Create More Pie

Two posts on mikemisbach.com keep pulling me back to the same idea — one about scarcity thinking, one about what value actually means in a business context.

They’re written for different audiences. They use different vocabulary. But they’re describing the first principle of the Entrenaut framework — Create — from two angles.

The fixed pie trap

The fixed pie fallacy is the belief that success is finite. Someone else’s win is your loss. Someone else’s customer is one you can’t have. Someone you mentor might eventually replace you.

I wrote about this because I’d watched smart people limit their own growth by protecting slices instead of baking more pie. Hoarding ideas in a workplace. Avoiding generosity. Treating every interaction as zero-sum.

Entrenauts fight that instinct. The Create principle is “maximize value delivered.” That requires an abundance mindset — believing that creating real value expands the pie for everyone involved: customers, team, community, and the business.

Worth more than you cost

In The Big 4, I separated profit margin from value. Margin is what you keep. Value is what the customer experiences — the gap between what they receive and what they invested to get it.

In The 4 Pillars, I pushed further into the mechanics: understand your audience’s dreams, reduce time delay, reduce effort and sacrifice. Make the outcome feel effortless and worthwhile.

That’s Create in operational terms. Ask: can I make the good things bigger and the bad things smaller for the people I serve?

Where the standard tightened

The blog posts treated value creation as a growth strategy. Smart, effective, good business.

The Entrenaut framework treats it as a moral floor. An Entrenaut asks “am I delivering the most value I can based on the commitment I made?” Sometimes that means turning down work that pays well when it won’t serve the customer well.

Same instinct — make more pie, be worth more than you cost — with a higher bar for what counts as enough.

The question I keep coming back to

If you disappeared tomorrow, would the people you serve have less of something that actually mattered to them?

That’s the Create test. Whether you’re genuinely adding something that wasn’t there before.

Read the originals if you want the full treatment: Breaking Free from the Fixed Pie Fallacy and The 4 Pillars of Revenue Growth. The framework here is what those ideas became once I treated them as a standard.