Lines On The Paper
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Thom started Pizza Pilgrims believing everyone wanted what he wanted: a blank sheet of paper and total autonomy. He also deliberately hid the numbers from managers, on the theory that the fun bit is running the party and the P&L is the boring bit. Both assumptions were wrong. He found that roughly ninety percent of people don't want a blank page — they want some lines on it, a couple of headers, and a clear picture of what success looks like. Numbers, it turned out, don't constrain people; they free them, because labour percentage and productivity are how you can tell a struggling team from a flying one. The framework is to draw the lines — targets, budgets, definitions of success — while explicitly labelling them guides rather than pass/fail bars, and to push spending authority down to whoever faces the customer.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Stop assuming your team wants your autonomy
Founders project their own love of the blank page onto everyone else. Thom's experience — echoed by Ali with his own team — is that people want autonomy plus direction, and specifically want to know what success looks like to you.
Pro tip Ask directly. The question that exposes the gap is usually 'what's the budget?'
- 2
Stop shielding people from the numbers
Thom spent a long time learning the finances and then keeping them away from managers so they could 'run the party'. He now considers this backwards: numbers tell everyone what good looks like and let a team see whether they're flying or struggling.
Pro tip Labour percentage against revenue is his tell for whether a site's team is happy and competent.
Watch out Learning the numbers late is expensive. Thom had never heard of a P&L or VAT when he started and calls that his biggest gap.
- 3
Give each owner an actual number
If someone is the CEO of their department, they need a figure. Ali's team asked for a budget and got 'unlimited', which nobody believed; sitting down and setting an explicit number — 100k rather than a million — was what unlocked them.
- 4
Label the number a guide, not a target
Say out loud that going over isn't a failure and coming under isn't a win. Thom wants people to say 'this is outside the budget but it'd be amazing' rather than killing a game-changing 200k opportunity because the line said 100k.
Pro tip State the malleability at the same moment you state the number, or the number will be read as a ceiling.
Watch out A hard finish line changes people's energy the moment they hit it — John Timpson's objection to budgets entirely.
- 5
Leave real blank space inside the lines
The lines are a frame, not a fill-in-the-blanks form. Thom's rule is to make absolutely sure there's genuine blank space for people to fill — the vast majority want a framework to work in, not a script.
- 6
Push spending authority to the customer-facing person
Thom's model from John Timpson's 'upside down management': the most important person in the business is the one serving the customer, and they should have the authority to fix things — at Timpson, up to £500 of company money with no approval process.
Pro tip Pair the authority with upside — Timpson stores keep a third of everything above their weekly sales target.
In the wild
Ali told his YouTube, podcast and social leads he wanted them to be the CEOs of their own departments. The immediate question back was: what's the budget? His first answer was effectively 'unlimited', which the team rejected — spend two million and there'd obviously be a problem, so there was a real number and they needed it. Sitting down and setting it explicitly, at around 100k, changed things: people now knew what they had to play with and could act without checking in.
→ Autonomy became usable rather than theoretical once the line was drawn and named as flexible.
Thom and his brother spent a long time learning the financial side, then deliberately kept it from restaurant managers on the assumption that nobody wants the boring bit and the managers should be left to create a party atmosphere. He now says that's 'so not true' — the numbers are precisely what lets a manager see whether their team is delivering, and reading productivity from afar is how he can spot a happy site from a struggling one.
→ Reversed the policy: numbers now function as a shared definition of success rather than a founder-only secret.
Common mistakes
Confusing autonomy with an absence of direction
Handing someone a blank page and saying 'do it your way' reads as abandonment to most people. They want the freedom, but they also want to know what you'd count as success.
Protecting the team from 'boring' financials
Withholding numbers doesn't make work more fun, it makes it unmeasurable. Thom found the numbers free people up by showing them what good looks like.
Letting the budget become a wall
If the number is treated as a hard limit, a genuinely game-changing 200k opportunity gets dismissed because the budget said 100k. Say explicitly that the figure is a guide and that beating it isn't a crime.
From the transcript
“numbers just free everyone up to know like what success looks like”
“the vast majority want some kind of framework to work in”
“It's it's a guide. It's a guide. It's not like the target.”
From the episode
“I Quit My Job And Built A $10M Pizza Business” - Thom Elliot Founder of Pizza Pilgrims
Thom Elliot