The Disruption Dynamics Portfolio: Run, Grow, Discover

Large organizations love to talk about innovation portfolios. They create committees, slide decks, stage-gate processes, and elaborate governance structures to decide which initiatives deserve investment. You can do that sort of thing when you live inside a towering corporate tornado made of money. Most small businesses don’t have that luxury.

Instead, us little guys tend to operate in reaction mode. The loudest customer request wins. The most urgent operational problem consumes the week. The interesting new idea sits in a notebook somewhere until it quietly dies.

The irony is that the core concept behind many corporate portfolio frameworks is actually very useful for small businesses. Once you strip away the bureaucracy, the idea is simple: divide your attention between sustaining the business you have, improving the business you run, and discovering the business you might become. One version of this is the 70/20/10 portfolio model.

• 70% — Run the business

• 20% — Improve the business

• 10% — Discover the future

It’s not a precise formula. It’s simply a reminder that if you spend 100% of your time reacting to the present, you’ll never build the future. As I continue shaping Disruption Dynamics, I’ve started using a very simple 70/20/10 portfolio to guide where my energy goes each week. This is what it looks like right now.

The 70%: Run the Business

Theme: Find My People in the Marine Industry

The majority of my time needs to go toward activities that sustain and focus the core business. For Disruption Dynamics, that currently means customer discovery and positioning in the recreational marine sector, particularly marinas and yacht clubs.

This focus didn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes from decades of involvement in the sailing community and from observing the kinds of challenges these organizations repeatedly face. Many yacht clubs and marina operators are volunteer-driven or lightly staffed organizations that must still manage complex infrastructure projects, regulatory requirements, and large capital investments.

They don’t lack passion or commitment. They often lack structured project management capacity. So the 70% portfolio for Disruption Dynamics is focused on clarifying and sharpening how the business serves this community. Current actions include:

Repositioning the website for marine organizations.

If a marina manager or yacht club commodore lands on the site, they should immediately recognize the problems being discussed. The language, examples, and case scenarios should clearly reflect marine infrastructure and nonprofit governance realities.

Aligning product offerings with marine project management needs.

Many clubs are facing major capital projects: dock replacements, marina upgrades, shoreline permitting, seismic retrofits, and clubhouse renovations. The offerings need to clearly support organizations navigating those kinds of challenges.

Adding marine-specific pain points.

Volunteer governance, regulatory complexity, environmental permitting, capital campaign coordination, and contractor management are all recurring issues in this sector.

Clarifying the benefits.

The outcome should be obvious: better managed projects, reduced risk, faster delivery, and clearer decision-making for boards and committees.

Offering a “try before you buy” introduction.

Many nonprofit organizations are cautious about consultants. Offering a small entry point allows them to see the value before committing to larger engagements.

Removing pricing from the website.

Marine projects vary widely in scale and complexity. Rather than anchoring the conversation prematurely with fixed prices, the goal is to start with a discovery discussion and scope engagements appropriately.

None of these activities are glamorous. But they are the essential work of aligning the business with the people it is meant to serve.

The 20%: Improve the Business

Theme: Tools That Make the Work Better

The next slice of the portfolio is reserved for things that could improve how the business operates but are not yet core revenue drivers. These are promising ideas, but they still need proof. Two experiments currently sit in this category.

Exploring AI-driven project management agents.

Large capital projects often involve coordination between boards, committees, contractors, regulators, and volunteers. AI-assisted tools could help automate reporting, track milestones, summarize meetings, and maintain continuity across long projects.

For now, these are internal experiments designed to improve how I work. But they may eventually become capabilities that benefit clients directly.

Finishing development of the Race Roster app.

This small sailing-related application began as a practical tool for managing race crews and schedules. It may remain a niche project, but it also strengthens credibility and visibility within the sailing community.

Not every improvement project turns into a product. But a steady stream of tool development helps sharpen capabilities over time.

The 10%: Discover the Future

A Moonshot Idea for Puget Sound

The final slice of the portfolio is reserved for ideas that may never work. That’s intentional. If every idea in the portfolio feels safe, the business probably isn’t exploring far enough. One speculative concept I’ve been thinking about recently is this:

What if Puget Sound yacht clubs formed a cooperative project office to manage more than $200 million in shared infrastructure needs?

Moonshot indeed! Across the region, yacht clubs are facing aging docks, marina upgrades, shoreline regulations, environmental compliance requirements, and facility modernization projects. Individually, each organization must navigate these complex projects with limited professional support.

But collectively, the scale is enormous. If even a fraction of these projects were coordinated or supported through a shared professional project office, clubs could gain access to expertise, standardized processes, and economies of scale. The cooperative model is common in other industries. It’s rarely explored in recreational marine infrastructure.

Could something like that exist in the Puget Sound sailing community? I don’t know yet. But that’s exactly what the 10% category is for. And if such a cooperative ever came into existence, Disruption Dynamics would be well positioned to help operate or support that project office.

The Weekly Review

This portfolio isn’t a static plan. It’s a working tool. Every weekend I review it and ask a few simple questions:

• What actually moved forward this week?

• What stalled, and why?

• What should I stop doing entirely?

Small businesses don’t need elaborate strategy processes. But we do need deliberate choices about where our attention goes. Without that discipline, the urgent always replaces the important.

Try It Yourself

If you run a small business, try writing down your own 70/20/10 portfolio. You may quickly discover two things:

Your 70% work consumes nearly all of your time, and your 10% ideas rarely get attention.

That’s normal. The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is simply to make sure you’re placing a few intentional bets on the future while still running the business that exists today. Because in small businesses, the future doesn’t arrive through strategy documents. It arrives through experiments.

If you’re part of a marina, yacht club, or marine organization wrestling with infrastructure projects or complex initiatives, I’d love to hear what challenges you’re seeing. The sailing community is sitting on some very interesting opportunities right now.

Let’s compare notes.