Why 10x Is Easier Than 2x and What You Have to Cut

If you work a lot and your company isn't growing, more hours are rarely the answer. Most owners believe the only way to grow is to work twice as hard. The instinct is understandable and the reality is brutal: linear effort has a ceiling, and you reach it long before you reach your ambitions.

The idea in the title isn't mine. It comes from 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less, by Dan Sullivan, co-founder of Strategic Coach, with Benjamin Hardy (Hay House Business, 2023).¹ I read it recently and recommended it in the reel. Its premise sounds absurd until you test it: multiplying results by ten can be easier than doubling them, because ten times can't be reached by doing more of the same.

The publisher describes 10x as a process rather than an outcome, built on four freedoms (time, money, relationship and purpose), and sums the book up as being about "quality vs quantity."¹ The thought has an older cousin. In 2013 Astro Teller, then head of Google's moonshot lab, wrote in Wired that it is often easier to make something ten times better than 10 percent better, because a 10 percent goal keeps you working with the existing tools and assumptions.²

The arithmetic of more hours

Start with the ceiling, because it is real. Stanford economist John Pencavel studied records of British munitions workers from the First World War and found that output rose in proportion to hours up to about 49 hours a week. Beyond that, each extra hour added less, and output at 70 hours was barely different from output at 56.³ Those were factory shifts a century ago, but anyone who has run a company on 70-hour weeks will recognize the curve.

The cost doesn't stop at productivity. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that in 2016, 398,000 people died from stroke and 347,000 from heart disease as a result of working at least 55 hours a week. Those hours were associated with a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared with a 35 to 40 hour week.⁴

What a 10x goal forces you to see

That is the useful part of the idea. A goal of doubling invites you to stretch the current model: more clients, more products, more hours, more approvals running through you. A goal of ten times makes that plan impossible on paper, so you have to look at the model itself. Which customers, products and habits could never come with you to a company ten times the size?

The 80/20 is real, and usually more extreme

In the reel I say a 10x goal forces you to pick up strategic scissors and cut 80 percent of your clients and distractions, keeping the 20 percent that generates most of your profit. The direction is right. The numbers are often more extreme than Pareto suggests, and the order of the cuts matters.

Harvard's Robert Kaplan wrote that in virtually every customer profitability study, 15 to 20 percent of customers generate 100 percent or more of the profits. At one insurer he described, the most profitable 40 percent of customers produced 130 percent of annual profits, the middle 55 percent broke even, and the least profitable 5 percent lost the equivalent of 30 percent.⁵ Management accountants call that shape the whale curve: profit climbs above 100 percent, then the tail drags it back down.

Kaplan's advice on the loss-makers is more careful than "fire them." First look inside and lower the cost of serving them. Then reprice, or offer a broader package with better margins. Drop the account only if none of that works.⁵ That sequence is the difference between strategy and a tantrum. If you sell a lot but sell badly, the companion piece on selling more versus selling well goes deeper, and a Pricing Power Audit™ puts numbers on it.

A 10x review in one afternoon

You don't need a retreat to start. You need an afternoon, last year's numbers broken down by customer and product, and two weeks of your own calendar.

Stop pushing an exhausted model

The hardest part is rarely the analysis. It is letting go of the customers, products and habits that built the company. That is the trap I describe in why successful companies fail: protecting what made you successful long after it stopped being what will make you successful. In Designed to Survive I argue for the alternative, a firm core with a periphery that keeps reinventing itself.

If you want someone in the room while you make those cuts, that is the work I do in operator-led execution. If you plan to grow with outside capital, a RISE™ score tests whether the model can scale without breaking margins, people or quality.