You get a real scale story, not theory. Rick breaks down how a small construction firm went from $6M to $24M in ~3 years, plus headcount growth from 6 to 24, by redesigning the business end to end. Strategy, systems, culture, accountability. The whole stack.

Culture is treated like infrastructure, not vibes. The most important “growth lever” wasn’t a new tool. It was getting everyone on the same page, teaching the playbook, building training and reviews, and making the place productive and magnetic.

A simple mechanism for bottom-up innovation that doesn’t turn into chaos. They used guardrails plus a shared “idea platform,” reviewed ideas at least quarterly, and pulled in feedback from the field so ops kept getting sharper. That’s how you get autonomy without losing control.

A grounded take on AI: speed up the work, don’t outsource the thinking. Rick uses AI for deeper research and faster synthesis, but he’s explicit about not replacing judgment. He also calls out the real risk: teams becoming stale if they don’t evolve.

A bias for shipping that most corporate teams need to hear. The episode hits the point directly: if you over-polish version one, you’ll be obsolete before it launches. Build incrementally, learn, refine, then scale.

This Week’s Article: Legible vs. Illegible Work