--- title: The seven functions, expanded. subtitle: The matrix from "Give it hands." in long form. One function at a time. One paste-ready prompt per function. version: 1.0.0 parent: "Systems are strategy. (bonus pack)" sibling_titles: ["Expand your mind.", "Build the brain.", "Give it hands."] status: manual-pass draft audience: public, non-technical founders who finished the trilogy self_test: A reader who only opens this file can pick one function, see the 20% capture for it, run the sample prompt this week, and know what week four should feel like if it is working. --- # The seven functions, expanded. The matrix from [[give-it-hands]] in long form. One function at a time. One paste-ready prompt per function. 30 seconds to start. 30 minutes to set up. 30 days to compound. --- ## Why this exists The matrix in "Give it hands." gives you the shape. Seven functions. The 20% capture. The 80% leverage. One row each. A row is enough to see the idea. It isn't enough to start. So this expands the matrix. For each function: what the capture actually contains, what week one looks like, what week four feels like if it's working, what breaks if you skip the function, and one prompt you can paste into Claude or ChatGPT today. Function names match the matrix exactly. Sales, Marketing, Delivery, Finance, Hiring, Decisions, Self. Same names, same order. Pick the function where the pain is loudest. Run that one. Come back for the next after the first one's paying you back. --- ## 01 · Sales ### The 20% capture A list of the top ten objections you've ever heard from a buyer, with the reply you'd give to each. Ten rows. One column for the objection, one for the reply you'd actually send if it was 9pm and you had to type it from your phone. Replies should be in your voice, caveats included. If the answer changes by industry or deal size, write the version you'd send to your most common buyer first. ### Week one You have the ten rows in a brain page. The next objection that lands, you ask the brain to draft a reply. The draft already knows the buyer is raising procurement friction, not budget friction, because you wrote that distinction in row four. It won't be perfect. You'll edit. You update the row. The next draft is closer. ### Week four Drafts come back tight. The team starts replying to objections without escalating, because the brain has the answer and the team trusts it. The "needs the founder to write the reply" queue shrinks for the first time in years. You're still the closer on the deals that matter. You're no longer the bottleneck on every routine objection. ### If you skip this Every deal still routes through you for the same five replies you've given a hundred times. Your senior salespeople won't push back, because they don't have the reply and would rather forward you the email than risk getting it wrong. The cost is that you can't leave for a week without three deals stalling. ### Sample prompt ``` I sell . My ICP is . List the 10 most common objections a buyer in this ICP raises in the last third of the sales cycle. For each, suggest a reply structure (not the words) a seasoned founder would use. Ask me one clarifying question per objection so I can fill in the reply in my voice. Hold off on writing any final replies until I have answered. ``` --- ## 02 · Marketing ### The 20% capture Three things, captured once. Your voice profile. The words you use, the words you refuse, the tone someone hears when they get an email from you. The way you start a story, the way you end one. Your ten stories that always work. The anecdotes you've told from stage or on a call that always land. Your anti-AI list. The words that would never appear in your writing. The phrases that make you cringe. Three different things, same page. Together they're the marketing brain. ### Week one You ask the brain to draft a LinkedIn post about a thing that happened this week. The post comes back in your voice. The story it pulled is one of your ten. The words you'd never use aren't there. You edit one line and hit publish. The first time it happens it's jarring. You read it twice. That's the working state. ### Week four Your output has stopped sounding like every other LinkedIn post. Drafts arrive in 20 seconds and ship in five minutes. You post twice as often without spending more time. The team can draft on your behalf without you sounding like a different person every Tuesday. ### If you skip this You keep paying for marketing in two currencies. Time, because you draft from scratch. Voice, because nothing the team writes for you sounds like you. The brand stays small because the output can't be trusted to anyone else, however good the work behind it is. ### Sample prompt ``` I want to capture my voice profile so an AI can draft in my voice from now on. Ask me 20 questions across: (1) words I use, (2) words I refuse, (3) how I start a story, (4) how I end one, (5) the emotion I want a reader to leave with. One at a time. Do not move on until I answer. At the end, summarise my voice in 200 words and ask me to correct anything that is off. ``` --- ## 03 · Delivery ### The 20% capture Definition of done for each thing you sell. One sentence per offer. Scope guardrails. What's in, what's out, the list of common requests that arrive mid-project and the script for how the team responds. Escalation rules. Who decides what. What's a flag the team can hold. What's a fire that needs you in the room. ### Week one The team hits a scope request and asks the brain instead of asking you. The brain knows the line. It returns the answer with the script. The team responds to the client without your input. You see the ping land and resolve without a single message from you. ### Week four Scope creep gets named on the call where it appears, not on the invoice three weeks later. Your team holds the line more consistently than you would, because the line is in writing and the brain reads it the same way every time. Delivery margin improves. You didn't raise prices. You stopped giving away work for free. ### If you skip this Delivery becomes the place where the business leaks. Every project is slightly different. Margins drift. The team carries the cost of every ambiguous moment because asking you takes more energy than just doing the extra hour of work. You won't see it on a P&L. You'll see it in the team's exhaustion at the end of every quarter. ### Sample prompt ``` I want to write the definition-of-done, scope guardrails, and escalation rules for my main service offer. Ask me one question at a time: (1) what single sentence means this engagement is complete, (2) the 10 most common things a client asks for mid-project that I am not sure how to handle, (3) the three situations my team has escalated in the last 90 days where I wished they had decided themselves. Do not move on until I answer each. ``` --- ## 04 · Finance ### The 20% capture The five to seven numbers you should be reading every Monday morning. For most service businesses: cash position, pipeline coverage, revenue against plan, gross margin trend, days sales outstanding, headcount cost as a share of revenue, and one or two leading indicators that matter for your model. The exact list is yours. The point is the list is short, named, and the same every week. ### Week one You ask the brain on Monday for the seven numbers. It returns them in a short table. You read them in two minutes. You see cash position is below your floor. You see pipeline coverage is short for the quarter. You decide what to do about both before your first meeting. ### Week four Sunday-night spreadsheet hunting stops. The team starts surfacing the numbers without being asked, because they've seen the page format four weeks running and know what good looks like. You catch trends in week two instead of in month two. The "I should have caught this earlier" moments drop to near zero. ### If you skip this You keep running the business by feel. Some weeks the feel is right. Some weeks the feel is two months behind reality. The first time you catch a serious problem late, the cost is bigger than every other function in this matrix combined. ### Sample prompt ``` I run a . Help me write the list of 5 to 7 numbers I should be reading every Monday to know if the business is healthy. Ask me one question at a time: the failure mode I most want to catch early; the numbers I currently look at and which I trust; the leading indicators specific to my model. Do not give me a generic finance dashboard. ``` --- ## 05 · Hiring ### The 20% capture The pattern bank. The reasoning behind every hire and every exit you've made in the last two to three years. Who lasted. Who drifted. What you wish you'd asked in the final interview. The early signs you missed. The 90-day moment where you knew this was going to work, or knew it wasn't. This is uncomfortable to write down. It feels like grading people you cared about. The honest version is where the value lives. ### Week one You start the pattern bank, one past hire at a time. Three lines each. You notice midway through that you've hired the same archetype four times. Two worked. Two didn't. You write the difference. That difference is now in the brain. ### Week four You're interviewing again. The brain pulls the pattern bank. It surfaces the three questions you wish you'd asked the last hire who didn't work out. You add them to the interview. The candidate gives an answer you wouldn't have noticed mattered six months ago. You make a different call. ### If you skip this You make a version of the same hiring mistake every 18 months. Each one costs you a year of payroll, a quarter of team morale, and the trust of the team members who watched you hire someone who shouldn't have been hired. The pattern bank is the cheapest insurance you can buy against your own blind spots. ### Sample prompt ``` I am going to walk through the last 5 hires and 3 exits. For each, ask me: (1) the role, (2) what made me say yes, (3) what I know now that I did not know then, (4) the one question I wish I had asked in the final interview. At the end, identify the 3 patterns that repeat across people who worked out and the 3 patterns that repeat across people who did not. ``` --- ## 06 · Decisions ### The 20% capture The decision log. With the reasoning written down. Not just the outcome. You think you already have this because you remember the decisions. The memory is the problem. You remember the decision. You forget the reasoning. Six months later the same trade-off shows up, and you settle it differently because the context is gone. Each entry has the date, the question, the answer, the reasoning in two or three sentences, and the conditions under which you'd revisit it. ### Week one You start logging. Every meaningful decision gets three lines. The reasoning is the load-bearing line. You'll resist this because writing the reasoning takes 45 seconds longer, and 45 seconds feels like a lot between meetings. Do it anyway. The 45 seconds in week one save the hour you'd have spent in month six rethinking it from scratch. ### Week four A trade-off shows up that feels familiar. You ask the brain. It pulls the decision from February. It shows you what you concluded, why, and what would have to change for you to revisit it. Nothing has changed. You make the same call in 30 seconds instead of re-running the analysis from zero. ### If you skip this You re-decide the same question two or three times a year. Each time, you spend an hour reproducing reasoning you already had. Sometimes you land on a different answer than the original, for no reason except that you forgot the context. The team watches you contradict yourself and learns to wait you out. ### Sample prompt ``` I want to start logging decisions with reasoning. For the next 5 decisions I tell you about, ask me: (1) the question, (2) the answer, (3) the reasoning in 2-3 sentences, (4) what would have to change for me to revisit this. Then format each as a 4-line entry I can paste into my decision log. Push back if the reasoning is hand-wavy or if the conditions for revisiting are vague. ``` Push back is the load-bearing instruction. A decision log full of soft reasoning is the same as no log. --- ## 07 · Self ### The 20% capture The weekly retro. The open-flag system. The decay window. The retro is three lines on Friday. What shipped, what stalled, what's rolling forward. Five minutes. No theatre. The open-flag system is a place to write down the things that feel off but aren't yet a decision. The senior who's stopped pushing back in meetings. The client whose tone in the last three emails has shifted. The quiet feeling on Sunday evening. Flags are early sensors. The decay window keeps flags honest. A flag that sits two weeks without movement surfaces. You either escalate it to a decision, kill it because nothing came of it, or re-flag it with a note on why it's still parked. ### Week one You write the first retro. Three lines. You write the first three flags. None are dramatic. One is about how a deal has been moving. One is about a recurring scheduling friction with the team. One is about how you've been feeling at the end of the day. ### Week four You have four retros and 12 to 15 flags. Three flags decayed and were killed. Four became decisions. The pattern across four weeks is one you wouldn't have noticed week to week. This is the function where the brain catches things you'd have missed alone. The brain isn't wise. It remembers what you were saying three weeks ago, and notices when the same thing has come up four times. ### If you skip this You catch burnout late, and team drift later. The slow erosion of a client relationship you usually catch last of all. None of these announce themselves in a single moment. They announce themselves across weeks, and only if something is keeping the record. ### Sample prompt ``` I want to start a weekly retro and an open-flag system. For this Friday, ask me: (1) what shipped, (2) what stalled, (3) what is rolling forward. Then: (4) what felt off this week that is not yet a decision. For each thing that felt off, log it as a flag with a 14-day decay date. Push back if my retro is more than 6 lines. The shorter the retro, the more likely I keep doing it. ``` This is the prompt you will not want to run, because Self always feels self-indulgent until the week the brain catches something you would have missed. Then it never feels self-indulgent again. --- ## How to use this You'll be tempted to start with all seven. Don't. The matrix is a menu. You pick one. You run the capture for that one this week. You let it pay back for two weeks before you add the next. The function you start with is the one where the pain is loudest right now. For most founders that's Sales or Delivery, because those are the two that bleed money fastest when they're broken. For some it's Self, because the body has already told them where the problem is and the body is rarely wrong about that. The wrong way to start is to capture three rows of every function in week one. You'll end up with seven half-formed substrates and trust in none of them. The matrix in [[give-it-hands]] showed you what pays back. This expansion showed you what to capture. The bridge in [[second-brain-to-business-os]] shows you how this layer meets the company layer. The essay in [[systems-are-strategy]] shows you why the choice of substrate over tactic is the only strategic choice you make this year. The capture work is small. The pay-back isn't.