My Executive Summary for this week: stop relying on someone else's platform, someone else's recruiters or someone else's sales process.
Build what you own - the audience, the expertise and the narrative. The builders today are the ones who control their own distribution. Use social media for what it is - a recruitment tool. Don't be a slave to it.
What I'm Being Asked
How would you grow our business? (A niche online B2C with slowing results on social media campaigns)
You have a great audience already and you're not using that to attract more people. You need to create a sense of FOMO - fear of missing out - by building something that people want to be part of. In this case, your customers really do feel a sense of belonging - so you have to take that to new channels. Social media isn't delivering as well as it did, so you need to build your own promotion platform. You have to put a newsletter at your top of funnel as well as social. But the newsletter needs to be a product that people love.
I've lost my job I've had for 15 years. Feel down as AI is taking over and I feel old.
It's an opportunity to reposition yourself as an expert in a field you either know a lot about or want to be seen as. Start building your newsletter - and start shouting about it. Spend your time building your reputation and audience as the expert by writing and giving people what they need. Tiktok could help you enormously, but it will feel uncomfortable at first.
There's a great concept called 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly I encourage you to read. You don't need hundreds of thousands of people reading you. You need a thousand of the right folks and an offer they love.
Newsletter, website and social. Collect the email addresses. Ensure you're getting the people you want and then build your funnel. Use the dead time to build your way out. Do not rely on recruiters, but do keep the job hunt process running in parallel.
Most of all, you have to get your mind in the right place. Stop thinking about how bad it is or you will lose. Get your head in a place of knowing what you can win at.
How do we stop our business from flatlining? (3 years - software)
You've hit the ceiling of your go-to-market model, but that could be for a number of reasons. Firstly, it sounds like the board has lost connection with customer demand. Fix that by going and talking to customers. Find demand. This is your true north. Nothing else matters.
Secondly, you need to assess whether your marketing, sales and delivery teams are using the narrative in demand. Chances are they are not and that lack of alignment will be hurting performance. You need to measure this and look closely at why.
Finally, with a few years of flatlining and no radical changes at the board level, I would bet two things.
1 - The board will tell you know this already, which is the case to move them on.
2 - They'll make excuses for not having acted on that if they knew - which is another case to move them on.
Either way, your players are not picking up the ball when you need them to and you have to run serious interventions. If you have the data, they know the data and they have done nothing, you as the CEO have the responsibility to stop being nice, but act in the interests of the company.
How would you grow our business for bigger deals? (B2B software)
Stop sending sales people in for specialist conversations with C-level buyers. There isn't time for powerpoint. There is only time to listen and teach - and they want to learn. High-level buyers want rocket scientists not lego builders.
The conversation should leave the client feeling like they have better choices and control - not just: 'I know about your service'.
Secondly, I would build the platform to own the audience and keep them coming back. You need to build trust and relationships. For this you need a media product and brilliant execution. Your marketing is not aligned to this, but is pumping out Linkedin rubbish every day with only your employees liking it.
What I'm Hearing
School fees - you're paying them. Two school governors, different private schools, same message: councils are paying private schools to keep kids there because state schools don't have the space. Thanks to government brilliance, the public now pays private school fees so parents don't have to. If I were an investigative journalist, I would be dropping Freedom of Information Act requests all over the UK. Not my job anymore, but for anyone who fancied it...
Hearsay - a large US software company you'd definitely know (hint: "DEVELOPERS") recently told a global bank based in Europe: "We're not prioritising rollout in Europe because it's not a growth region."
Opex savings: Demand is high. One large financial this week: "Even now, we have costs we don't really know about." AI should be helping, but those in charge haven't worked out how or where yet. "Too many product pitches, not enough solutions to our problems," one exec said. There is huge opportunity here.
Marketing budgets are back. After a year of freeze, agencies are winning. PR agencies are the barometer - first to be cut, first to be hired. Spreading bets to widen capabilities and sectors is a good move - but not so far as to damage focus and quality. I am seeing a number of firms prosper. Good news.
Wealth management - ripe for modernisation with huge opportunity again as many firms struggle to recruit younger customers. Modernisation is a must in terms of propositions and infrastructure.
Construction - really tough. Margins compressed, labour shortages, and now the double hit of inheritance tax changes affecting family firms plus the Employment Rights Bill creating further uncertainty. National Insurance contributions has been pointed to.
What I'm Thinking About
The farce that is COP 30. Brazil's President Lula wrote a piece in the Guardian that appears every year with a different biline:
"This year will be about action."
Yeah, right. Having covered this as a journalist and followed it closely for years, I have lost faith in it. I'll just look out of the headlines this year. I guess I am not thinking about it then...
The Big Issue (a UK magazine sold by homeless people) ran a pretty good analysis of COP's failure to deliver.
And...
Deals - some of the smartest deal opportunities are emerging out of the problems companies find themselves in - largely due to perception of AI, poor government controls and a lack of insight. It's worth standing back to look at this for a moment. I'll write about it, but I'm still mulling it over. Big consultancies are missing a trick.
What I'm Reading
Range by David Epstein
We've been sold the idea that mastery requires early specialisation and 10,000 hours of deliberate practice - and that if you dabble or quit, you're finished.
Epstein argues in complex, unpredictable fields, generalists beat specialists. The book tracks top performers across domains and finds the same pattern - late starts, multiple interests, frequent career changes and a breadth of experience trump narrow focus.
I am finding this book refreshing as it challenges the normal narratives we hear from school-thinking people.
What I'm Asking
What would you like to see on the Executive Summary? What would you like to ask or do together? Speak up.
The newsletter goes out to more than 1000 CEOs and that number is climbing and I'm working with some great leaders.
I would love it if you'd leave me a review.
Have a great weekend
Dan
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