I’ve been fortunate to have mentors who fundamentally changed how I think about building and scaling. This is part of an ongoing series where I share the insights that have stayed with me — because the best lessons shouldn’t sit with one person.
This one also came from A.B. — and it’s probably the one I come back to most when I’m working with business owners who feel buried:
“If you want to eat the elephant, you need to slice it up.”
The overwhelm problem
How many times have you looked at what your business needs to achieve and felt completely buried?
The list is too long. The problems are too interconnected. Every time you fix one thing, two more appear. Scaling a business from where it is to where it needs to be can feel like staring at an elephant and wondering where on earth to start.
The answer is always the same: you don’t eat it whole. You slice it up.
Why complexity paralyses execution
The businesses I work with across Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia that struggle most with operational efficiency are rarely struggling because the problems are unsolvable. They’re struggling because the problems feel too large to approach in a structured way.
When everything feels urgent and interconnected, the natural response is to react — to jump between fires, to try to fix everything at once, to let the business lead you instead of the other way around. That’s when execution breaks down and scaling a business becomes genuinely difficult.
The irony is that the bigger the challenge, the more important it becomes to slow down and break it into smaller pieces. Not because small steps are more comfortable — but because they’re the only thing that actually works.
How to slice the elephant
Scaling a business is not one project. It’s dozens of smaller ones, sequenced deliberately.
The starting point is always the same: identify the single biggest constraint — the one bottleneck that, if removed, would create the most movement across everything else. That’s your first slice. Not the whole elephant. Just the piece that matters most right now.
From there, break that constraint into specific, actionable steps. Define what done looks like for each one. Assign ownership. Set a timeline. Then execute — one step at a time, building momentum as each piece falls into place.
This is the operational logic behind every successful scaling effort I’ve been part of — from building record-breaking machines at Rimac-Bugatti to helping business owners restructure their operations. The complexity never goes away. But it becomes manageable the moment you stop trying to solve it all at once.
What consistent progress actually looks like
Scaling a business is not a series of dramatic breakthroughs. It’s a series of small, deliberate steps that compound over time.
The founders and MDs who scale most effectively are not the ones who move fastest in any given week. They’re the ones who maintain consistent forward momentum — slicing the elephant methodically, completing each piece, and moving to the next without losing sight of where they’re going.
Perseverance and commitment matter. But they work best when they’re directed at something small enough to actually complete today — not something so large it’s impossible to know where to start.
Start with one slice. Then the next. The elephant gets eaten the same way every time.
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