Hugo Cutrone.
Hugo Cutrone – Managing Partner, Avenue C
Every time I hear someone say “we’re building the plane while flying it,” I roll my eyes and reach for the life jacket. It sounds bold, but really it just signals there’s no plan. It also signals a team that has little care for the people on board. Nobody in their right mind would board a half-built plane, yet in boardrooms people nod along as if it’s wisdom.
I’ve been in those rooms, felt the knot in my stomach but kept quiet and regretted it. I’ve seen what happens next: campaigns rushed out with no real direction, teams working ridiculous hours to patch problems that never should have existed and the clean-up is always more expensive than getting it right upfront.
I grew up in an Italian household where waste was never tolerated, If you left food on your plate, you got the look. Spent money carelessly, you got the “more money than brains” speech. Waste time… forget about it. That’s why this phrase gets under my skin. To me it’s waste dressed up as swagger.
But the deeper issue is this: “building while flying” isn’t just sloppy, it’s risk-averse. It gives cover to skip strategy and hide in the short term, taking quick wins that mean little in lieu of long term vision. It’s easier to optimise what’s measurable, more traffic & more click-throughs than to commit to the harder, longer-term job of building a brand. That’s the irony: the line sounds reckless, bold and exciting but it’s really the safest play in the room. And safe in this case means stagnant. The brands that grow aren’t the ones sprinting from one tactical execution to the next, they’re the ones that balance short-term performance with long-term brand building. Yet in Australia, like in many markets, the bias has shifted heavily toward the quick win, and long-term thinking is being quietly abandoned. If you build it while you are flying, you’ll typically settle for what you know has worked previously, rather than taking the risk on something new and planned out.
The market doesn’t wait and neither do competitors, which is why at Avenue C we move fast but we do it with intent. The difference is clarity. You set the destination, you know what success looks like, you line up the tools to measure progress, and then you go. That’s not slow, that’s smart. The best operators I’ve worked with don’t confuse chaos with agility. They pause just long enough to figure out what matters, then they go hard. And maybe it means sitting on the tarmac for an extra 10 minutes, but the flight is smooth.
So the next time someone says “we’re building while flying,” don’t nod along. Call it what it is: short-term thinking dressed up as bravery. Without strategy you’re not building anything, you’re just burning money.