About Design, Don't Drift and Adam Robbings

What this book is about

Most small businesses don't fail because of one big mistake. They drift: hundreds of reasonable decisions, each made by someone good at their job, that add up to a business nobody actually designed.

Design, Don't Drift is a practical guide to fixing that. It introduces Core3, a framework that looks at every important issue through the three jobs of any business: Sales & Marketing (get the work), Operations (do the work) and Finance (get paid). You work out what each function would ideally choose, rate your proposal against it, and trade off until nothing is materially worse for any of them.

How the book came about

After about ten years of running Reuben's Brews, we added food to our taprooms. A year in, the program was losing money. When I dug in, I found a program full of decisions that each made sense on their own and didn't work together.

Within two months of rebuilding it, we had improved the contribution margin 17x and food sales hit a record. Then I handed it back to the team, and over the following months it slowly drifted back.

That improvement, and the reversal, is why I had to define my thought process on business decisions. I needed to define it for our team internally, and that is what led to this book. There are plenty of books on strategy and plenty on execution. I couldn't find one on business design, on how to connect strategy to the day-to-day decisions that actually run a business.

About Adam Robbings

Adam Robbings was born in the UK, trained in finance, and has lived in the US for more than 20 years. He co-founded Reuben's Brews with his wife Grace. It began in their garage, with a home brew that won the People's Choice award at a 2010 Seattle beer festival, and opened in Ballard in 2012. Today it's one of the largest breweries in Washington State, and Adam is its CEO.

Adam wrote Design, Don't Drift for founders, owners and managers of small businesses: restaurants, shops, agencies, trades, and anywhere else one person wears several hats. You don't need a finance team or a strategy consultant, just a willingness to have the argument on purpose.

Join the list

Join the email list to hear when the book is published, and receive an exclusive Core3 decision sheet.