Week 969

Matt Kirkland

It's week 969!

This week Nate, Will, and I set aside some time to do our annual review and re-up of our Vision/Traction Organizer document for Brand New Box. This makes at least five years we've been using this system, I think?

I've been historically pretty dubious of most systems that say: here's how to run your business. Buy my book! Take my workshops! Pay my coaches! But I'm tempermentally suspicious of everything in the 'business' section at the airport bookstore, anyway, so that's not a great indicator. But I'm on a multiyear journey to have more humility about learning from other people, AND the VTO system is endorsed by other entrepreneurial friends that I know in real life. People who I respect personally, in life and in how they run their operations.

So anyway, we gave the VTO system a try, and have found it to be pretty useful.

There's nothing magic there - just a framework to force yourself to look at your business from the top down, and say: what do we value? what is our purpose? what do we want to accomplish and how do we get there?

After a handful of years doing this, we can move pretty quickly reviewing and re-endorsing the big picture stuff. There's a lot that hasn't changed in the last year.

We still value empathy, curiosity, creativitiy, resourcefulness, and have an allergy to bullshit.

We still exist to build new superpowers for teams, and we do that through software. We're still aiming to make big impacts on a global level (and getting there!).

We're still competitive because we work to deeply understand our clients, because we're flexible, because we're seasoned, and because we're not your internal IT department (which, face it, nobody likes).

What has changed? Not a ton, this year. The rise of AI-powered tooling means that we can do a lot more, and we can do it faster. That also means our clients can do more by themselves (which we love - we exist to empower teams!). We're probably looking harder at BNB-owned products vs an all-service model. But we're still building interesting tools that help teams get stuff done. Maybe AI or market forces will rewrite all of that for us! Who knows! Stay tuned for the 2026 plan.