Most of us grew up with Lego bricks and/or have kids obsessed with ‘em. There are two flavors:
The Kit. Instructions, perfectly packaged pieces, a spaceship or mega-brand partnership structure waiting for you if you just followed the steps.
The Bucket. A random pile of bricks dumped on the floor. No instructions, no plan. Just imagination, trial and error, and some wobbly structures that only made sense to you.
I’m a bucket guy. Details below.
Reply to this email to let me know what you think. Happy to chat.
Be good. Thanks for reading.
~Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss
A brief note from our sponsor…
Episode #2 of The RevBoss Show airs tomorrow Friday, September 19th at 12pm EST. All the details are here.
My guest is Vince Beese — one of the best sellers I know.
Selling is set of skills and processes that anyone can learn. And Vince spelled it all out in his excellent and well-reviewed new book Red Zone Selling.
I'm excited to catch up with him this week to hear about his new book (which I've read and highly recommend) and talk about selling in 2025.
The Bucket of Legos (Most CEOs Forget How to Play)
Kits have instructions and a guaranteed outcome. Buckets do not. With a kit, you build Hogwarts. With a bucket, you definitely build something.
The bucket and the kit are obviously both fun in their own way. I’m generally a bucket guy, but I’ll admit that in a career defined by building things sometimes it’s therapeutic to start a kit, have a clear process, and end up with a perfectly built finished product.
Building and running a business requires both bucket and kit mode, but at different times.
The simplistic view is this: do well with the bucket and you eventually get to the point of executing a series of kits.
Let’s accept this and say that you’ve turned the mismatched pile of bricks into something functional and repeatable. You’ll have plenty of kits to choose from at this stage.
Check your email or pop open LinkedIn and your eyes will start bleeding from the sales playbooks, the GTM frameworks, and the “10 things every CEO should do” (but you’re definitely not doing) lists.
Some are useful. (Especially mine!) They teach you how things can fit together. They give you confidence and structure. They give you the illusion of an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process that’ll 100% work.
Aside from well defined organizational processes like HR and finance, I am not sure an off-the-shelf playbook works the same way for everyone.
Worst case, the kit doesn’t actually fit your problem, market, or team.
Best case, if you keep following the instructions, you stop creating. You start protecting what already exists.
This doesn’t work in a 2025 moment that requires bucket skills like tinkering, creating, building, and rebuilding.
It took me a long time to figure out (and a lot of humility to admit) that AI and everything that came with it broke parts of our machine at RevBoss. Some things needed a rethink. Others needed a funeral.
I was still kitting. I should have been bucketing.
And I think that is where many of you are. I know because I hear it from you every week:
“Nothing is working.”
“I feel stuck.”
“Our deals are taking longer.”
If that is you, it might be time to dump the bucket.
What bucket mode looks like:
Stop one thing that no longer serves the business. Not sunset. Stop.
Ship two tests a week. Marketing, product, pricing, positioning. Tiny is fine.
Change your scoreboard. Measure learning speed, not just pipeline volume.
Talk to 5 customers and ask open, honest questions about their happiness.
Rewrite your pitch in plain English, then rewrite it again.
When to use a kit:
Onboarding new teammates so they can move fast without breaking values.
Documented motions that already print dollars.
Safety rails for compliance, security, and cash control.
Rethink what you have built and what you are still carrying. Let go of pride and sunk cost. Start tinkering again.
It will feel a little reckless at first, like you are undoing progress.
Then you’ll figure something out, see some traction, and you will remember that building is the fun part.
Thanks and shoutout to my live stream guest from last week Tooba Durraze for the Lego analogy.
I built this masterpiece in September 2020 with my kids.
Good Stuff
I talk to people every week that say they found RevBoss via ChatGPT. We’re not doing much proactively (yet) to make this happen, but the phenomenon / practice has a name: AEO — answer engine optimization. This post / pod is a good starting point.
Loved this post from Friend of RevBoss Ricky Spero about adding value in the sales process as a technical / scientist founder. Everyone can sell, even physicists! :)
New-ish movie Friendship with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd has some deeeep cringe and genuinely hilarious bits. Really enjoyed it, highly recommended.
Know some good stuff? Reply and tell me about it.