The Level #111

< 5 min

Welcome back to The Level —  where strategy stops living in your head and starts living in structure.

A little over year ago, Natalie and I were standing at her kitchen counter. Coffee cups pushed aside. Sticky notes everywhere. No deck. No launch timeline. No promises to the market yet.

Just one quiet question we kept coming back to:

What would this need to look like to still work a year from now?

That counter is where the MRR/A Accelerator actually began.

Not as a program.
As architecture.

Expert Insight of the Week

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Founders often mistake planning for prediction. But the value isn’t in getting it right. It’s in forcing the thinking early, before urgency, momentum, or ego start making decisions for you.

Planning is how you protect your future self from bad tradeoffs.

This Week’s Shift: From Ideas → Infrastructure

When we mapped MRR/A on that counter, it wasn’t impressive.

It was honest.

Sticky notes labeled things like:

• Where founders burn out first

• What breaks at scale

• What has to work even on a bad week

That’s how real operating systems are designed.

Most founders approach annual planning by jumping straight to outcomes. Revenue targets. Growth goals. New initiatives.

But what we learned that day is simple:

You don’t plan the year by choosing goals first.
You plan the year by designing what can actually hold those goals.

Here’s the shift I want you to make:

1. Anchor to real capacity
   Not your best-case energy. Your actual calendar. Your real life.

2. Build the container before the targets
   Offers, delivery, and systems that don’t require you to be everywhere at once.

3. Let constraints do the thinking
   Sticky notes force prioritization. Constraints force tradeoffs. Tradeoffs create strategy.

That counter wasn’t messy.
It was disciplined.

→ Your Next Move

Grab a pen and paper. No tools. No tabs.

Answer these slowly:

1. What parts of my business still only exist in my head?

2. Where am I the structural bottleneck?

3. If this doubled in the next year, what would break first?

4. What deserves to be designed once instead of decided daily?

Circle the answer that makes you pause. That’s where your planning actually begins.

A Quiet Note for the Founder Looking Ahea

Every MRR/A cohort starts the same way.

Not with execution.
With a surface full of ideas that need structure.

If your next year feels bigger than your current operating system, that’s not a motivation problem. It’s an architecture problem.

Sometimes the most important planning doesn’t happen at a desk.

It happens at a counter, telling the truth.

Explore the MRR Accelerator →

To building plans that can actually carry the year ahead

 - Amanda

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