42. The Weekly - Lean Rules

On staying lean, knowing what to do and the power of one bag of matcha.

Oct 13, 2025

Welcome to the Happy Medium newsletter, where I share inspiration and bite-sized musings on creative business each week. Enjoy!

10 Rules for running lean (and stress free)

Lean means creating value with the fewest resources possible. What is means in our context is avoiding things that use up your time, energy and money so you can spend more time focused on the good stuff.

Running lean means creating freedom. Instead of dumping money back into a hungry business machine, you are pruning the non essentials, so that you have the freedom to choose where that extra money goes. Whether that’s reinvesting, saving for a rainy day or spending on something you care about, the choice is now yours.

Each rule is designed to save you headspace, time, money or all three and have been road-tested in companies large and small.

Over the next 10 weeks, I’ll break down each rule further so make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already.

Whether your business makes millions or thousands, these are the ten rules for running lean and stress free.

Have purpose - Define the north star that will orientate all the activities in your business.
Understand the point, cut everything else - Be intentional about meetings, emails and time.
Justify ongoing costs - Interogate any expenses that will raise the water level, meaning the amount you have to make in order to stay afloat.
Create frameworks - Reduce the complexity of predictable decisions by creating frameworks to abide within.
Create processes - At a minimum you need a sales and a project process. But if you do something more than twice, create a process to make it easier in future.
Provide visibility - Create visibility from within a system, don’t hide information behind manual reports. Avoid time spent translating, make it possible to self serve relevant data.
Trust - A team you can trust is an efficient team. Trust is built by consistency and competency. Build and earn trust.
Culture - Safe minds make better decisions. Avoid chaos and drama, create calm.
Understand before you act, but do act - Discovering, understanding and strategising are all important, but meaningless without execution.
Switching costs you - Stick to the plan, OR have a very good reason for not doing so.

Join us for the next 10 weeks as we break down each of these further with practical examples and insights.

Inspiration

Things that have inspired me this week.

On knowing what you have to do

Ty Maxwell with Zak Prekop, The Creative Independent

“Just start, and not act on your insecurities. It’s impossible to not worry about what you’re doing, or to not wonder if it’s worthwhile, but I think you have to do it anyway….

…I think your work can change over time without having to sit down and say, “What’s going wrong here? What do I have to do?” I think it could be a slower process than that. And in the meantime, you can keep going and discover things through working.”

Full Article

Ten years in business - top tips

Sarah Davidson

I attended a panel that Sarah spoke on recently at Eclat and one message that stood out to me was the myth that you have to be desperately unhappy to start something new. It’s not true, you can be content AND need to scratch that business itch. Similarly, not everything needs to grow indefinitely. Sometimes it’s about finding something that is the right size for you (the Happy Medium, if you will 😉).

spoonful_of_sarah

A post shared by @spoonful_of_sarah

Sidenote: I didn’t realise I was inspired by this post when creating my 10 rules, but looking at it again this morning to link it here, I realised it must have been somewhere in my subconscious. Thanks Sarah!