The single biggest waste in setting up any system? Building it for the team you
By John Aspinall ✱ · May 30, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
The single biggest waste in setting up any system?
Building it for the team you don't have yet.
The eventual COO who will need their own reporting layer.
The two product lines you might launch next year.
The fictional 12-client roster.
The future TikTok division.
You build folders for all of it.
You write SOPs for all of it.
⤷ None of it exists.
Six months later you've outgrown the structure in three places you didn't predict & you're still maintaining empty scaffolding in twenty places you did.
Don't build for the future.
Build for what you're actually doing this month.
Five clients? Five folders.
Not a sub-system that can "scale to 50."
One channel? One channel.
Not a marketplace-agnostic taxonomy.
Two people on the team? Don't write role-based access patterns.
Write your name and theirs.
When the actual constraint shows up, the right structure becomes obvious in about ten minutes.
You'll reorganize once and it'll fit.
Versus the version where you reorganize quarterly because the imagined future never matched reality.
Ship the messy now-version.
Let usage tell you what to build.