Decision stacks and portfolio careers

Hey gang!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of being a generalist and curating a portfolio career. I’ve spent 20 years ‘figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing’ but it turns out, that squiggly-ness, that little bit of everything, that was the career.

I love working on People & Culture.
I love supporting solo founders
I love the concept of a Chief of Staff
I love scrappy early-stage businesses
I love AI and tinkering with Operational efficiency
I love going old school with a paper and pen

Above all, I love problem-solving.

So my intention now is to be relentlessly generalist. Screw the ‘pick a niche, pick a lane’ brigade, screw one source of income. Just gimme a problem to solve and I’ll be happy.

Which brings my to my next thought.

All of the above? Well, it’s wonderful, yes, but flippin eck it doesn’t half make my week a bit of a sh*t show sometimes.

Actively trying to avoid shiny object syndrome, trying to focus, giving something the breathing room it needs to evolve… it’s a daily struggle. So I often come back to something I learned back in my days as a Head of People at a tech startup.

And we love a framework at The Ops House - so let’s dig in.

I realised recently I was spending more mental energy deciding whether to send a particular email than I ever spent making critical hiring decisions at a scaling startup. More energy deciding whether to send a DM than I spent deciding whether to restructure a whole team.

More mental hand-wringing on the wording of a teeny proposal than I ever spent on the comms plan for one of the biggest tech mergers in Europe!

None of these things I’ve been doing are actually hard decisions (in the grand scheme of things). But I had happily chucked everything onto one single pile, and that pile had absolutely zero sorting mechanism.

So every decision I’ve been making had the same weight - and I was treating everything like it needed the same amount of me.

Reader…it absolutely did not.

I came across Matt Mochary's Decision Stack in The Great CEO Within a few years ago (I’ll be honest, I looked at the title and scoffed, then read it and thought hey this ain’t so bad so now I am officially the great CEO within my own head).

You know me, I love simplicity. And this framework is pretty dang simple.

It sorts decisions into a few different modes:

Level 1: Inform. Low stakes. Someone makes the call and tells you after. You don’t need to be involved.

Level 2: Consult. They make the decision, but they want your input first. You’re involved, but you’re not the decision-maker.

Level 3: Discuss together. This is for higher-stakes decisions where the team needs to work through the problem together, ideally until there’s genuine alignment.

The key point is that not every decision should be escalated to the top. The goal is to push as many decisions down the stack as possible, so the people closest to the work are the ones making the call.

The leaders I worked with who really got this, sent decisions down the stack and low and behold, got a lot more of their week (and a much happier team). The ones who treated every email like a top-level issue...well let’s just say they were pretty miserable, very burned out, and ultimately lost a lot of respect from their people.

I spent some time last year with some startup leaders teaching them this framework and it really helped. Genuinely made their lives a bit easier.

Because brilliant people, completely capable of trusting their team, still acting as if their presence in every decision is the quality-control mechanism ARE NOT BEING EFFECTIVE.

And I hate to break it to you, but nobody is that important.

You might think the above only works for someone with a team, but the Decision Stack works just as well when you’re solo. The only difference is you’ve gotta push things down the stack a little differently.

Instead of pushing decisions down to people, you push them down to your systems, your defaults, your templates, and increasingly, to AI.

Let me give you some real life examples.

The first time you write a proposal, it’s a Level 3. You’re thinking hard about scope, pricing, structure, and whether the project is even a fit. That thinking is totally appropriate and necessary. The second time you write a proposal of the same kind, it should be a Level 1. You open the template, fill in the blanks, and send it.

If it still feels like a Level 3 the tenth time, you haven’t templated it. You’re rewriting the same things from scratch every time and calling it bespoke, and the only person that serves is your anxiety.

Same logic applies to client onboarding. Same with pricing. Same with deciding whether to take a discovery call. That decision can be made once, written down as criteria, and then every future call is just a Level 1 check against the rules you already set.

Then, every 3 months or so you take a few mins to review. Is everything still relevant? Are my templates still fit for purpose? What does scaling now look like?

That’s how you start systematising a solopreneur business: making good decisions once, capturing them properly, and not re-doing the same things over and over for forever.

This is the thing that has MASSIVELY changed a solopreneur’s life over the last eighteen months.

AI is the team you don’t have.

A Claude project loaded with your pricing logic can turn every quote from a Level 3 into a Level 2 - the thinking is already drafted before you look at it, and your job is to review and adjust.

A custom setup trained on your brand voice can turn every “what should I caption this?” from a Level 2 into a Level 1 (with a heavy sprinkle of human eyes - we don’t use AI to write our content!).

You can even go all meta and build a project that helps you classify decisions using this framework. You can turn ‘I have no clue what to do’ into ‘this is clearly a Level 1, stop overthinking it you plonker’.

None of this is magic or groundbreaking. It’s just easy to forget that you can actually delegate something even if you’re a business of one.

The goal is the same as it is in any well-run organisation too. Make sure the only decisions falling onto the most expensive, most irreplaceable resource (which is you btw) are the ones that actually need you.

For most solopreneurs, that’s decisions like who you serve, what you say no to, and how you want the business to feel like in three years.

The rest can and should be systematised, templated, or AI-assisted into a Level 1 or 2.

List the last ten decisions you made in your business. It doesn’t matter how big or small, just the last ten. If you’re feeling fruity you can apply this to life admin too.

Level each one. Be brutally honest. If you’re doing it right, you’ll probably find that three or four of them were genuinely Level 3 decisions and the rest were Level 1s or 2s you were treating like Level 4s.

For every Level 1 and 2 on the list, ask yourself - is this a template I haven’t built yet, or a prompt I haven’t written yet? Or do I just outsource this entirely as it’s costing me far more than I admit.

Righto. That’s me done for this edition.

If you’ve got any thoughts or feedback, send them my way! Even better - share this newsletter with your friends and colleagues because lord knows it’s hard to get your voice out there these days.

See ya later, alligators!

Laura x