailing — if that’s the case, then you look for outsourcing options. A lot of times, especially in today’s gig economy, there are very, very cheap options out there for almost everything you’re trying to do. Too many of us founders try to do it all ourselves because we think we can learn it, it’ll be cheaper, it’ll be free.

But if you’ve ever tried to paint your house and you’ve never done it before, it’s like, “It’ll be so easy.” Or build a garden — “It’ll be so easy. I’ll just go and buy the stuff and do it.” And you end up spending $1,000 to build this garden. And then your neighbor’s like, “Oh yeah, I just gave this guy $150 and he came in and built the whole garden for me.” Why? Because he builds gardens for a living. There are people out there who are good at this stuff. So if it is not in your wheelhouse or if it’s low impact, you immediately go out and outsource it to other people. But if you do have people that can do it, then you dole that out based on their strengths. Don’t try to fix people’s weaknesses. Takes too much effort, too much time. If your team is not good at it, farm it out or bring in somebody who is. That’s the best way to get it done.

Wisdom: From what we’ve just discussed, it’s become obvious that when we feel stagnant, the first thing we should do is take a piece of paper and just write down the things we think we ought to be doing or the things that are looming and hovering over our head and get it down on paper. That way we can make decisions, because I feel like a lot of time when I feel overwhelmed, I hesitate to actually take that step. And when I do take the step, things become better.

Todd: It’s a really interesting thing and I’ll tell you a story from early in my career. I used to do that. I used to always write down 10, 15, 20 things that I had to get done and I would just go through and mark them off as I got them done. One of my bosses came to me and said, “Listen, do that same thing you’re doing, but then rank them first of all.” So you’re doing the same ranking, but this was just one through 15. And then he goes, “Cross out everything but the top five.” So it’s almost the same thing I’m telling you, but it was in a different context. He goes, “Cross out everything except the top five and just don’t even worry about them, because what’ll happen is you’ll never get the top five done if there’s 10 other easy things there on your list to do.” Those 10 things that you’re going to do are not as valuable as the top five. So focus on the top five, get them done.

Now when I do engineering with larger teams — I’ve got a 150-person team right now — we do this and there might be 80 projects that we want to work on. We only let ourselves work on 10 at a time. What it makes yourself do is you look at the 80, you figure out what your top 10 are. The only time something new gets to go on the list is if you finish one — then you take it off and you bring something up, you promote something back to the list. Or you decide that this one isn’t good enough anymore, it’s not worth it because something’s changed, so you take it off and put something else on the list. Or this new thing got in here that’s super profitable — something big just came up — and then you have to decide what gets off the list. It makes you constantly say, “What are the top 10 today?” Not a month ago when I came up with the list. Not the top 10 things my customers think. It’s what are your top 10 things that’ll make you the most money right this second. Those are the only things that should be on your list and everything else should be off of it.

Wisdom: I love this method because what that does is it gets you to really evaluate that no, I have five things that are more important than this. This idea is nice, but I would just choose to do it later.

Todd: It’s really powerful. One thing that I like to always tell people is poor people add things to their plate. Rich people multiply — they’re able to take things that they’re doing and multiply the effectiveness of it. But billionaires subtract. What billionaires do is they take all this noise and they get rid of it. They either decide not to do it at all or they have somebody else do it, and they focus all of their time and attention on the things that they can do to drive the most impact. That’s when you really make a difference.

Wisdom: So that’s probably the very next implementable strategy — to go down and ask myself what are all the hundred, probably a thousand, all the things that are in my head that I feel guilty not doing. Write them down. Then I scroll off and select the top five, and the remaining ones I put in my big list of things to do later.

Todd: We call it the shelf. They don’t go away. They just go up on the shelf. It could be that something changes and two weeks from now that thing’s really important and it finds its way into the top five. But for right now it’s on the shelf, and then whenever there’s an opening, you go back to the shelf and see what is the next big thing that we’re going to bring into our portfolio.

Wisdom: And I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel like I’m lacking. I don’t feel like I’m falling behind because I know that I have made strategic decisions, and I know that as long as I do this, I would have won irrespective of the fact I didn’t do 100 or 200.

Todd: 100%. It’s so powerful because if you don’t do it, you’re going to automatically either go towards the easiest things or towards the things you like to do the most. And usually neither of those things are what you should be working on. It’s usually something different.

Wisdom: I really love the — I think there’s another matrix I’ve heard of, the Eisenhower matrix by one of the US presidents. It has important, not important, urgent, not urgent. And there’s another real good business one based off of that?

Todd: Yeah, very similar. There’s another real good business one that was based off of that president’s matrix, and what it is is reversible and non-reversible decisions and then high-impact and non-high-impact decisions. If you think about it that way, if there are decisions that you can reverse real quick if they don’t work, then you can start thinking about how much time to put towards different things. Because if something is non-reversible — once you do it, you can’t get it back, you can’t change it — then you do have to spend the proper amount of time and energy on a non-reversible, high-impact decision. But if something is reversible and high-impact, you can go hard and fast and get that thing done knowing that you can change it afterwards or change it later without getting yourself into trouble. There’s all kinds of matrices that you can think about your decisions in different ways. All they are are frameworks so that you can think about how to make the decision and have something to judge it against, so that it’s not just you deciding. It’s legitimate — looking at them on paper, seeing where they rank, and making a call on what you’re going to spend your time doing.

Wisdom: I really love that. You talked about working on your book. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?

Todd: Sure. Just high level, I’ve got three books coming out and they’re all about business transformation. The first book is business fiction. It’s a nice fiction novel that goes through somebody turning around a shopping cart manufacturer. It’s very relevant to people who are running businesses. You’ll recognize a lot of yourself in that book. The idea behind fiction is you’ll be able to go back and be like, “Oh, remember in that chapter he ran into this and this is what he did to fix it.”

The second book is a non-fiction deep dive that goes all the way into those strategies and really tells you how to deal with those strategies and how to implement them. Then the third book is a measurement book on how to measure yourself — that’s where you talk about profit per minute and flow-through and some of these other metrics that you can use to figure out if you’re doing the right things.

Wisdom: Well, thank you so much for the tips and the strategies. If listeners can take away one thing from this episode, they should sit down when they feel stagnant and write all the possible things they could be doing. And I think there’s one thing I’d like to add — you talked about looking at the thing, realizing if you know about it or if you have a team that can do it, if you need to hire someone, bring someone in, or probably if you need to consult someone to give you directions. Probably because you can’t afford to get someone — it’s just way expensive, outside your budget — you probably get someone to talk to for one hour and say, “I’m about to start this kind of thing, what do you think I should focus on? What are some resources I should consider?” And their thought is like, “Oh yeah, do this, do this, do this.” And you’re like, “Yeah, sure, now I know what to do.”

Todd: There’s so many of us out here that are willing to give free information, free advice — just have a quick chat, bounce something off of each other. We learn by helping each other out. It feels good, and you get other people’s knowledge. If you can make it a win-win and think about what you can do for them on the way out, you can get a lot of good free information. Reach out to your network. It’s one of the things that we’re all good at in this founding role — to build that network out and meet people who know more than us about things.

Wisdom: Well, thank you so much. This is such a nice episode. This is the episode I needed right now — not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right now. Where can listeners learn more about the work you do and the books you’ve written?

Todd: The best place to get me is toddhagopian.com. I put a lot of free information out there. This goes back to serving your listener and serving your audience. I give a lot of information away for free. I don’t sell anything except the book. So if you have a question, contact me through that website, ask me the question, and I’ll answer it. Then you can find my book on Amazon, pre-order — The Unfair Advantage by Todd Hagopian. Then I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn most — that’s just Todd Hagopian on both of those.

Wisdom: Well, thank you so much, Todd. I’ll put the links in the description for listeners to click and go to the sites. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.

Todd: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

Wisdom: Thanks for tuning in to Wisdom Journey. I hope today’s episode gave you practical steps and fresh ideas to keep moving forward. If you found value, be sure to subscribe and share this podcast with a fellow creator or entrepreneur who’d love to learn too. And don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter in the link in the description for more resources, experiments, and lessons straight to your inbox. Until next time, keep building, keep learning, and keep walking your own wisdom journey.