Operations & Systems Archives - Malloy Industries

Jace AI

Words I like: “If a shiny, new AI tool can’t give you an hour back at least 1 hour/week, it’s not worth your attention.” TL;DR I’ve used Jace AI since August 6, 2025, which is 111 days as of today It has saved me 111+ hours and a ton of energy by reducing my time in my email inbox Jace is trained on my unique communication style to draft high‑quality replies in my tone I can rapidly review, tweak, and send email replies in seconds In one recent inbox sprint, I sent 50+ sales follow‑up emails in 30 minutes between

Minimalist illustration of the components of business operations: control, profitability, planning, and process icons

The 6 Key Components of a Well-Run Business

Most growth problems trace back to the same handful of systems: a clear vision, the right people, useful numbers, a way to solve issues, disciplined planning, and documented processes. These are the six components of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), the framework Gino Wickman lays out in his book Traction, and they're a useful map for any CEO whose business has outgrown the way it's run. We've seen the same pattern across the companies we work with: the bottleneck is rarely effort; it's one of these six systems missing or broken. 1. Vision: Does Everyone Know Where You're Going? A

How CEOs Should Use AI in 2026 (The 10/80/10 Way)

The CEOs getting real leverage from AI aren't the ones with the cleverest prompts. They treat AI like a capable team member and manage it with John Maxwell's 10/80/10 rule: you do the first 10% (set the outcome, the context, and what "good" looks like), let the tool do the 80% (the draft, the research, the first pass), then you own the last 10% (edit, verify, make it yours). The skill is the delegation, not the magic words, and in 2026 that delegation is changing fast. Want prompts that already follow this 10/80/10 approach? Grab the AI Prompt Library for

Do and Document: How to Build SOPs With Scribe and Loom

The fastest way to stop being the bottleneck is to write down how you do things, so someone else can. The problem is that documenting tasks after the fact never happens. The fix is a simple habit we call do and document: capture the process the moment you do it, not weeks later. Here's the habit and the two tools that make it nearly effortless. The Do-And-Document Principle Every time you do a task you'll eventually want to delegate, document it in real time. It costs about 10 percent more effort in the moment and saves you hours of trying

How to Automate Copy-and-Paste Work to Save Hours Every Week

Are you still re-typing the same Zoom link, calendar link, or boilerplate reply every day? We have a solution for you: a text expander to turn short abbreviations into full phrases, links, and blocks of text you'd otherwise retype all day. Watch the Walkthrough How It Works Here's how it works and where to start. Want to reclaim more of these hours? Our $10K Productivity Framework maps the highest-leverage tasks to automate first, and our guide to what a fractional executive does helps you decide what to keep doing yourself versus hand off. Why This Matters for a CEO Your

Illustration of a person fitting puzzle pieces together among charts and a stopwatch, representing scoping a technology project

Technology Project Brief: How to Tell Developers What You Want

The fastest way to waste money on software is to hand a developer a vague idea and hope. A good technology project brief fixes that: it lets you explain, in plain English, exactly what you want built and why, so a developer or agency can scope it accurately and you get what you pictured. Why a Brief Saves You Time and Money Most founder-developer friction comes from a fuzzy starting point. Without a brief, you get guesses, scope creep, and a build that misses the point, then you pay to redo it. Twenty minutes spent writing a clear brief up

Laptop with colorful app icons flying out of the screen, representing a company's software subscriptions

Software Subscriptions Audit: Stop Paying for Tools You Don’t Use

Every growing company quietly bleeds cash through software it forgot it's paying for: the tool one person trialed, the seats you stopped using, the annual plan that auto-renewed. A subscription audit finds that money, and it's one of the fastest ways to cut burn without touching anything that matters. Why Audit Your Subscriptions New tools get added constantly, old ones rarely get cancelled, and no one owns the total. Left alone, it inflates your monthly burn rate, the number that determines your runway. Cutting unused software is pure margin: it drops straight to the bottom line with zero downside. The

The $10K matrix: skill against leverage, from $10 work to $10K work

The $10K Productivity Framework: How to Spend Your Time on What Matters Most

Not all work is worth the same effort and time. The $10K framework, created by Khe Hy of RadReads, sorts your tasks by how much long-term value they create, so you can spend more time on the few things that move your business and less on the busywork that feels productive but isn't. What Is "$10k Work"? Khe Hy scores tasks on two axes: how much skill they take and how much leverage they create. That gives four buckets, from $10 work (low skill, low leverage, like manual data entry) up to $10K work (high skill, high leverage, like setting

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs): A CEO’s Guide

OKRs are a simple goal-setting system that keeps a whole company pointed at the same outcomes. They pair an Objective (what you want to achieve) with the Key Results (how you'll measure progress toward it). Used by Intel, Google, and many of the best-run companies, OKRs are a vaccine against fuzzy thinking and scattered execution. Here's the formula, the best practices, and a deck you can use as you write your own. The Formula An OKR is one Objective with three to five supporting Key Results. As a sentence: "I will [Objective] as measured by [Key Results]." Objectives The Objective

North Star Metrics

North Star Metrics are the top-line metrics that all company priorities are aligned around. Whatever companies choose as their guiding metric, all energy and brainpower will flow in that direction. There are six categories of North Star Metrics: Revenue (e.g. ARR, GMV): The amount of money being generated — the focus of ~50% of companies. Customer growth (e.g. paid users, market share): The number of users who are paying — the focus of ~35% of companies. Consumption growth (e.g. messages sent, nights booked): The intensity of usage of your product, beyond simply visiting your site — the focus of ~30%