Your “strategy” isn’t what you think.
It’s not your plan.
On this I happen to agree with Mr. Martin, though we both partly disagree with Mr. Webster.
Webster never ran your business. We’re in Quarter Four, and if you’re like a lot of companies you’ve been making plans: You’re looking over where you’ve been, you’re naming issues and whiteboarding challenges, and you’re setting your priorities for the next 3 months.
You’ll turn priorities into goals with actions, milestones and next steps. You’ll delegate.
If you’re lucky, this means you’ll have better movement in your business.
Movement in what direction?
That’s what strategy is supposed to tell you.
STRATEGIES ARE LIKE DIETS
Everybody has one, but not everybody knows which one they have.
Your diet might be on purpose or by accident. The point might be “find out what’s causing stomach cramps” or it might just be “stay alive.”
Either way, it gets you what you’ve got.
A central premise of my work is that your marketing problems aren’t being caused by marketing, just like stomach cramps aren’t being caused by your stomach.
It’s the strategy, stupid.
But – what does that actually mean?
Your strategy’s not a list of actions. Marketing strategy’s not a list of all the ways you’re going to market. “Radio, conferences and Instagram” might be your plan.
It’s not your strategy.
Here’s what strategy is, what strategy does, and how to make one if you want one.
STRATEGY IS CHOICE IN CONTEXT
Let’s take chess: Perhaps you like to move your pawn first, then your knight and then your bishop. Those are actions. That’s your plan.
Your strategy ties this plan together; it’s a choice about how every move should fit in context with the other moves.
You might want pieces in the center of the board, or you might set up to attack the center from afar. Those are two different strategies – both valid, both coherent.
Or you might move piece by piece, as the mood strikes you, without thinking where your other pieces are. That’s strategy too – just not a good one. Every move seems right by itself, but in the context of the other pieces it’s unhelpful. Rooks aren’t helping knights. The pawns are doing their own thing.
That’s strategy, but it’s incoherent. And it’s going to lose.
Chess players need to pick the strategy they think gives them the best shot at success; they do this by examining their opponent and the pieces currently in front of them. The context.
Your business has a lot more context to consider than a game board does.
That’s why it’s fun! And also why you’re nuts for thinking so.
Making the best strategic choice in chess is hard. In business, it’s downright impossible.
So you want to shorten your odds as much as possible.
POSITION IS THE BIGGEST PIECE
Strategy is choice in context. More specifically, in business: Strategy is several choices, in context of one another.
The biggest choice, the most important piece you play in business strategy, is position. Your position answers two things:
What space do we move in?
For what reason will we succeed there?
Two weeks ago I called the answer to these questions your category and your differentiator. They are inseparable choices: What makes you succeed depends on where you are looking for success. And where you look depends on what you’re planning to do.
Taken together, these two answers form your business’s position.
Last week I offered to help you find your position using AI optimization as a starting point. That offer had its own position:
What space does the offer move in?
AI visibility audit
For what reason will the offer succeed there?
Most AI visibility audits assume you already know your position and just want to tell AI about it. I’m helping you find your position.
If your marketing’s going to have much effect, the positioning of each individual offer needs to tie into the positioning of your business overall. (Mine is “strategy-first marketing agency,” so this offer fits.)
Want to get clearer about your own position?
Start by trying to answer these four questions:
➡️ Who do we sell to?
➡️ What kind of business would that person say we are? (Hint: What budget line do they use to pay you?)
➡️ If they don’t hire us, what alternative do they have?
➡️ Why would they choose us instead of that alternative?
These questions will get you to some version of the “category and differentiator” answers above. They are a first pass at your position.
That’s the heart of your strategy. But there’s more.
THE OTHER PIECES MUST AGREE
In my experience, most messaging exercises at most marketing agencies fail. This is because they try to find position. They have to, because your marketing message comes from your position.
But to actually work, your position has to line up with the other parts of your strategy:
➡️ Vision: What does success look like for your company?
➡️ Strengths: What is your company especially good at?
➡️ Structures: What assets and systems do you have to support your work?
These pieces provide context to the positioning piece: Vision defines success; position tells you how you’re going to achieve that success. Strengths say what it will take to occupy the position you want, and structures make you able to take that position.
Each of these is a choice.
And each choice must be made in context of the other choices.
Having your marketing agency work on message or position without letting them touch the other parts of strategy is like having them move the queen without seeing any other pieces on the chess board. It won’t work. It’s out of context.
Context can help too, though. Not sure what your position should be? Start by looking at your unique strengths and proprietary structures.
Not sure your position will make you successful as you’ve defined it? Pick a different position! Or change your definition of success!
You control all four of these pieces, so your job is to change them until they all work in context. Until you have a coherent strategy.
But not just any coherent strategy.
One that’s going to work.
TO CHOOSE A STRATEGY, MAKE STRATEGIES
At the chessboard, the grandmaster already knows a bunch of strategies that could work. She isn’t making them up for the first time.
You might be. That’s why business is so insane awesome.
But just like the grandmaster, the best way to choose is to have choices.
Work out a vision, position, strengths and structures that all line up. Tell yourself a story about how the position, supported by the strengths, could lead you to success as you’ve defined it.
Then work out another. And another.
Your job in strategy is to choose the story that seems most likely to be true – and, we should add, that you can also live with.
Once you’ve got a few coherent sets of choices, you can test them. You can do the research. You can ask, “how likely is it that this story becomes real?”
Then you can make your choice.
Lining up pieces and helping your team decide between them is my favorite part – so if you need outside insight on that, you know where to find me.
I am about to sell you something.
But let’s see if I can teach you something, too.
Not how to sell. But how to listen to your market and create a thing you think they want, and offer it, and find out if it works.
This is what entrepreneurs do: We’re like scientists. Our hypotheses are products; our experiments are offers.
Is this product true? we ask.
Then we design an offer, pitch it to the market and find out.
You are the market.
Here’s the pitch.
NOW MORE THAN EVER
Last week’s Just Business email had the most replies I’ve ever had.
Read it here, if you missed it. But the gist was this:
➡️ Search engines like Google don’t send traffic to your website any more.
➡️ Instead, they tell your customer about you and your competitors – right there in the AI window.
➡️ Upshot: Your customer chooses between you and someone else. Without visiting anybody’s website.
The risk here is that AI doesn’t mention you at all. You’re not even in the conversation.
The opportunity is that someone could get in the conversation who didn’t used to be – not because they’re the market leader or sink tens of thousands into SEO, but just because they’re interesting.
That someone could be you.
Last week I called this being “listworthy,” and it’s not just about how big you are or how optimized your website is – though those things still matter like they always have.
But something else matters now, too: What sets you apart from other companies that do what you do?
The answer to this question is the key to your positioning. It’s always been the heart of your whole business strategy. It’s always been a part of why your clients choose you.
But now, it’s a part of how your clients find you too.
That makes positioning matter more than ever.
YOUR UNSOLICITED ADVICE
I don’t have a big email list.
But a ton of you replied to last week’s email. You told me your own positioning, or you asked a question. You said thank you. You asked for a link to share.
At least two of you told me my headline was terrible and almost stopped you from reading any more.
Every one of those replies is a great compliment. Any time somebody bothers to engage at all, you know you’ve hit a nerve.
Jay Acunzo calls this “unsolicited response rate” – a measure of the number of people who responded to your content without being told to. It’s a made-up metric (but they all are, right?) that reminds us of a deep, important truth:
The best way to see what people care about is to watch what they do when they can do whatever they want.
Nobody had to hit reply, but many did. My URR was around 5% last week.
That’s massive.
That’s you saying I piqued your interest.
That’s you telling me “positioning for AI” is a thing that makes you act.
And that’s my cue to try and sell you something.
LET’S EXPERIMENT
Conveniently, positioning is something I have done for 20 years. I love it.
The “for AI” part is new – for every person on the planet, if they’re being honest. There are tools to do the research and I know how, but I’m going to get better and better as I do it.
I want that.
So I yesterday I built an offer, and it goes like this:
If you give me an hour, a few dollars and a little trust,
I’ll tell you how AI is understanding you,
I’ll help you decide how you WANT it to understand you,
and I’ll give you marketing copy and an action plan to make that happen.
That’s it. That’s the pitch.
I’m calling this the “AI positioning sprint,” and you can read the step-by-step on this webpage.
It’s going to take a day or two of my time and an hour of yours. Experience and a little research tell me this is worth something like $2500 – but this is an experiment, remember. I’m finding out (1) if my market wants to buy a thing like this, and (2) if I can deliver it as efficiently as I think I can.
In experimentation mode, the data is as valuable as the money.
So I’m pricing this at $600 for the first person who says “yes.”
And then I’m raising the cost every time I book the service, until people stop saying “yes.”
At that point I’ll know a lot more about what people want and what they’re willing to pay for it. I’ll know if delivering on this offer is fun, if it leads to the kinds of work and relationships I like. And I’ll know if it’s long-term profitable.
I get the data.
And a couple of you get clear, fast positioning, built with AI in mind, fast, for cheap.
How am I doing?
QUALITY IS NOT A VARIABLE
I’m using the science analogy in this email, so I should make one thing clear before I go: If you hire me to do this, doing it is not an experiment.
Your positioning is a thing I’ve done already many times. I have a process. I’m not taking your cash and fooling around.
This offer – the email you’re reading right now, and the landing page that clarifies it – that’s the experiment.
Proven work. Unproven offer.
A person buying or not buying tells me something about what people do or do not buy. In business, that’s the thing you want to know.
So go ahead. Tell me.
If the AI positioning sprint sounds like a thing you want to pay for, sign up from this page.
If not, don’t.
The data’s helpful either way.
Is AI search a threat to your business — or a massive opportunity?
We’re in the middle of a seismic shift in how people find the products they buy, the firms they hire and the services they pay for.
That shift coincides with the arrival of AI as the dominant search tool. But to be honest, it’s about more than AI. It’s about how big tech has decided to do business.
The Internet’s become less open.
What I mean by that: Whatever website you’re on is far less likely to want you to click over to a different website than it used to be. LinkedIn tries to keep you on LinkedIn, Reddit tries to keep you on Reddit, and ChatGPT tries to keep you in ChatGPT.
Maybe most important: Google tries to keep you on Google.
All the large platforms would rather answer your client’s question on their own website than send your client to your site. Result: Most websites have a lot less traffic now than last year.
To me, this sounds like bad news for open competition and healthy, non-monopolistic capitalism.
But – I’m starting to think it could be good news for which kinds of businesses are able to get discovered. Especially if those businesses are doing something genuinely different.
Like pursuing justice.
THEY DECIDE BEFORE THEY MEET YOU
In the next few minutes, I want to show you why AI and “zero-click” search change the way clients make decisions, why that might be an advantage for certain companies, and what you need to do to leverage it.
First, we need to understand how Internet searches used to work – and what has changed.
If you’re looking for something online, you probably go through two steps:
➡️ Get a list of possible solutions
➡️ Compare those solutions and pick one
In an old-school Google search, the first step happened on Google. You’d type “all-natural deodorant” into the search engine, and you’d get a list of websites.
The second step happened on company websites. You’d click a few of Google’s suggestions and take the second step – comparison – for yourself.
Now both steps happen right on Google.
Search for “all-natural deodorant” and you don’t just get a list of websites – you get Google’s AI summaries of a few deodorant brands, along with information to help you compare them.
Then the AI will say something like “tell me about your daily routine so I can help you find the best deodorant for you.”
This is a dramatic re-ordering of the buying process.
Users don’t search, visit your website, then choose. They search, then choose, then visit your website.
Decisions happen right there on the search page.
With an AI guiding the buyer instead of you.
A ROBOT INTRODUCED US
Your deodorant’s still going on a human armpit, so your marketing still needs to convince a human.
The new part is that you must convince a machine first.
AI provides the list. AI decides who’s worth putting on the list. And AI summarizes how the companies on the list are different so the user can decide which one’s for them.
Without a click.
This is a literal game changer. In the game of search marketing, we tried to “rank” for certain searches so our websites would land high on Google’s list. Higher rank meant more clicks.
In the game of zero-click marketing, we try to get AI to put us on the right lists – and to argue effectively on our behalf to the human audience.
In this game, as the head of MECLABS put it on a webinar the other week, “clarity trumps persuasion.”
Persuading visitors with pretty graphics, an emotional video or exotic language won’t work until those visitors get to your website. But if your website’s not clear enough for AI to confidently recommend it, then they simply never will.
The big shift as I see it:
➡️ Search in the AI era isn’t about your keywords. It’s about your stance.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
A PAIR OF QUESTIONS AND A PAIR OF BRIEFS
To recommend your business, AI needs your answer to two questions:
➡️ what lists do you belong on?
and
➡️ what makes you different from the others on that list?
Take an example: Men’s Y-fronts. (I know, I choose the best examples.)
If you need man-panties and for some reason you ask AI’s help, it starts by noticing what you DON’T want: No boxers. No thongs. No blue jeans.
AI’s only going to suggest things that belong on the “men’s Y-fronts” list. It needs things that are the same.
But that’s a long list, so your robot pal must now decide which ones are worth a mention to you. It does that by figuring out what sets the items on the list apart. It needs ways they are different.
Mine split the skivvies up by budget: I was offered a $26 pair of Jockeys and some Ron Dorffs that cost twice that. (One AI even offered me a $120 dollar pair of underpants. Good gracious.)
An old-school search might have returned dozens of options, with no information about how they’re different. Today’s search gave me just a few, and it put them on a spectrum.
It asked, “Do you want affordable smallclothes, or the pricey kind?”
It told me how to choose.
BE THE SAME. BE DIFFERENT.
Marketers have sophisticated names for answers to the questions above.
“What list are you on?” is your market category.
“What makes you different?” is your market differentiator.
In an old-school search, your market category was what got you on the Google list. It might pull up a dozen or a million options in the “Y-fronts” category, then list them in order of popularity or some other inscrutable mystery rule.
With AI search, the category still matters – but so does the differentiator.
My search got two or three suggestions. Jockey made the cut, but “me too” companies that are similar to Jockey didn’t warrant mention.
I’d never heard of Ron Dorff, but I know them now – not because they make Y-fronts, but because their Y-fronts are an alternative to Jockey’s Y-fronts.
Ron Dorff has a view. A stance.
They make what Jockey makes. But Jockey thinks I need to gird my loins affordably, while Ron Dorff thinks I should swaddle them in luxury.
Gemini, the AI model that powers Google’s AI mode, finds that distinction interesting enough that it told me to frame my choice around it.
It didn’t ask if I want Jockey or Ron Dorff; it asked if I want cheap or pricey.
Jockey and Ron Dorff just made it clear that those spots are the spots in which they stand.
TAKE YOUR STAND
Here’s how the game is changing, then:
Businesses used to tell machines what made us the same as others — then tell customers how we were different from others. Now, we have to tell machines how we’re the same AND different.
That means being crystal-clear about our differntiators in a way that, frankly, most companies just haven’t done.
If someone asks what makes your company special and your answer is “great service” or “high-quality work,” that’s not enough for an AI to choose you over 1000 other companies who say the same things. Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT would never ask a user “do you want good service, or bad service?” It’s not a decision factor.
You are not listworthy.
If you want to get mentioned like Ron Dorff got mentioned, you need to believe something other reasonable people in your industry do not believe.
You need an opinion.
“Underwear should cost as much as personal electronics,” is an opinion.
“Work should be good,” is not.
We’re almost done.
THAT’S YOUR OPINION, MAN
Most business owners are too scared to let their business take a stance.
They’ve learned - not wrongly - that staying out of trouble is a good way to avoid risk and protect the things they’ve built. They want to be for everyone.
If you’re for everyone, you’re really for the status quo.
A justice-seeking business isn’t. If you’re trying to fix the system or make your community better, you’ve already owned that something needs to change.
You’re counter-cultural. You’ve made choices other reasonable companies might not.
Those choices might or might not add up to your value proposition. But they do suggest a stance. You’re willing to own both your sameness and your differentness. You’ve got opinions.
Your next step is figuring out how they make you listworthy.
➡️ When I start new strategy work, there’s one question I always ask to help a company find its stance. Curious? DM me with the word “question.” I’ll send it to you.
Your sales messiah isn’t coming.
So build a business that doesn’t need one.
HOW YOU MAKE IT
At some point, your business had a founder. Either they were
Naturally, luckily pretty good at selling
Willing to struggle and ask for help until they GOT good at selling
Able to hire someone right out of the gate to do the selling
Either way, two things were true:
Your company got sales (it wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t)
and
Whoever got those sales for you was, or became, or came to be viewed as, kind of a superstar.
Essential. Central. Irreplaceable. That’s the place of money to a business, and so that’s the place of the money-getter, the revenue-creator, the rainmaker, in the business.
That’s a problem, though.
HOW MAKING IT UNMAKES YOU
Somewhere north of $1M in annual revenue, most organizations need sales help.
Maybe it’s sooner. Maybe it happens well past $1M. But it happens.
If you grow enough, you need a second salesperson, then a third, and so on.
And what you find is your superstar, your first salesperson, outsells all the new folks. You can’t duplicate that first success.
Overall, your sales get worse.
You hit a slump. The instinct is to seek a silver-bullet hire, a hero, a messiah of moolah to come work for you and save you.
That first salesperson crushed it, after all. If these new people can’t, they must be the wrong people! Surely there’s another person out there who can rock the top line; you just need to find them.
That’s what you think.
Most companies try this, and most seasoned sales directors will tell you how often “miracle hires” end up creating miracles: Roughly zero percent of the time.
Your people aren’t your problem.
Your problem is: Your company DNA’s not built to scale. In business there are things that first salesperson, who is usually the founder, does that no one else can do – and not because they’re great at sales. Because they’re first.
When you grow, and your second and third and fourth salespeople can’t do those things that first person did, you start to notice gaps in strategy – gaps that didn’t matter with one person, but they really do with five. Gaps that slow sales for everyone who’s not the founder.
Here is why that happens, what those strategy gaps are, and how you can diagnose them.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARLY
Your first salesperson was the founder – or was authorized to more or less behave as if they were.
They had three superpowers:
They could change your offers on the fly, without saying “let me get back to you.”
They had personal ownership of your work because they’d been “there from the beginning.” Clients felt that.
They were doing market research live, in real time – hearing from clients and perfecting language on the fly until they found what works.
All this adds up to one thing:
Your first salesperson authored your positioning.
Your positioning is your company’s answer to two questions:
1️⃣ What business are we really in?
2️⃣ What sets us apart there?
Your positioning is the heart of your whole business strategy. Not just marketing, not just sales – all of it.
At first it’s a moving target.
But the more you hear from clients about what matters, the more you can fix positioning in a way that helps you win.
Your first salesperson did that, probably for years.
That work lived in their head.
Where no one else could get it.
OUT OF MY HEAD
A company of any size will struggle if positioning lives in someone’s head.
You have to pull it out, put it on paper, and choose consciously into it.
You have to make sure it lines up with the other parts of strategy – with your vision of success, with your unique strengths and with the systems your business runs on.
Going through this exercise, pulling positioning out of people’s heads and talking through it and agreeing on it, will probably change it in the same way turning an idea about a whale into Moby Dick changed that idea. It’s not a rebirth or a rebrand exactly, but it is creative.
You are naming what your company is, and you are choosing what your company should be. You are owning your success – not merely hoping for it.
This takes courage.
And it’s fun.
And when you’re done, when you’ve named where you stand and what you stand for and how you will make the change your company’s here to make – someone can turn that into messaging.
And then everyone can say the same thing. So they can sell consciously the way that first salesperson sold unconsciously.
1. REALITY GAP
I think of strategy as a tower; when the bricks don’t line up everything you do gets wobbly.
If your business has some wobble, check for gaps.
The first gap to look for is a gap between positioning and strengths – in other words, between how your company thinks about itself and how it actually gets things done.
Reality gaps are common in a company with a dreamer at the helm. If you’ve got one, you’re like one of those big dogs that believes it’s a small dog. You knock things over. Sometimes people, too.
You won’t know if you’ve got this gap.
But you’ll see symptoms:
Sales performance is all over the place
You negotiate a lot on price
The question “what do you do?” gets a different answer every time
When salespeople sense that what the company talks about isn’t what their prospects really care about, they write their own script. Results vary.
2. SYSTEMS GAP
Maybe your company knows what it’s about – but lacks the tools to live it out effectively.
Clients like you, but prospects don’t see the value
You track revenue; you don’t track the actions that produce it
Referrals never seem to happen
The company with a systems gap is doing the right things in the wrong way; it’s got bad habits or a broken CRM or an online presence it’s embarrassed by.
Salespeople are ill-equipped – or there’s no feedback loop to tell you how equipped they are.
You don’t know how you’re doing.
3. CULTURE GAP
Most people think of strategy as a thing for leadership to do. That isn’t right.
A culture gap means your sales team
Sees mission and vision as irrelevant
Resists offering new products or ideas; they stick with what works
Can get clients to trust them, but not trust the company
This is about more than communication; it’s about your people owning what they’re part of. Culture will embody your identity – or resist it.
Sales will show you symptoms, but the challenge is bigger.
If you’re interested in seeing how these strategy gaps show up in other areas of a business, try this Broken Strategy Bingo card.
If you could use some outside insight – you know where to find me.
5 ways a business can work for justice
Yes, business can work for justice.
What’s that look like? Let’s list possibilities.
There could be dozens, hundreds of ways on this list. Some so wildly specific that only one business could do it, and some so general that every business could try.
Listing 5 ways will barely scratch the surface.
That’s ok! Let’s scratch it.
But first – what do we mean by “working for justice,” anyway?
JUSTICE IS WHAT LOVE LOOKS LIKE IN PUBLIC
That’s how Dr. Cornel West has famously described it.
That word “public” is what interests us. When we say business can do justice, we’re talking about a business impact that is social. Wide. Communal. Shared. Repeatable.
We’re talking about systems, habits, norms.
The things many people do, over and over, every day.
The world is facing problems – lots of them! – that individuals didn’t cause alone and cannot solve alone. Systemic problems. Problems that aren’t caused by one person making one destructive choice, but by many people choosing many small destructive things repeatedly.
Because we are incentivized to do so.
For example: You can get rich ruining the planet. You can get popular by humiliating your detractors online. You can get ahead by leaving the poor behind.
And as long as those incentives exist, it’s a lot harder to ask people not to chase them.
Justice is about creating a world where crime doesn’t pay, where doing good also means you do well, and where things that help the many thrive long-term are also things the few want in the short term.
We don’t live in that world now, so we have to change it.
We must change how things work.
Sometimes, only business can do that.
TO CHANGE WHAT’S POSSIBLE, CHANGE WHAT’S PROFITABLE
It used to be impractical to buy a car that doesn’t pollute – because electric cars were bad cars, because they cost too much, and because there was nowhere to charge them.
So we kept buying vehicles that pollute.
And even Elon Musk, who’s now the most obscenely wealthy person on the planet, couldn’t change that.
Tesla could.
Tesla changed the system, which changed our incentives. Tesla committed to a strategy (make electric cars fun; sell them to people who don’t care about the cost) and that strategy helped them win. And Tesla winning actually changed the market.
Now I drive a Nissan Leaf.
I love the planet, ok, sure. But also – it costs less than pumping gas.
It didn’t used to; now it does. A business changed the system.
Sometimes business can’t affect that sort of change. But sometimes business can!
And sometimes, that change also makes the world more just.
That’s what we’re aiming for.
And how, specifically? Millions of ideas exist. There are a zillion places where the world needs justice, where a business might help bring the answer.
Here are five to get us cooking.
1. HELP EMPLOYEES THRIVE.
Let’s start with something anyone in any industry can aspire to: Pursue the flourishing of the people you see every day.
➡️ Pay living wages.
➡️ Offer health and family leave.
➡️ Foster a culture of mutual support.
Don’t be fooled; these three seem basic but they’re DIFFICULT. In some industries, competing while you pay a living wage sounds downright crazy.
Aspire nonetheless.
Tick these boxes – or pursue the change required to tick them – and you’re doing justice work.
2. HELP THE POOR ACCESS GOVERNMENT BENEFITS AS EASILY AS THE RICH DO.
Yeas ago, my friend Josh Turner built a business helping people apply for SNAP.
They’d pay him a flat fee; he’d submit food-stamp applications and navigate a complex government system for them.
This is what tax accountants do. But instead of helping wealthy people claim government benefits, Josh was helping hungry people claim them.
Our government spends far more on subsidies for the wealthy than the needy. But even the aid that does exist for needy families often goes unused because it’s hard to claim.
A business can make money fixing that.
Propel does. Their app helps millions monitor food-stamp benefits, hunt deals and generate income. Advertising partners pay, which keeps the app free.
As for my pal Josh – he closed his business years ago when his state literally passed a law to make his work illegal.
I don’t know the details. I do know that justice often meets resistance.
3. MAKE HOUSING AFFORDABLE.
The more some of us accumulate wealth by owning homes, the more others of us can’t afford a home at all.
This is a complex problem with a lot of issues. And a lot of creativity going into fixes:
➡️ ICON is literally 3D-printing homes to lower construction costs.
➡️ PadSplit converts existing family homes into co-living spaces, letting teachers, restaurant workers and the like live communally and affordably.
➡️ Here in my backyard, Harborlight Homes mixes property management with community advocacy. If you’re north of Boston, you can see how they turned an abandoned middle school into artists’ apartments next month.
➡️ My former client The Neighbor Project’s Breakthrough Rental model lets families recoup rent as savings for a home down payment.
Homes are more than housing – in the U.S., they’re about who holds the wealth. If you want more families to flourish, you already care.
4. GIVE THE POOR BETTER FINANCIAL OPTIONS.
One of the best ways to get rich is to find someone with no choice except to buy from you… and bleed them dry.
This is why you don’t see payday-lending programs in rich neighborhoods; people don’t put up with their predatory practices if there’s a better deal available.
A just business can create that better deal.
Payactiv is a for-profit company using factoring – a financial method that lets companies take advances out on money customers owe them – to let hourly workers draw advances on the wages they’ve already earned.
Payactiv’s work has brought about regulatory change, getting its model – which is called earned wage access (EWA) – classified as legally distinct from payday lending in several states.
That has the potential to shift norms across the industry.
5: TELL THE TRUTH.
At the heart of most persistent injustice is one idea: Some people deserve to thrive, but other people don’t.
This is a lie.
An individual can call out the lie, but businesses have ways to fight the truth war individuals don’t:
➡️ Through data. Up for Growth produces data used to fight economic segregation. NatureServe sells ecological data to developers who want (or are required) to protect biodiversity. PolicyMap sells demographic data to banks, to government agencies – and to the advocacy groups who scrutinize them.
➡️ By hiring equitably and diversely. It’s a lot harder to imagine “those people” don’t deserve respect or opportunity when you work side by side with them. Integration of all sorts decreases inequality.
➡️ In marketing and communications. Us marketers aren’t just storytellers; we’re the authors of the stories you hear more than any others.
Marketing can tell the truth – or something else.
I did say we would only scratch the surface.
There’s a lot of work to do – but lots is being done, too. Call me crazy, but this list inspires me. It gives me hope, and it makes me want to help.
Helping companies like this is why I’m here.
If this list inspires you, I’m glad you’re here too.
One thing you offer that AI can’t, ever
The incomparable first season of Ted Lasso starts with just the image above, antagonist Rebecca Welton’s face in steely close-up.
Ted Lasso is a riff on The Wizard of Oz. Ted comes from Kansas to the strange new world of British football, and Rebecca is his wicked witch.
The season even ends with him throwing water on her:
The gulf between these images – impervious, emotionless Rebecca at the start and reachable, receptive, selzer-soakable Rebecca at the close – is everything the show’s about.
Between the photos is Ted’s friendship with Rebecca.
And that friendship tells you everything you need to know about why you will always be worth more than any AI.
BUT FIRST: STORY STRUCTURE
I’m tying a lot together here, I know. But it will make sense.
First, let’s cover how to tell a story.
There are three parts:
At the story’s start, a person wants a thing.
In the story’s middle, they attempt to get it. But there’s opposition.
In the story’s end, the person gets the thing they want – but not despite the opposition. They get what they want because of it.
In well-told stories, friction – the antagonist, the fight – is HOW the hero gets the thing they want.
Because good stories are about growth.
And growth happens via struggle.
We want something, we fight for it – and that fighting forms us. This is what my toddler’s doing when she puts the wrong shoes on the wrong feet and won’t let me help her. It is also what my 80-year-old neighbor’s doing as she stands beside the road with a “No Kings” sign for two hours.
They’re both being formed through struggle.
If you’re trying to form an audience – clients maybe, or donors or employees – then inviting them to struggle alongside you is how you do it.
In other words: Tell them a story.
NO CHARISMA NECESSARY
Hollywood made the 3-act story formula; most of us have seen so many movies that we are drawn to it without even noticing.
Last June, my friend and client Mike Carpenter suggested we create something together about the entrepreneurial journey. We’re both business owners; could we use our similarities and differences to springboard conversations others would appreciate?
Neither of us had ever run a podcast. I thought we would benefit from a structure that we couldn’t screw up too badly.
Story was that structure.
We got in the weeds recording No Plan Survives; we shared details so specific to our own experience that they won’t apply to many listeners.
But the struggle will apply.
If our podcast is listenable – and I hope you’ll try – it’s not because we chose universal subject matter.
It’s because we chose a universal structure:
I tried this.
It went to hell.
Hell made me better.
That’s the stuff that’s kept us humans huddled around fires and glued to screens for generations. Humans love that stuff.
So it’s weird that, when we build businesses, we work so hard to leave out the best part.
TECH IS ANTI-FRICTION
No child ever asked to hear a bedtime resume.
The projects you completed, the wins you racked up – all dull, so dull. The best part of your story is the second act, when your plans went to hell.
You fought. You grew. The friction formed you.
Friction is what Ted gets from Rebecca – and it’s what your friends and clients get from you that LLMs won’t give. You have the chance to be their second act, the place they grow, their friction.
AI isn’t even trying.
The tech-biz approach to business, since tech business was a thing, has been to take the friction out. Amazon removed the friction from our shopping; Uber took it out of taxis. Google took it out of research.
You might think these plays were all about convenience – and that’s half-right, because inconvenience is a form of friction.
But it’s not the only one.
Was getting a taxi from the hotel’s front desk ever inconvenient? You just had to ask.
And asking was the friction.
Talking to another human can be hard; sometimes we’d rather not. Our neighbors come with their own needs and problems. Some of them are weird. You ask the guy at Ace Hardware for rivets and before you know what happened you are looking at grandkid photos.
Amazon search won’t do that to you. It’s not only faster; it’s less human.
Please don’t hear me saying I don’t like this. I’m so into it! I love one-click convenience.
But removing friction costs us something, too – and we’re just starting to sense how much.
I MISS THE FRICTION
AI feels like the “no human friction” idea turned up to max volume. Claude and ChatGPT and their cousins could act like machines; they don’t. Their builders made them use first-person pronouns and soothe egos and say “great idea!”
They act like people. Just not like real people.
Your LLM won’t make fun of you, won’t push back, won’t tell you when you’re behaving badly. It always reassures. It never runs out of patience.
I mean, not unless you ask. Ask Claude to criticize you and it will; it will take sterner tones or look for weak spots in your argument if you tell it to.
But that’s not friction. That’s still doing what you say.
Your AI friend’s a mirror, not a window. It can’t see the world differently from you – can’t see the world at all, in fact. It just reflects it.
That means you can’t be in conflict.
And if there’s no struggle, how will there be growth?
HOW TED GROWS
Here’s the 3-act structure of Ted Lasso Season 1:
1️⃣ Ted wants a family.
He is alienated from his wife, who finds his constant can-do attitude isolating.
Ted’s determined to prove the value of his optimism.
2️⃣ In English football, Ted the optimist is thrust into a world of misanthropes and cynics.
He fights back with kindness. Ted would like the team he coaches to win games – but mostly, Ted wants to win people.
Most of all he’d like to win the trust of the team’s owner, Rebecca.
So they struggle.
When Ted thinks he’s won her trust, a secret is revealed: Rebecca has been using him to sabotage the team.
She thought so little of him, she was sure he’d fail.
3️⃣ Ted forgives Rebecca.
In so doing, he both wins the family he has craved and proves the value of his optimism.
But – and this is key – Ted wins by going through Rebecca’s cynicism and addressing it, not by pretending it does not exist.
The world of cynics teaches Ted to be a better optimist.
Without Rebecca, he’s a fool who hides hard things behind cliches and cookies. But when his true self and her true self collide, he learns to face reality. Ted gets better.
If you want to offer something AI never will, then offer this.
Challenge your clients. Collide with friends.
Give them the gift of being different.
WITCHES WANTED
I’ve got Claude doing research for me and speeding up some tasks. It’s cool, I guess.
But I don’t want my young kids near it, and that tension troubles me.
I don’t buy Silicon Valley’s lines about how everyone will soon have perfect therapists and teachers. Give my kids imperfect, thank you. Give them weird lab partners, chatty cabbies and deskmates with insufficient hygiene.
Maybe the occasional mildly wicked witch.
I don’t want friction for my kids, but I’m aware they need it. I want them to grow.
I want to grow, too – and for that, we need the friction.
Our lives need to story.
Thanks for being in mine.
To hear more stories from me, subscribe to No Plan Survives. To share one of your own, find me here.
How to write a web page
Last week a prospective client asked me to explain how I would write their website.
I don’t really sell myself as a copywriter because, as any marketer will tell you, we’re supposed to sell the sizzle and not the steak.
And copywriting is the steak.
It’s basic. Yes, it’s full of protein (am I taking this analogy too far?) and calories (nah, we’re good). Your copy is your marketing’s actual meat, the substance, the part that tells people how to buy from you. Without it, you’ve got nothing.
But it isn’t sexy.
That’s why I tend to sell “strategy” or “branding” or “consulting,” or one of a lot of other terms that basically mean “I’m good at thinking about this stuff.”
But really, it’s all the same. Because good copywriting is good thinking.
And if you get better at copy, then the other things you do that require thinking – from selling and speaking to making plans and managing employees – will get better, too.
Here’s how I write.
FIRST, WRITING ISN’T WRITING
It’s curation.
Decide what your goal is.
Get all the ideas on the table.
Decide which ideas serve your goal.
Decide which order they belong in.
Put them in that order.
Decide what words best express them.
Did you see how many times the word “decide” showed up on that list?
This is why copywriting is the steak and not the sizzle. 90% of it is making choices – you choose what you want, what you think, how the things you think connect to what you want.
The writing process is the thinking-and-deciding process.
Below, I’ll walk you through that process as I shared with my client* on that call last week. If thinking and deciding are part of your work, maybe this will make you a bit sharper.
*hell yes, I got the job
THE STRATEGY HIDDEN IN YOUR WEBSITE
I love websites because they are the Trojan Horse of strategy discussions. Everybody thinks they’re talking about a bunch of html on a web server, so they lower their defenses.
But they’re actually talking about the way they understand their business.
The client who asked me to explain my process wants a website redesign. They don’t want new content or a new message; they want to be easier to find and buy from online.
So they asked me to write, not to strategize.
But it’s really the same thing.
A website rewrite is a purer way to get at strategy, in some ways – because all your questions have already been answered in the old site. The ideas have been gathered up into one place for you already.
When I work on strategy or rebrand a company, that’s not the case. I have interview leaders and salespeople to ask what the business means and how it needs to be positioned. We decide together.
In a website rewrite, they already made those choices. They’re saying, “don’t change our choices, just communicate them stronger.”
So I start by figuring out what choices they already made.
PERSON, ACTION, REASON
I look at the old website and ask the same 3 questions we ask every month on our Group Clarity calls:
➡️ What person is this page for?
➡️ What action do we want them to take?
➡️ What reason do they have to take that action?
These three things should be explicit.
When I say “explicit,” I mean you should literally be able to point to a set of words or sentences that answer the questions:
“This sentence says what they should do. This sentence says why.”
If I can’t answer these questions by looking at the old web page, then I decide for myself what action would be good or who is taking it or why. I make the choices my client didn’t make or didn’t communicate – then check those choices with them for approval.
This is strategy.
Once I am clear about the person, action and reason, I know what I’m being asked to build.
Now I can gather bricks to build it.
GET IDEAS IN PILES
Writers’ bricks are called ideas. I comb through the old web page, identify the ideas there and sort them into piles.
What piles? A framework helps here. For example, here’s Don Miller’s Storybrand framework:
Person (your client)
Problem
Plan
Guide (your company)
Action to take
Results they want
Results they don’t want
If you like Miller’s framework, you can sort the ideas on your client’s old website into those 7 piles. Maybe a section that lists your company’s qualifications is “guide” content, while a section that lists the benefits of your service goes under “plan.”
Usually, I do this and find holes.
Companies often talk about themselves and their product too much – so they’ll have lots of ideas in the “plan” and “guide” piles, but the person/problem/action piles are nearly empty.
Mostly, though, I’m not so worried about the size of the idea piles.
I’m worried about their sequence.
START WITH PAIN
Copy’s first challenge is getting anyone to read it. Companies blow this when they lead with “guide” or “plan” ideas, because they’re talking about themselves.
Readers don’t see how that relates to them, so they tune out.
Reverse it. Tell them why to care before you tell them what to care about.
Most of the time, an idea from the “problem” or “result” bucket justifies your page’s existence best. The trouble you solve, the pain it’s causing them or the pleasure they feel when that pain is gone – that’s usually your first sentence. Maybe even your headline.
From there, you weave a story – probably some benefits of the plan are next, then some guide info to prove you know what you’re talking about, then some more details of the plan.
Mention the action you want them to take up front. Remind them every scroll or two.
Go lighter than you think you need to on the guide stuff. Readers need to trust you, but your page is NOT about you.
It’s about your reader.
EASY ON THE SIZZLE
Think you’ve got your ideas in good sequence? Go ahead and choose the actual words to say them.
This part is the part my clients think of as “writing,” but I find it almost happens by itself if I’ve been focusing on the sequence of ideas.
In fact, my challenge isn’t choosing the most beautiful word – it’s avoiding the temptation to be beautiful or clever or write anything that gets in the way of the ideas.
The goal is not to write. It’s to be understood.
And you won’t actually know if you’ve achieved that without someone else’s help.
EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMEBODY
When you’ve got a draft, the best thing you can do is get some outside insight. Show a person who knows nothing about your business; can they name the person, action and reason behind what you’ve written?
You won’t know until you ask. The best marketers and the greatest writers don’t know. None of us knows what it’s like to be another person.
That’s what makes communicating hard – but why it matters, too. Your job’s not just expression. It’s connection.
Want to see how this unfolds in practice? We hold Group Clarity calls the first Friday of most months. Learn more here.
Your marketing needs a purpose, too
The most common marketing gripe I hear is not “this isn’t working.”
It’s a little worse than that.
Most CEOs and marketing leaders, when I ask them how they feel about their marketing, give me some paraphrase of “we do too much for too little result.”
➡️ They’re hustling too hard placing calls or making content, or
➡️ They’re spending too much for the leads they get, or
➡️ They feel like the important results are buried in glut of data their platforms (or their agencies!) bombard them with.
For many, marketing is a black box AND a black hole.
They’re not sure what’s going on inside that agency or on that ad platform. But it sure does keep sucking money.
YOU MADE ME FEEL SHINY AND NEW
It’s tough to solve this problem on your own – so lots of companies don’t. They know they have to market, so they pay and post and spin the hamster wheel and stay dissatisfied.
And then: The Next Idea.
Someone reads about another tactic: AI can do outreach! Tiktok has a store! My buddy’s company geotargets clients when they get within two blocks of his competitor!
That seems worth a try.
Our brains get high on new ideas, which may be part of why so many companies switch their agencies every two years and add another tactic every time their youngest intern tells them what the kids are into. A new possibility brings new dopamine. This time, it just might work!
It doesn’t work.
The black box grows; the black hole gets more vacuous. Marketing gets more pricey, more busy and more confusing. Results stay mostly “meh.”
If you’ve been there, this piece is for you. I want to argue that if marketing seems directionless, uncertain, underwhelming – yet another tactic isn’t going to fix that.
Because marketing tactics aren’t the problem.
You are.
I’LL STARE DIRECTLY AT THE SUN BUT NEVER IN A MIRROR
In the movie High Fidelity, flawed main character Rob Gordon has moved from relationship to failed relationship.
Rob owns a record store. He is a gifted critic – both of music and, alas, of people. But he can’t create. And he can’t see why every woman he dates winds up dumping him.
We might be worse. Novelist Nick Hornby created Rob in the mid-90s, before people scrolled from dopamine hit to dopamine hit on social media feeds much of the day.
In 2026, we’re more conditioned to seek out the new than even Rob was.
But “new” does not mean improved. Rob realizes this when he revisits past relationships to find out why they ended. He can only find one common factor.
Rob himself’s the problem.
Rob is awful. He resists commitment, dodges growth, avoids connection. He discusses art and music but refuses to discuss himself. He barely knows himself.
Your company’s probably not this bad. But if your marketing tactics multiply and fade like mayflies, it may be because your marketing doesn’t really know you.
You keep doing what you think you should. You follow others. You don’t market like yourself.
Your company has a purpose.
And your marketing needs to have one, too.
POP QUIZ, HOTSHOT
The point of marketing is to (pick one):
➡️ Build trust
➡️ Get noticed and remembered
➡️ Get leads to contact us
➡️ Get buyers to choose us
Pick your answer (I don’t care which!), then ask the next question.
Why do you deserve their trust?
Why would they notice and remember? Why should they reach out? What reason would they have for choosing you?
These questions are much harder because they’re about your business – as it is, or as it ought to be – and not some other business. Your team’s answers are your answers.
Once you have them, you may realize you’re not playing the same game as every other business in your industry.
And if you’re not playing the same game, you probably shouldn’t be running the same plays, either.
BUSINESS, KNOW THYSELF
My favorite High Fidelity line: “What really matters is what you like, not what you ARE like.”
It’s Rob Godon’s issues in a dozen words; he really thinks it’s better to know every album and artwork in history than to know himself.
It’s not. Your self is all you’ve actually got to offer.
If your marketing’s not a win, consider that your company may be running other people’s plays from other people’s games. Marketing with purpose doesn’t mean you post about your “why” or advertise your ethics – it just means you’re clear on what makes your company unique.
Stop following.
List what makes you special. Then tell yourself 3 or 4 stories about how these advantages could translate to success as you’ve defined it. What would have to happen? What would have to be true?
Choose the story that seems most likely to become true. That’s your strategy.
And it will drive marketing more effectively than swapping agencies or chasing dopamine hits ever will. eery 6 to 18 months.
And if you are the problem – then you’re going to be your best solution too.
I’m piloting a one-day strategy offer right now. Curious? Hit reply and write “strategy.” I’ll send details.
Moana is a heart-led CEO.
She’s consumed by the entrepreneurial urge – or the creative urge.
Same thing.
In the classic Disney film, Moana wants to go. She has a good life – systematized, secure, consistent. All her needs are met. Her Dad is in the island-chiefing business and wants her to follow.
“We need you,” he says. “Be smart. Bloom where you’re planted.”
Founders hear this all the time – from outside voices and from inside ones.
But we’re obsessed with the horizon.
To stay safe – as those who love Moana wish for her – would crush her. It denies her heart. The world can’t see her as she really is.
This wounds Moana.
Those she meets off of her island have the same wound: A demigod who tattoos over rejection with achievement. A giant crab who hides not just in armor but in sparkly social-media perfection. A fire monster, who, it turns out, is a nature goddess transfigured by rage.
The world has robbed them each of their true heart. It robs Moana, too.
She has no purpose statement – just a call, an urge for something different. But she heeds it. And in owning that identity, in leaving structures and security she knows, Moana finds her purpose: She’ll restore the island goddess’s heart. She’ll heal the world.
The world laughs, as it does at all with the audacity to try and change it.
At the low point of the film, Moana fails: The goddess’s hurt and her own doubt wash over her, and all is lost. The world is unmoved by her mission; she can’t make a dent. The problem is too great.
“I’m the wrong person,” she concludes.
Tell me I’m not the only founder who has felt this.
Those of us who trade the stable for the liminal have our reasons. Maybe you could name your company’s mission from the start, or maybe you’re like me and like Moana: You just felt a call and figured out the rest along your journey.
Either way, it wasn’t just your industry. It wasn’t opportunity. It wasn’t only that you saw a need in those your business serves.
It started with you.
You were insane enough to think that what was in you was worth letting out – and business was your boat. You sailed for your horizon.
And at some point, didn’t it all fall apart?
Did someone ask you to be sensible? Did the world fail to change? Were your grand dreams and visions met with shrugs?
How many times have you thought, “I’m the wrong person?”
In the movie’s climax, Moana doesn’t fix her tactics or rework her org chart or try harder. She doesn’t even find her “why.”
She finds herself.
“They have stolen the heart from inside you, but this does not define you,” Moana sings to the fire monster. She is singing to herself, too, and to all she’s met and fought and loved.
She heals them with five words:
“You know who you are.”
ABOUT THE IMAGE
Pictured above: The biggest Moana fan in my life (current age: 2.75).
She’s out the door most days and down the path before we can shout “shoes!” She sings Moana’s song as she goes, just the three words that she knows:
“It caaaalls meee!”
If it calls you too, I hope you heed it. May your work restore our hearts.
May you know who you are.
You can’t message your way out of a broken business.
Stories have archetypes.
In fantasy it’s the grumpy dwarf, the snooty elf, the hard-partying hobbit.
In romance: The bad boy, the dysfunctional parent, the hard-partying hobbit (again? weird).
Your business has them too: The risk-taking CEO, the operator who pokes holes in every idea, the hard-partying hobbit (kidding this time. Maybe.)
These archetypes are frequently in conflict; dwaves and elves and boys and parents and visionaries and finance wonks all see the world a little different. In a story this makes conflict, which keeps things exciting.
In a business? You could do without it.
Probably you want your people getting along, caring for each other and all rowing in the same direction. When a leader tells me, “my team needs a unified message,” typically that’s what they mean.
They want a more unified team.
And what I want to argue in the next few minutes is that while team unity is a worthy goal, a better message doesn’t get you there.
And I should know. I’ve tried.
ALIGNMENT CAN’T BE ARBITRARY
I’m being flip with the fiction references, but in a company this pain is real.
In businesses that aren’t aligned, marketing is always blaming sales for failing to close leads – while sales blames marketing for the leads being bad. Operations grumbles at them both, meanwhile, for making promises it can’t or doesn’t want to keep.
The CFO is sick of telling everybody no (or worse, she loves it). And the CEO can only get things done by pulling rank, overruling the objections and saying “look, we’re going to try this.”
Which leads to eye-rolls when that CEO leaves the room, a half-assed effort by the team to try what they already know won’t work, and finally – big surprise! – the ho-hum result they’d already decided was a foregone conclusion.
Was the plan wrong? Or was it that your people weren’t aligned on it?
You’ll never know.
A STATEMENT WON’T ALIGN YOUR ACTIONS
For 20 years, I tried to solve alignment problems like this with a marketing message.
Marketing is the hammer companies often reach for when they see the nail of internal disagreement. “We need a unified message,” someone says, and if I’m lucky they hire me to talk with leaders and with clients and uncover afresh what makes the company special. Then we try to can that lightning in a homepage or a video or a new division name.
It sometimes kind of works – but not for why you think.
A message, like a purpose statement, tries to name why you’re important so employees and clients can align around that.
But they don’t. Shared statements don’t align us humans.
Shared experiences do.
THAT CARPET GAVE ME JESUS
I grew up in churches; I’m still there. Us Protestants love to tell you that our faith is all about the Bible – that we read the words, believe them, and that unifies us.
Dozens of distinct traditions and tens of thousands of denominations kind of complicate that narrative, though, don’t they?
We’re not sitting here in perfect clear alignment on the Bible or on any creed. We are connecting on experiences: Sunday singing, service projects, meal trains, funerals, weddings.
This is how belonging forms. It’s why the blue-haired ladies at your childhood church were stirred to frothy fervor when someone dared to suggest a different carpet color. And it’s why my formative years were filled not just with Bible reading but with Bible study – a collective gathering in which our shared documents became shared experiences as we stumbled over them together.
Our pursuit of doctrine, even of God, is shared experience. Shared experience can align us.
When I lead a company’s leadership through a “unified message” exercise, it’s much the same. The process of defining and refining messaging is an experience: People share and listen in a way they haven’t for a while. They reconnect.
If anything about a messaging exercise can unify your team, it’s this.
It’s also not enough.
WE SAY SO WE CAN BE
When I revamp a company’s message, two or ten or 20 people speak into that process. But your company might have hundreds of employees.
If you want to be on the same page, you’re talking about a cultural change – not just a marketing change.
They need to hear you say what you’re about, yes. But they also need to experience it.
This is why my clients want a unified message: Not so they can say it, but so they can do it. So that clients and employees can experience the same thing, with consistency, year after year.
To build unity, you must experience what you’re about together.
Naming what you’re about lets you be more intentional about that. But it’s not necessarily your message.
It’s upstream from there.
THINK, THEN ACT, THEN THINK AGAIN
I’m shaping Hopeless Marketing to build strategic alignment within justice-seeking businesses – through dialog.
At smaller companies, that means dialog between me and a leader or two. At larger ones, it means my joy really is facilitating your dialogue with one other.
This isn’t cuddly or peripheral; it’s about building agreement on how you will be successful so you then can do it.
Two things: How you’ll be successful, and agreement on it.
You need both.
And neither is your message. Messaging comes after, as part of the working out. Communication is an action.
If that action isn’t feeling right to you, it’s not a sign to take a different action — but a sign to stop and think. Because communication’s not the only action people in your company take. It isn’t even the biggest one.
Seeking alignment means we think together, then we act together.
Then we learn - and think - and act again.
CONFLICT IS OPPORTUNITY
It matters that you put strategy first because a message is just what you’ll say – but strategy is both what you’ll say and what you’ll do. It’s your framework for turning purpose into actions.
And those action are what build your unity long-term.
Conflict is an opportunity to build that. Different views on your team can be an advantage; disagreement wants to teach you something. The hard-partying hobbit has perspective for you.
Want help finding it? You know where to find me.
Next week: “Moana.”
The CEO with nothing to sell – but hope
Last week we looked at how, when justice-oriented companies build marketing around their purpose, it’s an advantage for a few – and a trap for most.
Today I’m introducing you to a CEO with nothing to offer but her company’s purpose.
By unpacking what works for her, you may see something that would work for you too.
SOMEDAY, WE’LL BE EVERYWHERE
To clarify: Nathalya Mamane could make her audience a lot of money.
She’s the founder of Anywhere DX, a biotech startup here in Boston developing at-home diagnostics. First goal: A single-use strep test you can take from your medicine cabinet, saving parents and kids a trip to urgent care.
That’s not a small idea.
It’s massive, actually. It’s the next Band-Aid or Children’s Tylenol, a product every parent on the planet might buy like clockwork for a decade-plus. It’s a world-changing concept with a world-sized customer base.
But that’s the long-term opportunity.
Investors you’d expect to want a piece of that long-term return have been reluctant to jump on. And the investors who’ve been eager to get in aren’t focused on the long-term gain.
They’re writing checks with something other than profit in mind.
In the next few minutes, I want to show you what Nathalya’s learned about the people who most readily give her cash, how that has altered her approach – and what you might take from that if you also run a business that thinks of investor returns in a way that transcends money.
“EVERY INVESTOR IS A CONSUMER”
Nathalya hatched the Anywhere idea during the pandemic – which turned out to be precisely the wrong time.
At-home diagnostics boomed during COVID, leading to a glut of at-home testing companies. Inevitably, many failed to execute. As the pandemic receded, so did investor trust.
Institutional investors became risk averse just as Nathalya’s team was reaching out. They were skeptical of anything with “at-home diagnostic” in the pitch. And they didn’t see the urgency of something like an at-home strep test.
Ordinary parents got the pitch immediately, though. They weren’t seeing as investors, but as buyers. Anywhere DX was building tech they wanted.
They were willing to invest to get it.
IT’S NOT ABOUT WHAT I GET
The shift to a consumer-as-investor angle meant a presence on crowd platform WeFunder, where Nathalya’s company is nearing the end of a $300k investment round made up of ordinary people.
Naturally, she looked at Kickstarter – where pre-sales of non-existing products are the norm. She made a similar promise: Invest now and be the first to get our strep tests when they hit the market.
But as conversations multiplied and Nathalya grew to understand investors, she began to think she’d misattributed their motives.
She’s got nearly 100 of these angel investors – some in for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, some for mere hundreds.
None of them, she’ll tell you now, is doing it for the money.
They’re on board for something else.
THEIR OWN SELVES-INTEREST
You can watch the condensed version of my chat with Nathalya above – it’s about 15 minutes, and honestly kind of an adventure.
I asked if offering the product early was what got ordinary people to invest.
She said, essentially, I doubt it.
So we explored what people’s motives might be. Who puts down money when a company has no product, when the payback is uncertain – and at small enough amounts that even if the payoff does come it won’t be life-changing?
I think Nathalya’s right – it’s not about me getting the product for myself; that benefit’s too small, too far away and too uncertain to open up my pocketbook.
But this isn’t simple charity either.
What I think motivates Anywhere DX’s angels is something between self-interest and pure altruism. It’s solidarity. It’s a sense that what I need is part of what we need.
The right person becomes motivated by collective need in a way that they aren’t by personal individual need.
And knowing how to recognize that person can help any of us aspiring to just business.
3 SIGNS OF A SUPPORTER
The small-but-passionate investors Nathalya told me about had a few things in common:
They’ve seen the effects of the problem she’s trying to solve at a community level.
They belong to – or feel responsible for – one of the communities affected by that problem.
They can put an individual face on the problem.
We spent a while talking about one school teacher who invested $200 in Nathalya’s business. Most educators aren’t flush with cash, and the eventual payday from investing $200 probably won’t change that. This person doesn’t even need an at-home strep test for herself.
So why invest?
Because she’s part of a community of kids and parents who feel the pain of urgent-care trips and missed work. She sees how inefficiencies in the medical system compound back to impact education and attendance. And she can see faces and name names who are affected by the problem.
She’s part of an “us” that needs Nathalya’s product – even if she isn’t the “me” who needs it.
A PROBLEM WITH A FACE
Nathalya’s own drive is similar: I asked why she personally cared about this and she talked about the social problem of missed work and overinflated diagnostic costs and how that problem has unfair, inequitable impact on those with low incomes.
But then she named a person, with a face, in a community she feels connected to.
That’s how it happens, I think: “Me” becomes “us,” and we find we’ll go to lengths to help our people that we’d never go to merely help ourselves.
The first step toward justice is connection.
To support Nathalya and Anywhere DX, visit anywhere.health or invest on WeFunder.
Running a purpose-driven business of your own? Get on my calendar – I’d love to know you.
Don’t expect clients to give you credit for doing the right thing
There’s one mistake most clients I work with make at some point: They think customers will care.
Your company’s trying to do things right. You’re going to heal the world or fix your industry or give employees a better life.
And that’s worth bragging about, right?
…right?
YOUR MISSION MAY NOT BE YOUR MESSAGE
The landscaper sharing video from the employee retreat and the solar-panel company preaching climate change both make the same error: They put one stakeholder in another’s seat.
Employees aren’t clients. Customers aren’t the climate.
For a company seeking justice, this is a particular challenge. You’re not only in this for your buyers or yourself; you’ve figured out that how you treat your team or use the earth’s resources or impact society matters.
Your org’s heart sets you apart. So doesn’t it make sense to market with it?
Sometimes yes.
But in a lot of cases, doing so confuses clients, makes the message weaker and makes selling harder than it could be.
In the next few minutes, I want to show you why your higher purpose may not be the winning advantage we all wish it was. And why sometimes it is. And how to know which camp you fall into.
And what to do about it.
First, we have to throw cold water on your favorite TED talk.
DON’T START WITH WHY
Even if you haven’t seen Simon Sinek’s 2010 talk, you’ve come across his “golden circle” with the word “why” scrawled across the center.
Or some nerd like me has quoted it to you.
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” Sinek says in that talk. It’s a sound-bite so fantastic that us would-be sages have repeated it roughly once per second for the 16 years since Sinek said it.
It’s so elegant. So simple.
That’s the problem. Critics have a lot of questions about Sinek’s argument; most of them boil down to: Where’s the data?
Sinek doesn’t use any.
And of course, his talk’s about how to inspire – it’s NOT explicitly about your company’s marketing plan.
Guess what happens when you turn “start with why” into a campaign and track it?
THE HIGH ROAD’S NOT A CHEAT CODE
I won’t get too into the weeds here, but the actual research data into whether you should base your marketing on your company’s purpose is… complex.
Peter Field found marketing campaigns that did NOT focus on purpose outperformed the ones that did by almost 50%.
But – the same study found that the best purpose-focused campaigns did the best of all.
A report by Kantar showed the same complexity: Brands seen as having “high positive impact” grew 175% over 12 years, compared to only 70% growth for brands seen as “low impact.”
The trick: Only one in ten companies studied had a “meaningful activation plan” to go along with their purpose.
Still with me? Here’s the bottom line, I think:
➡️ A business chasing more than money does have an advantage. But to realize that advantage, you can’t just talk about your company’s purpose.
You actually have to live it.
If you say it but don’t live it – you’d be better off not saying it at all.
PRACTICE MAKES PURPOSE
Here’s how philosophers have thought about you since, at least, the days of Aristotle:
You have beliefs, the ideas you hold about how you ought to live.
You have practices, the things you routinely do and say.
You have character, the sort of person you are and are known to be.
Your neighbors trust your character. Not your beliefs.
In business it’s more complicated, but not different. Turn a purpose statement into marketing without letting it touch operations, sales or customer success — and you’re not purpose-driven. You just say you are.
But practice what you preach, and marketing won’t even need to preach it.
Should it, though?
SHOULD MISSION BE THE MESSAGE?
If you’ve seen the four-part strategy framework I use with clients, you’ll notice it lines up with the ideas above: Your company’s vision and position are beliefs. Its strengths and systems are its practices.
Those are the elements you control. You – as a group, together – choose your own strategic DNA. You name beliefs and create practices.
Your company’s character comes from that.
Want a more just world? Then that pursuit should be reflected in your company’s character. Buyers should both see it and experience it; it should win their trust and keep it, too.
If your company lives its purpose, that should give you an advantage in your market.
But it’s probably NOT your message.
I’ve seen purpose work as primary messaging perhaps one time in 10. If you sell to early adopters or to a small niche who have the same values and cultural insights you do — then yes, talking purpose might be what moves them to act.
That’s the bet I’ve made in this very newsletter, and if you’re still reading then it must be working.
Usually, though, it doesn’t. Clients need clarity most of all – they need to know what you do and how they should buy. They need a “why” that works for them, not you.
They need to know you’ll fix their yard or lower their electric bill.
Changing the world can wait.
Your own “why” might be part of what a buyer’s looking for. But for most people, most of the time, it’s not where the conversation starts.
WHAT WORKED FOR YOU?
In the coming weeks, I’ll share some stories about how just businesses have used or not used mission in their messaging.
Did an experience of your own come to mind while you read this?
Reach out – I’d love to hear it.
If you’d like some help aligning your own company’s beliefs and practice in a way that helps you win more clients, I’d love to tell you how I do that. Here’s my calendar.