Field Notes - the airport test

I've been spending a lot of time in airports lately.

And whatever you think about airport security, whether you respect the process or not, there's one thing worth borrowing: it's built to scale. Thousands of people, every hour, through the same steps, and most of them make their flight.

So try this on your own business. If ten more people showed up today, ready to buy any of the things you sell, how would that actually go? How smooth would it be? What kind of experience would they get? How stressful would it be for you and your team?

Ten feels fine? Good. Now what about a hundred. What about a thousand.

The point isn't to build something so scalable you never think about it again. The point is that somewhere in those numbers, you'd start to struggle. And that's the useful part. Where does it break? Why that part? What's actually wrong with it, and what could be better? You keep asking until you can see the exact steps in the process that could be smoother.

Here's the airport bit again: most of the time, if we just follow the one rule, be there on time, the rest of the process carries us where we need to go. That rule is rarely a real inconvenience. It's just a shifted expectation.

With AI, you get to choose what you fix first. A four-day week. A company that runs without you in the room. More revenue than ever. Or just processes that have always been clunky, finally made clean.

You get to choose. Start by mapping where it would break.

I just did this process with two teams and we found a way to improve their scale and save thousands a month. Not with any staffing change - just better questions.

If you’d like to schedule a full or half day process mapping session, or know more about what it looks like, just reply “map”. We’ll get a free, 30-minute call on the books.

P.S. - Where are you traveling to next? I’ll be driving to Nashville, Tennessee this weekend for a client research project. Follow along on my IG here.