A biweekly bulletin for leaders who have outgrown founder-led hustle and are ready to build systems that sustain their vision and scale their business. Each issue decodes one “signal” — those subtle patterns that reveal friction, bottlenecks or untapped leverage. You’ll learn what it means, why it matters and how to fix it, all in 5 minutes or less, so you can shift from signal to system and from vision to velocity.
Building a Second Brain for Your Business
|
You’ve heard of “Just-in-Time Inventory”? I’m all about Just-in-Time Information. Two things are true:
That combo means I’m religious about tagging, cross-referencing and storing everything I need to know and everything I learn inside a system that is intuitively designed to match how my brain works and where I need the information to be when I go to look for it. That system has been a game-changer for me, so I'm equally passionate about helping my clients build their own second brain — not just for themselves, but for their companies. The SignalIn the absence of a strong knowledge management system, you and your team are drowning in information, yet starving for insight. Onboarding is a total PITA — more scavenger hunt than system. Your Google Drive is a digital landfill — good luck finding anything useful in under 5 minutes. Multiple teams are doing the same work because there’s no shared repository of what’s already been done. Sound familiar? If your team is constantly reinventing the wheel, or is spending more time finding information than using it, you’re paying the hidden tax of organizational amnesia. The PatternThe problem isn’t lack of information, it’s lack of structure. Founders often start with hyper-personal, informal systems for knowledge management that evolve organically, until they can’t keep up. As the team grows, knowledge gets scattered across inboxes, drive folders, Slack threads and personal memory banks. The company’s memory becomes fragmented, dependent on a few long-timers and impossible to scale. This is when you need to build an organizational second brain: a system for storing, organizing and retrieving knowledge in a way that reflects what your people need and how your business runs. Without one, every onboarding process, deck build and decision drains cognitive capacity that could be spent on innovation, problem-solving, creative thinking and growth. The Tool: The CORE Framework for Building a Second BrainTo build your company’s second brain, start with the CORE, my foundational framework to help you store and structure knowledge so it’s useful, discoverable and repeatable across the business. C – Capture what mattersA second brain isn’t about collecting everything — it’s about curating. Use this simple filter (think Marie Kondo for files):
Eliminate the noise in your folders and files so you don’t waste time and energy wading through a bunch of outdated crap to find what you actually need. O – OrganizeYour people won’t be able to find anything if they don’t understand how to navigate. Folder architecture tips:
The goal: a new hire can land in your system and quickly figure out where to get what they need. Bonus Tip: Add a “_Templates” subfolder in each department to house reusable assets. This will reduce duplication of effort while also standardizing quality. R – Retrieve Knowledge only has value if it’s accessible when you need it.
Limit your tag taxonomy to a small set that is adopted cross-functionally. Bonus: Add a “Last Updated” field or tag to every core doc. Trust in the system collapses the moment someone opens a file and wonders if it’s current. E – Evolve: Maintain it like infrastructureA second brain is a living system. Without maintenance, it decays fast. Establish quarterly cadences to review, prune and refresh content. Archive outdated materials, tag new ones and re-evaluate folder relevance as your organization grows. Think of it as digital hygiene: if you don’t clean it, it will start to stink. The Fix: How to Get Started 1. Start with a quick audit. Pick a small handful of core docs or deliverables and run a “discoverability test.” Ask a few team members to locate the files. Time the search, note where they get stuck and capture what’s missing or confusing. 2. Define your structure. Create or refine your top-level folders by function (Strategy, Operations, Marketing, Finance, People, Culture) and then break out further, but only go two levels deep:
Clean up or archive anything that doesn’t fit. 3. Create your shared standards. Document the basics: how files are named, where they live and which tags your team will use. Store this in your home base hub and review it with the team so everyone’s aligned on how to capture, store and find information. 4. Assign stewards. Give each functional area an owner responsible for maintaining clarity: updating key docs, pruning outdated files and keeping the tagging consistent. This prevents drift, builds accountability and ensures that those closest to the work make the decisions about what to keep. 5. Protect the system with maintenance rituals. Schedule a quarterly “digital deep clean.” Archive or delete what’s stale, update SOPs and refine tags or folder names as your operations evolve. Treat your second brain like operational infrastructure, not a one-and-done project. Why It WorksCognitive capacity is finite. Every minute spent searching for information is a minute stolen from strategy, creativity, or leadership. Context-switching increases, frustration rises and decision quality drops. In a scale-up, that inefficiency isn’t just annoying, it’s expensive. Time spent searching is time not spent executing. It's a zero sum game. A second brain fixes that by externalizing memory and operationalizing JIT information. It frees individuals and teams from the cognitive load of storage, search and recall so they can focus on analysis, problem-solving and innovation. Put simply: The less your team has to remember, the more they can create. Your TurnIf you’re constantly re-explaining the same processes, hunting for the same files, or relying on the same two people who “just know where things are,” your organization is running on borrowed brainpower. It’s time to start building your second brain. Reply and let me know (I read and respond to every email): How much time do you think your team is currently spending trying to find the resources they need to do their best work? Which of these steps would be most helpful to implement in your organization? Or, if you’re ready to get out of the information quicksand… Book a Signal Session — we’ll map where your company’s knowledge is hiding, identify the bottlenecks costing you time and focus and design the foundation for your organizational second brain. Because in a scale-up, clarity isn’t a luxury — it’s the signal your success depends on. |
The Signal Report
A biweekly bulletin for leaders who have outgrown founder-led hustle and are ready to build systems that sustain their vision and scale their business. Each issue decodes one “signal” — those subtle patterns that reveal friction, bottlenecks or untapped leverage. You’ll learn what it means, why it matters and how to fix it, all in 5 minutes or less, so you can shift from signal to system and from vision to velocity.
Last week, we dove deep on Decision Filters -- the guardrails that help your team internalize your tradeoff calculations and make decisions the way you do (without asking first). This week, we’re expanding on the natural next layer: Escalation Triggers. Even with strong filters in place, your team still needs to know exactly when a call is no longer in their lane. Without that clarity, fear and decision paralysis creep in, putting everything back on your plate. The Signal: Your clue that...
Until your team has internalized the tradeoffs that matter most for your business, you either need to be in every decision or you need to be ready for a lot of unintended consequences. Decision Filters close the gap by giving your team practical guardrails to make aligned, confident decisions at scale. The Signal (your clue that there's work to do): You’re still the go-to for every signficant decision because your team can't confidently navigate the tradeoffs that keep coming up as you scale....
THE SIGNAL You thought you delegated clearly: “Can you pull together a quick deck on X for next week’s meeting?” Three days later, you’re reviewing a 40-slide masterpiece that took your best strategist and a graphic designer the better part of three days to build. It’s beautiful. It’s also extreme overkill for what you actually needed: five simple slides to drive a decision. Or the opposite: You ask for “a plan” and get three bullet points in Slack with no tradeoffs or clear direction. You...