🥐 The Nouns of January 10, 2025

1. NEW BUSINESS BISCUITS

2. NEW SWEATSHIRT FOR COFFEE DRINKING

3. NEW COUNTER SPACE

The best scorecard is a can of biscuits

I’ve been having a really on-again-off-again relationship with my oven.

By that, I mean I keep turning it on, and it keeps turning itself off again.

Pro: no house fires from leaving the oven on.

Con: hard to cook anything.

Fortunately, I own an air fryer, as evidenced by my being a cisgender, middle-class, white American male in 2025. Demographically, I’m about as interesting as air-fried chicken nuggets.

Though the air fryer was a good enough bandaid to avoid getting our oven fixed for about 18 months, we finally gave in a few weeks ago.

While he was reassembling my now functioning oven, the appliance repair guy gave me an unexpected breakthrough about business scorecards.

“If it’s still not working, just make biscuits.”

“What?”

“Make a can of biscuits. Cost you two bucks, done in 7 minutes, and they’re just temperamental enough to tell you what’s wrong. Too hot. Underdone. Didn’t rise. Makes your house smell good, too.”

In software development, a team will often do regression testing to ensure any code changes didn’t accidentally break something else.

We don’t do this in business much.

Instead, we run around putting bandaids on issues (and occasionally solving real root problems) and hope the solution didn’t have much collateral damage.

My teams (and all EOS teams) use a weekly Scorecard (download below) to track the most important leading indicators in the business, allowing them to see issues coming and solve any problems facing the team from a data-first mindset.

The problem is that we only operate on one side of the transaction.

We can track and optimize our work from our point of view as the business. And while we might do our best to understand the customer’s experience, rarely do we actually sit in their seat.

I’ve heard it advised to sleep in your own guest room so you can better notice (and ideally solve) any problems your guests might face. A simple, inexpensive way to test and improve a system. How can you do this in your own business?

They say “what gets measured gets managed”, and keeping a scorecard is a fantastic way to make sure you’re managing the inputs and outputs of a team effectively. But, if you forget to step into your customer’s shoes, you can accidentally optimize for the scorecard instead of customer experience.

This week I got an email from Max (formerly twitter HBO) that illustrates this perfectly.

I guarantee the marketing team behind this email is having its performance judged by Click-Through Rate. By having readers click the email, they boost their numbers and look great on the team scorecard this week.

They also create resistance among users, forcing them to open a web browser and load another window instead of just including the information in the email.

Instead of optimizing for the scorecard, make sure you are reading your own emails, sleeping in the guest room, and making a quick can of biscuits regularly.

So, are you “making biscuits”?

If not, what is the ‘can of biscuits’ in your business? How can you simply and inexpensively test the system on a regular basis to make sure it is up to snuff?

Take a few minutes this week and create a process for testing your own business. Write it down and put it in your calendar at least every quarter.

Or just make some biscuits. I’m hungry.

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Fellow Ski Club

Cool coffee stuff brand Fellow just dropped a limited edition run of vintage ski themed merch. Nice gift for your coffee snob friend who’s Christmas present is still “in the mail”.

Misen Knife Block

Having your knives on the counter in the big hunk of wood they came with is so 1995.

DTC kitchen stuff brand Misen now had preorders available for their modular in-drawer knife storage. They initially launched it on kickstarter and absolutely smooshed their $25k goal, raising over $200k from people sick of shit on their counter.