Wouldn't it be great if you always knew what do next in your business?

Many have attempted frameworks and built elaborate systems for how to achieve this.

Two honorable mentions for me are Mike Michalowicz's Fix This Next and Eliyahu M. Goldratt (and his book The Goal), whom Dickie Bush frequently credits as the source of his "bottleneck thinking" idea.

The former is a more structured approach (this order, every time) and the latter is a more flexible approach (run the numbers, find the bottleneck, fix it).

I've used both systems with a degree of success.

But they both lack simple stickiness. I like broad, simple, intuitive frameworks I can call up at a moment's notice to help me decide where to focus my energy.

Enter More > Better > New.

Credit where it's due, I first learned this idea from Dickie Bush's business partner Nicolas Cole, whom I believe credits Alex Hormozi.

The power is in the simplicity.

When you're trying to grow your business, there are only three actions you can take. You can do more of something, you can do what you're already doing better, or you can introduce something completely new to the mix.

But this framework is prescriptive, not merely suggestive.

More is legitimately better than better. Better is legitimately better than new. And new is the worst of all.

Now, to be clear: I hate that this is true. If you're a spasmatic entrepreneur like me, you're probably wiggling in your seat right now.

New... new is my JAM. I LOVE new. I hate maintaining. (I want to love it, I just don't.)

And yet "boring maintenance" is good. There is virtue in maintaining a thing. Keeping it alive. Helping it stay in orbit.

So, what does this look like for you practically?

Let's take two entirely different dimensions.

Marketing

Let's say you are building your business and want to get more clients. You know you should be marketing. You've tried to. But you can't get any traction.

You don't understand why, though, because you've started a blog (it didn't work after a few months, so you gave up), you've tried podcasting (but nobody listened even after making it through 20 episodes, so you wrote that off), and you post on social media every once in a while but you've never seen a client from it.

What gives?!

This is what Allan Dib calls random acts of marketing.

In your mind, you were doing more. But you were actually doing new. The WORST option of all and a last report.

"But it was testing! I was trying different channels to see which one would convert! That's what I'm supposed to do, right?!"

Yes... but you were testing wrong 🙂 Actually, what I'm giving you right now is THE framework for testing. You've only tested accurately if you've followed the law of More > Better > New.

See in this framework, something can either work or not work. But you (by nature) dramatically underestimate how long you need to stick with something to know whether it will pan out.

When you think this way, here's what you're gonna find: MOST "tactics" work. There's a reason you see successful people on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. They each work if you 1) follow the rules of the platform and 2) follow more > better > new long enough to see it work.

It should've gone something like this:

1. Start blogging.
2. Keep blogging until you are consistently blogging, without fail, every x interval. (More)
3. Once that becomes routine, a given, research ways to get even better. Write better blog posts, make them more interesting, add images, get SEO greenlights on every post, create a deep linking tree for topical authority, etc. (Better)
4. Once you've squeezed every ounce of optimization juice out of blogging based on current best practices, content tolerances (how much content search engines will bear before diminishing returns), and your capacity, consider adding another strategy (New)

Don't misunderstand step 4. While this framework gives you permission to stop doing the old thing if it doesn't pan out, it doesn't assume or prescribe that you do. The opposite, actually. If you've done "more" and "better," you've probably seen more success than your peers and can safely add a new medium without sacrificing the momentum of the previous one.

If you have the bandwidth or can outsource to AI or another human with your proven process and move on to the new thing, do it. Then follow the same process. More > Better > New.

Health

Here's another domain example.

The whole industry of "fad diets" exists because people violate more > better > new. Instead of doing more of the diet plan they had decided on and getting better at doing it over time, they move onto something new and never see any traction.

This is a fundamental tension because, guess what? All diets work!

There's literally not a diet that doesn't work when following this framework. On the flip side, every single diet fails every single time if you jump to the end and keep doing new.

I understand there are some people whose struggle with diet goes beyond more mechanics. I am 100% food addicted, and breaking those patterns has been difficult for me. So I empathize.

The bitter facts remain though. Even if your directive is abstinence from a thing (like food), more > better > new applies.

Products

One bonus domain to bring it back to business. Products and services!

If you keep adding new products and services to your business because the others aren't working, I'd be willing to bet you haven't stuck with them long enough and/or improved them over time.

Get a product to cruising altitude (more). Put it on autopilot (by making it better until fully optimized for current context). Then put another plan in the sky (new).

This is framework for living. And it's simple. It will help you make even important decisions quickly. You will audit how you spend your days with this tool.

And if you'll dare to follow it, I'd dare say you'll see more success than ever.