The good luck was real. So was the bad. Neither one is a plan.
There’s a version of running a company where everyone waits for the visionary to have a new idea descend from on high into their glorious brain.
I have a glorious brain. At least, I’d like to think so.
After twenty years, I’d also like to think Sanctuary has a better way to decide what to do next than waiting for something to occur to me.
None of that is a knock on intuition. Some of our best moves started as a feeling: an opportunity that looked right, a person who seemed like a fit before I could explain why. And we’ve been lucky. Right place, right time, more than once. I’m comfortable saying that.
I’m less comfortable building the next twenty years on the assumption that it keeps happening.
Where the Luck Lived
When I think about our early luck, I think about people.
We had people whose strengths matched what the company needed before anyone had articulated either one. They picked things up. They covered the areas that needed covering. A lot of what made it work lived in relationships, not in anything written down.
Some of our core team members, people who are still here, never got anything like the onboarding we’d expect today. The company was small and the owners worked right alongside them. Context came from a conversation, not a process document.
Their ability was real. But if we’d hired someone else, dropped them into the same seat, and expected them to fend for themselves, would it have worked?
Some people would have figured it out. I wouldn’t want to bet someone’s career on it.
That’s the kind of luck that’s easy to miss. What works for a handful of people quietly stops working as the company grows, and nothing announces the change. You find out when someone struggles in a seat that used to run itself.
The luck did compound, though. We ended up with a leadership layer of people others want to work with and for. They attracted good people, who brought their own relationships and strengths. Our luck spread through people, not through strategy.
Was It Luck, or Did We Know Something?
The harder question is how much of the rest we actually understood at the time.
We landed on recurring revenue. We believed in measurable results, in proving value with numbers, and in reporting as the thing that keeps a client. We believed accountability and honest dealing would make team members and clients stay longer.
Were those decisions? Intuition? Rules carried over from earlier business experience? Or one guy going with his gut and getting lucky that the gut was right? We had a boatload of failures, too. The wins are just easier to remember and easier to explain.
We’ve had our share of the other kind of luck. The 2008 market. COVID. Two clients who filed for bankruptcy.
Both of those clients were out of state. We’ve always preferred clients we can sit across a table from, and those two showed me why. From a distance, we were a line item, without full visibility into what was happening inside their business.
Losing them hurt, but it didn’t threaten the company. And when I list the things we’ve been lucky about, the reason it didn’t is on that list: we’ve kept any one client from becoming too large a share of monthly revenue.
That wasn’t luck. It was a decision, and today it’s a rule, our seven percent guardrail. I’d been filing a system under good fortune.
That’s the trap twenty years sets in. You can’t go back and correctly sort every win. What you can do is know, next time, which kind of bet you’re making.
Give Intuition Somewhere to Go
That’s what our R&D and business strategy processes are for. They don’t replace luck or intuition. They catch more of it.
Anyone in the company can submit an idea through an intake form in Wrike, our project management system. A client need, competitive pressure, something from a conference, something someone has been experimenting with. It needs a home other than a conversation everyone enjoyed and nobody remembers a month later.
Every idea we review leaves with a decision, an owner, and a next step. Nothing leaves the room undecided.
When an idea needs proof, it gets a two-hour Research Sprint: define the problem, scan the alternatives, rough out the effort and the revenue potential, and name a few clients who might pilot it. Two hours caps what we invest before deciding whether it deserves more.
One of the required deliverables is my favorite detail in the whole process:
“Researcher’s Gut Assessment (Green, Red).”
Intuition has a field in the form.
The person doing the research often sees something the rough numbers can’t capture yet. We record that judgment next to the evidence and talk about both. A strong feeling doesn’t win the argument on its own, and it doesn’t get thrown out for being a feeling.
Let the Tool Say No
Collecting ideas is the easy part. Most of them are good. The real question is whether this one deserves time ahead of something we already said mattered.
So we keep a strict Top 3. Only three items can carry High Priority in Wrike at any time. When a new one comes in, something else comes out. Nobody has to rely on willpower to say no, because the tool won’t allow a fourth.
Bigger bets go up a level. If an idea could add $100,000 or more a year, take more than ten hours, touch more than two departments, create a new offering, or change our direction, it moves into business strategy. That keeps a small experiment and a company-level commitment from being treated as the same decision.
Here’s the part I think most owner-led companies get backwards. The visionary still owns the strategy agenda and makes the final call. The Top 3 is a strong recommendation, not a mandate.
What changed is where the options come from. I don’t have to be the source of every idea. I get to make better calls on better options, with more known before I make them.
Who Builds What Comes Next
The part I keep coming back to is who’s doing this work.
The people we were lucky to find are the ones documenting the processes and building the protections. They’re still guided by intuition. They’re also putting up their own systems to protect themselves and the company, so the next person in their seat gets clearer footing than they had. That gives me more confidence than anything that falls out of my glorious brain.
Luck is not a system. But some of our good luck brought us the people capable of building one.
It’s not just about being lucky; it’s about being able to navigate when your luck runs out.