This week’s newsletter was written on a plane without wi-fi. Forgive the extra chaos.
It also is apparently too long for email, so you may need to click out and or something towards the end.
This could be addressed by using less imagery, but thats kinda one of my few core tenets so I’m passing my stubbornness on to you as inconvenience.
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Imagine you’re the founder of a startup. You have a year of runway with your current funding and your investors are expecting certain benchmarks before injecting more capital.
Now imagine that you haven’t been seeing the traction you were hoping for and don’t know why.
You essentially have 3 options.
Keep a lean team, burn through the funding at a slower rate and hope that you are able to figure it out with your current team.
Hire up, burning cash quicker but increasing your output speed and quality.
Approach your investors and admit that, as is, things aren’t working. Allowing them to recoup the remaining investment.
If all companies were run like agencies, option 1 would be the only choice ever made. I want to argue that option 3 is sometimes the best option.
Clients are essentially investors.
With route 1, you are either the hero or the scapegoat. If you figure it out, great. But if not, it makes it less appealing to invest in you in the future.
But if you are approaching the relationship like a partner, you don’t want to just keep trying until “funding” (goodwill) runs out. You would be upfront with your “investors” and say “look, there’s something preventing this from working. Let’s pause and evaluate rather than continue to burn”
They’d appreciate the gesture and likely invest in you again in the future.
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I guess what I’m saying is that if things ever get past round 3 reviews, maybe it’s time to stop burning goodwill (as well as the client’s actual $) and think about securing future investments rather than stubbornly insisting that it can be figured out.
We’re supposed to be a partner, not a vendor after all.
According to my own definition, this is a pretty decent insight:
The share of voice exchange - How expensive ESOV is in a category/culture of ebbs and flows
Client feedback be like:
Purpose of a workshop = “we’ve done some work, now it’s time to make some decisions”
LINKS
101 Things to Learn in Art School (PDF)
Excerpt:
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An Introduction to Systems Thinking (PDF)
Excerpt:
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The Subject of Semiotics (PDF)
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Shock Me. Please. (Link)
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How Measuring Time Shaped History (link)