We've been getting frequent questions about our agency's thinking on various topics and platform updates. This updated newsletter format is designed to address these common questions not only for our clients, but also for the broader marketing & small business community.

Each interesting article we’ve read this week is linked and features commentary from various team members.

Enjoy,

Kenn, Mike, Bea, Hanz, and Team

The Iteration Newsletter

⭐ Interesting Ideas & News

How I Use AI Agents to Send 1000 Personalized Emails for Outreach

https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-personalized-email-for-outreach

The author shares his experiment with AI agents for personalized email outreach to developers. His workflow included three specialized AI agents:

• Web Agent: Gathered contextual information about recipients from their blogs, GitHub repositories, and websites

• Email Agent: Used this research to craft personalized emails with specific references to recipients' work

• Report Agent: Documented the process and tracked results

While this sounds a bit intimidating, what "AI Agents" mean in this context is that he has LLMs do very specific steps, similar to how most Business Owners would have their staff follow process documents or SOPs. You can see examples here: https://www.monolithgrowth.com/custom-ai-workflows

How to Do SEO for Google Maps

https://nogood.io/2025/03/20/seo-for-google-maps/

Google Maps SEO boils down to three ranking factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. To actually move the needle:

1. Complete NAP verification immediately - incorrect or inconsistent business information kills rankings

2. Prioritize review generation - develop a systematic approach to request reviews after positive customer interactions

3. Respond to ALL reviews within 24 hours - Google tracks response rates and times

4. Ensure keyword consistency between your website and Google Business Profile

5. Monitor competitor profiles monthly to benchmark performance metrics

Most SEO-focused businesses waste time on Google Posts when fixing NAP inconsistencies across directories would deliver faster ranking improvements. Focus first on verification, accurate information, and review management before moving to advanced tactics.

Google adds Search Terms visibility to Performance Max

https://searchengineland.com/google-adds-search-terms-visibility-to-performance-max-campaigns-453489

This is useful as it helps ensure alignment between your landing pages and the actual queries triggering your ads. Before, this wasn't possible.

How to Find it:

• Access your Performance Max search terms report to see which queries trigger your ads

• Add negative keywords directly from the report to filter irrelevant traffic

• Check search term-to-landing page alignment to improve relevance

• Monitor for campaign overlap between Performance Max and standard Search campaigns

• Use search term data to refine asset groups and targeting

Implementation is rolling out gradually - if you don't see it yet, check back in your Google Ads account within the coming weeks.

💭 Assorted Links We Found Interesting

Amazon Said to Make a Bid to Buy TikTok in the U.S.

As TikTok faces a U.S. deadline to separate from its Chinese owner or be banned, Amazon has reportedly made a last-minute acquisition bid amidst ongoing national security concerns in Washington. Parties aren't taking the bid seriously. Amazon's past attempts to replicate TikTok's success internally, such as with its now-defunct "Inspire" feature, were unsuccessful. Amazon joins others like Oracle and Blackstone in expressing interest. TikTok maintains it is not for sale, citing potential obstruction from the Chinese government.

How mindshare marketing builds trust before the buy

Kishore Kothandaraman, co-founder of Goldcast, advocates for mindshare marketing to build trust and become a top-of-mind brand for customers. This involves showcasing brand personality, creating consistent content that establishes expertise, and engaging with the target audience in relevant communities. Kothandaraman emphasizes that mindshare marketing is a long-term strategy that requires consistent engagement and genuine efforts to assist the audience.

Use Benefit-Driven CTAs

Many B2B CTAs fail because they feel like commands on what the user should do. Create effective, benefit-driven CTAs by focusing on what the reader gets out of it -- could be relief, time savings, or quick wins -- making the click feel rewarding instead of demanding.

About Us

Our Publicly-Available Frameworks:

• Efficient Growth Model (Google Docs): https://www.monolithgrowth.com/efficient-growth-model

• Traction to Scale Model (Google Slides): https://www.monolithgrowth.com/traction-to-scale

Further Information about Monolith:

• Agency: https://www.monolithgrowth.com/

• Product (Jetdraft): https://www.jetdraftai.com/

• New Services (Custom Marketing AI Workflows): https://www.monolithgrowth.com/custom-ai-workflows

Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Consulting (a growth marketing agency) and Jetdraft (Source-First AI for Tough Research and Writing Tasks at Work). He is an honoree of Forbes 30 under 30 and Tatler Asia’s Generation T.

Marketers often default to a “do everything” approach to improving ad results: add this audience, tweak this bid strategy, add new copies, maybe change the campaign structure.

Many get bogged down with flipping on all the features instead of choosing the right one.

I get it. Marketers often get this large routine set of tasks, and they lose sight of the bigger picture.

There’s no clear way to understand what each task is ultimately for.

Here’s a simple way that works: you can bucket each marketing task into “targeting” or “content”.

Targeting is for marketing efficiency. Content is for revenue.

If the job requires you to increase revenue, then focus all efforts into ad quality & ad quantity.

If the job requires you to improve marketing efficiency, then focus all efforts into better targeting & account structure.

Think about it.

What ultimately drives revenue?

Revenue increases because there are more people who resonate with & agree with what you say in your ads.

And what drives marketing efficiency?

Marketing efficiency improves when you filter and select the people who agree most with what you had to say, and you cut out the rest who don’t care.

This rule of thumb works whether you’re doing Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Search Ads, or TikTok Ads.

So when you need to catch up to revenue, the answer is that you almost always need to increase your creative throughput: explore different angles, try more ad variations, do alternative cuts to your creatives.

More often than not, most brands’ targeting is done right. It’s just that content has gotten stale, and you’ll need to switch it out, and try more variations.

Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Consulting (a growth marketing agency) and Jetdraft (writing software for business owners). He is an honoree of Forbes 30 under 30 and Tatler Asia’s Generation T.

That question made me reflect on my own ongoing rebrand of Mai, our AI writer.

For Mai, we will not only make significant changes to the brand name & design, we'll also make big changes to the features & code.

For most businesses, a rebrand is not needed if you're having sales problems.

A rebrand is only worth doing if there is a fundamental shift in the business model or market.

How does one define a shift in the business model?

To start, for us to be on the same page, let’s use Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas as a common framework. This states that businesses are composed of the following 9 components:

- Customer Segments

- Customer relationships

- Channels

- Revenue stream

- The Value Proposition

- Key Activities

- Key Resources

- Key Partners

- Cost structure

And here’s the key idea:

A rebrand is worth it if and only if there’s a fundamental market shift in any of these components.

For Mai, we’re doing a rebrand due to market shifts in these four areas:

Customer segments:

• Mai was initially designed for creatives & in-house marketers for agencies and businesses. But the majority of our customers are business owners.

Channels:

• Most of Mai's sales are through Referrals, Complementary Sales, and Meta. We initially assumed most sales would be through ads.

Value proposition:

• Given the initial customer segment, we designed a bulk ads creation tool. Given the actual people that paid, and based on what we’ve learned about how they use it, the feature set needs to evolve to better cater to common business owner use cases.

Revenue Streams:

• Most sales are through what I call a hybrid service: not only do they subscribe to the software, they also need our help to use it for them. Specifically, they just want the output of 100 articles in 1 month, with additional help editing to ensure that the articles bring in the traffic & conversions we expect.

• It turns out that only a minority of customers use the self-service option.

In short, we positioned Mai originally to be a “productivity tool for in-house marketers, who’ll discover us on Facebook or Instagram Ads."

But instead, our market wants our Mai to be a “content assistant for business owners / executives, and wants the option to either DIY or hire us to direct this assistant if they’re busy”.

The market's response thus requires a fundamental shift in the product's positioning, and this merits a rebrand.

When considering a rebrand, ask yourself if your business model has changed fundamentally.

If there's no major shift in the business model, consider a "design refresh", which is smaller in scope.

A design refresh updates the language, fonts, colors, but assumes the same business model & strategy.

Rebranding is a loaded term, and you might get misled into paying a large bill.

A design refresh gives you a reasonable scope and price.

Or better, you might not need a design refresh at all. Just more aggressive sales and marketing.

Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Consulting (a growth marketing agency) and Mai (a writing software for marketers & business owners). He is an honoree of Forbes 30 under 30 and Tatler Asia’s Generation T.

But "more" comes at a cost.

Projects go over budget. Talent gets milked dry. Customers suffer, morale goes down, and the business begins to struggle.

It's important to have a balance. And ensure that ambition doesn't create an unsustainable growth model.

I hear people complain that it's the funding winter. Or the recession. In reality, we are just back to normal, and this is part of the normal business cycle.

Business is supposed to be boring. Full of constraints, hard decisions, and tradeoffs.

And in such periods, business fundamentals are in fashion again.

We are back to simply making more than what you spend. Back to implementing standard operating procedures. And back to making bet sizes smaller, as opposed to going all-in.

When we work with clients at Monolith, we always set growth targets in conjunction with ROI and ROE. One would say that we prioritize that more.

ROI means Return on Investment, that clients get more money than they spend, and ROE means Return on Effort, which means deleting wasteful processes & tasks, and ignoring things that don't move the needle.

Sustainable & profitable growth is done through frequent marketing experiments. Tests that build on marketing fundamentals that build the business. That means differentiated content, a message that resonates, and building a reputation that's credible & believable.

It turns out that growth often reveals itself in bursts. Something that many of our long-standing clients (over 4 years) experience a lot.

Initially, we'd just have "ok" growth and "ok" ROI.

But there are times when an experiment is a big home run.

Then, we reinvest more. We’ll keep growing. Competitors eventually catch on and copy us. And the well eventually dries up.

And we’re back to boring growth & boring ROI again. But we’ll keep testing and experimenting.

We've found that growth is a step-wise function when you zoom in real close, and never a linear one. It's a rising zigzag, and never a straight line. It only looks straight and to the right when you zoom out to the 3, 5, or 10 year timeframe.

For months, which can feel slow, it's wise to stay prudent. Prudence makes ROI, ROI creates retained earnings. Retained earnings expand your capacity to bet more & experiment more, and then open yourself that next burst of growth.

This is the essence of ROI-driven, sustainable growth.

It is wise to remind ourselves that everyday virtues also apply in business. Temperance through measured bets is better than gluttonous spending. Diligence & patience is better than the greed to expand.

Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Consulting (a growth marketing agency) and Mai (a writing software for marketers & business owners). He is an honoree of Forbes 30 under 30 and Tatler Asia’s Generation T.

The issue here is that most business owners think that paying a subscription to Shopify or paying a commission to a marketplace (such as Amazon or Lazada) is equivalent to paying rent for a physical space in a mall.

That can't be more false.

Ask yourself: what are you really buying when you rent a space in the mall?

The answer: what you're really buying is foot traffic, and you're not just renting an area to display your goods.

When you think of the reasons why people visit a mall -- it's normally for social reasons or personal entertainment (i.e. catching up with friends over coffee, kids going to the arcade, bonding over lunch or dinner, read a book or study at a coffee shop, or just enjoy a shared experience with a loved one).

Shopping is just a secondary activity -- stores need to interrupt the normal footpath by presenting a retail experience that resonates with the person passing by (e.g. the Lululemon retail experience would be vastly different compared to something like the North Face).

Now, when you set up an online store, you're not guaranteed traffic from the start. Unlike a mall, there is no existing foot traffic guaranteed for your domain. The domain is just literally a place for you to display goods. To bridge this gap, this is where digital marketing comes in.

Digital marketing is no different than the mall experience -- you'd want to catch people where they tend to socialize or where they'd want to entertain themselves. This could mean social platforms (e.g. Instagram, TikTok, Twitch) or information platforms (e.g. news sites), then your opportunity as a brand is to insert a relevant message in this natural digital foot path of the user.

Digital marketing can go deeper (i.e. how to target the right users, how to sure you're sending the right message), but when you think of revenue generation in the lens of "ways to get traffic" and "ways to get the sale", one can better understand the nuances and differences between offline vs online sales.

Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Consulting (a growth marketing agency) and Mai (a writing software for marketers & business owners). He is an honoree of Forbes 30 under 30 and Tatler Asia’s Generation T.

This led me to try to check if there's a generalizable idea that applies for all. It's not CTR% as not all ad placements have a way to click (e.g. Youtube Ads). It's also not Engagement as not all ad platforms allow reactions or comments.

One interesting idea, however, is what I call the "Principle of Consumption". The principle of consumption states that the best way to understand how a platform algorithm works is to identify how its users derive value from the platform. The way you can apply this principle is that whenever you're creating ad content, it must maximize the likelihood of consumption.

Let's look at some examples to illustrate how this works in practice:

For YouTube Ads and TikTok Ads, the way folks derive value from the platforms is by consuming videos. So it’s natural to assume that the main consumption metric to optimize for is the Watch Rate.

The watch rate is the percentage of the video the average user has watched. This means that when optimizing for such channels, it's important to create engaging videos that will keep users watching until the end. You can’t just repurpose a TV ad into Youtube or TikTok.

Facebook and Instagram are a bit different in that their primary consumption metric has changed over the years. Prior to 2018, reactions and comments was the main consumption metric for these platforms.

However, with the introduction of Stories and Instagram Reels, the "see more" rate (read more of the text) and the thumb stop rate (stopped and watched the video) have become more important metrics to track and optimize for. These metrics can be derived through custom metrics in the Business Manager and can be used to make informed decisions about your ad campaigns.

For example, if you notice that a certain post has a high see-more rate but a low thumb stop rate, you may want to experiment with changing the thumbnail or changing the hook or headline to see if you can get more people to stop scrolling and consume your post more.

Even for platforms that don't exist yet, the principle of consumption can be applied.

For example, if Clubhouse were to create its own ad platform in the future, it would likely incentivize ad content that maximizes listen rate.

A parting exercise for the reader: if Telegram were to offer businesses the option to have branded stickers, branded emojis, business group chats, and banner ads, what would be the best one to choose and why?

You’ll see that the consumption principle is broadly applicable, and allows you to adapt to any ad channel or marketing channel as you see fit.

I used to think that the hardest thing for me socially is training and managing my junior employees or fresh grads in Monolith. I've probably trained at least 70, all with their own quirks and habits, and I think I have that down at this point.

However, the adjustment I had to make once I had a child is probably 10x more than any of those combined.

One of the major changes that I had to make was my creative process and my planning process at work. Normally, I'd sink perhaps 3-6 hours just working on one thing. I've you've followed me before, you know that I'm a giant fan of detailed long form content.

But I can't do that anymore especially at home as I'd probably need to attend to something every 30 minutes or so.

Despite these constraints, a method that has worked for me is the idea of Progressive Refinement. It's inspired from agile principles such as "Fixed Time, Flex Scope" and "Earliest Lovable Product".

If you're not familiar with the idea, here's how it works:

1. You start with the problem you'd want to solve

2. Define the budget that you currently have, whether it's in time or resources

3. Based on that budget, define a version of the task that fits that budget. An important mindset shift is that there is a complete version that solves the problem whether it's just 10 minutes or 6 hours.

Here's an example for creating a strategy slide deck:

• Let's say you'd want help reduce burnout within your organization

• In terms of time budget, let's say you only have 10 minutes before your next meeting or next task

• For that given 10 minutes, what can you do? You probably can write out headlines of the slide deck (no body), with the key ideas (e.g. Slide 1: Burnout is caused more by social factors in our organization as opposed to overwork or overload, Slide 2: People who tend to get burnt out are managers, Slide 3: Managers observed that some juniors have not yet adjusted fully to the culture, etc.)

Now that's version 1 -- it is an acceptable version as it already has an answer to the problem that you're looking to address. Once you have another 10 minute time block or 30 minute time block, you can expand on some points further, and that would be version 2.

You may not arrive at the perfect version of what you're trying to do, but you know that the slides do not have any gaps and you've covered the full ground of the story that you're looking to express.

You'd see some similar "version ones" as well in another formats:

• For articles, don't start with a full draft, but start with bullet points.

• For design, don't start with Photoshop or Figma, start with a sketch.

• For code, don't start with the actual programming logic, start with the architecture or start with the relationship diagram that solves the problem.

The big idea behind Progressive Refinement is that the format is flexible. So don't think of "hey I need to make slides", but instead, you need to think of "hey, I need to solve X problem, what format is appropriate for this in the given time?".

Here's a final diagram Henrik Kniberg that illustrates this idea.

Do the solution, not the format.

P.S. Here’s my 10-minute version 1 of the above article :)

Bullet points:

- Recently, I had a child, which is certainly the biggest change that I had in my life. I've worked in other countries and with other cultures, I've managed and have had 1:1s with at least 70+ people in Monolith, all with their own quirks, but the adjustment I had to make once I had a child is probably 10x more than any of those

- One major change that I had to make was my creative process and my planning process. Normally, I'd sink perhaps 3-6 hours just working on one thing. I've you've followed me before, you know that I'm a giant fan of detailed long form content. And if you're an employee of Monolith, the first you'll read is a 21 page culture document that I wrote up and I expected you to know by heart.

- But I can't do that anymore especially at home as I'd probably need to attend to something else every 30 minutes and I'd lose context on what I'm working on

- A method that has worked for me despite these constraints is the idea of Progressive Refinement. The basic idea of Progressive Refinement is that unlike the conventional way of working, which is to just have 1 version of something, and get that 1 version done by any means necessary (i.e. either rushing through everything with the given amount of time or extending as much as you need to), your time budget is fixed, and you plan for multiple versions.

- Here's how it works:

1) you start with the problem you'd want to solve,

2) define the budget that you currently have, whether it's in time or resources

3) based on that budget, define the refinement level that you want to use. For an article, for example, it could be just bullet points that encapsulate the idea. For slide decks, you could start with just the headlines of the slides first and put placeholders on the body. For code, it could mean just writing the pseudocode first, and get the data structures right before writing the rest. For UI design, it means building out a layout first before the colors, shadows, and other details.

A few hours back, I open sourced a UI framework for Javascript that my company developed called Cami.js (https://github.com/kennyfrc/cami.js).

For non-technical folks, Cami.js is a code library that aims to maximize developer productivity - providing the power of Meta's React.js with the simplicity of lightweight libraries like jQuery. I wanted a framework with React's capabilities without all the complexity.

So far, the feedback on Y Combinator’s Hacker News has been encouraging: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38143844). As someone with an Economics background, I've always felt insecure about my programming skills, so it's great to hear some positive comments from folks more experienced than I. I took on the Head of Engineering role in my company as we gave ourselves the challenge to diversify our solutions (marketing agency + marketing technology), and so I challenged myself to step up and "figure it out" (entrepreneur life, eh?).

Some may ask: "Why spend so much effort creating something like this?"

My answer is simple:

Leaders are system builders and tool builders. And great businesses develop advantages from the distinctive systems crafted by such leaders. 

Developing my company’s own unique systems is how I developed my marketing team in Monolith, and this is how I intend to develop my engineering team as we create software products for my company.

If you’re a technical leader and you adopt React.js, you are, in effect adopting a strategy created by Meta. Their objectives and organization profile is likely different from yours, so why copy that? React.js started due to the problems caused by developing Facebook Ads Manager — do you have the same situation too? Do you have the same talent pool and organizational size to handle React.js’ complexity?

When you develop your own original systems to the specific problems your company has, you’re better positioned to solve it in the most correct and complete way possible. 

React.js was built for very large teams whose software needs require rendering thousands of data points and media in milliseconds. We’re a small team and our interface requirements are different. Cami.js was built for my company’s use cases.

General best practices can only get you so far. This is why we have our own software development framework.

This is why I strongly advocate for “Technical Leadership”, not “General Management”. GE-style general management is great for established industries, with well-known problems, but in highly dynamic industries like digital marketing & software, technical leadership is required.

I humbly suggest that leaders shouldn’t settle for off-the-shelf solutions. Roll up your sleeves and build the right tools for the job at hand. The systems you craft will become competitive advantages that can't be easily replicated. 

My hope is that Cami.js empowers our team to do great things. But more broadly, I want to inspire technical leaders to have the confidence to build their own frameworks, systems, and cultures from the ground up.

Since 2016, I've had the skills to do this. But two key constraints held me back: time and talent availability. That changed when I started using GitHub Copilot, an AI programming assistant, in 2022. It gave me enough productivity and motivation that I needed to execute on my production requirement for this to work—to ship a new product feature every 2 months.

However, it’s been both a fruitful and unpleasant experience — one of the hardest things I’ve done. As an agency owner first, my primary responsibility is still to clients and employees. With limited time, I’ve had to ruthlessly focus only on the essential, not the complete product vision.

This constraint has been a blessing. Frankly, looking to implement a "360 solution" causes organizations to spread themselves too thin and invest half-heartedly. When you avoid perfection, you easily eliminate non-essential work and make simple, focused decisions. These may seem "incomplete" but it drives clarity and growth.

For example, in Monolith:

• My marketing agency does not bother maintaining social media pages. We don’t post much on Instagram or Facebook.

• The reason is simple — our customer base does not hang around scrolling through different social media feeds, as they know most content is generic and not useful. So we don’t invest anything in it.

• Instead, to acquire the right customers, we do webinars, seminars, trade shows, or direct sales. Social media management may be useful for mass B2C, but not useful for B2B companies like us.

By accepting a wide scope of responsibility, it empowers you to scope down and eliminate non-essential jobs & tasks.

Another example, from Mai:

• I killed darlings and features that I really wanted to add, like an AI editor.

• I wanted more interactivity and an inline editor with special AI commands. This would have set us back 4 months.

• We asked: What does the customer need here? By framing ourselves to their problem, not our solution ideas, we decided to integrate chat instead, which offered feedback instead of direct inline editing.

• This allowed us to still solve our customers’ problem to a high degree, while allowing us to ship on time. 

• Any other cool feature that we had to pause can be a nice feature to add in the future

Such constraints are wonderful for lean organizations looking to create a distinctive, uncopyable strategy versus large companies. The game is not to "follow best practices" but to make tough calls big companies can't.

You must ruthlessly focus on what drives growth, even if it means eliminating features, channels or workflows that seem essential. This will be risky for an executive at a large company who has to check every box, and make sure that every department leader is heard & valued.

But for a nimble startup or small business, eliminating the inessential to focus on the vital few choices that drive results is key. It creates strategic leverage against bloated bureaucracies, and you will out-execute them with your focus.

Constraints force clarity of vision and empower you to turn limitations into advantages. By accepting and embracing constraints, you focus fully on the essential, and not half-heartedly on the complete.

For articles about entrepreneurship, marketing, or product development, follow me at Twitter: https://twitter.com/kennyfrc

After spending about 8 months and a few thousand dollars renting GPU servers to fine-tune Mai, a marketing-specialized language model, I wanted to share some thoughts on the limits of ChatGPT for marketing.

If you're a marketer, business owner, or entrepreneur, this is written to help you get a better grasp of how Language Models like ChatGPT work. It will also help you know when & where to use them in your work.

We'll cover the following topics in this order:

1. An intuitive view of how Language Models like GPT work under the hood, without getting into mathematical details.

2. How certain mechanisms within GPT lead to its limitations and inconsistencies

3. How these challenges can be addressed with updated workflows

The Analogy of a Word Calculator

To help you understand how models work, let's distill the concept of a model into 3 phases:

• There's input

• There are operations on an input

• And it produces an output

Just like with a calculator:

• There's a set of inputs (the numbers)

• There are operations on those inputs (addition, subtraction, etc)

• And there is an output (another set of numbers)

Below, you'll see how a neural network architecture generally looks like.

Don't be intimidated. You just need to know that there's an input, an output, and the things that happen in between to produce the output, which are called "hidden layers." Just think of it as slightly more complex mathematical operations that turn an input to an output.

Now let's look at the Transformer Architecture, which is the basis of models like GPT. I blurred out the technical parts so you don't freak out. You don't need to know them if you're non-technical. We'll walk you through a quick tour of how an input set of words produces an output set of words in a bit.

Cool, so it takes an input of words, does some calculations, then it produces an output of words. So how does it do that?

At its core, Language Models like GPT-3 are "word calculators".

Here's how it works at a high level:

1. It takes your input of words and changes it into digits or numbers.

   1. It needs to be converted into numbers so we can do math operations.

   2. It uses a "word-to-number" dictionary for converting it. It's called tokenization. GPT3 has a dictionary or token vocabulary size of 25,000.

2. It then takes these digits and performs a series of mathematical operations. The number of mathematical operations is extensive. GPT has 175 billion parameters.

   1. What is a "parameter"?

   2. If we take a simple formula, such as y = x + b, and let's imagine that x is your input word and y is the output word, b is just 1 parameter. Obviously, if you use this weak formula, our embryo GPT here won't work.

   3. But this explanation of how a "1 parameter model" looks like will help you appreciate the sheer size and scale of how a 175 billion parameter model would look like, and why it requires huge GPU clusters to work.

3. Once our operations are done with the computation, we are given another set of digits. These digits are then converted back to words using our 25,000 sized "word-to-number" dictionary.

   1. That's why language models can do reasonably well in certain translation tasks, as its true lingua franca are numbers, and words & syllables are mere numbers in the eyes of the language model.

4. Once it gets converted, one thing about the Transformer architecture is that it produces "output probabilities", which contain a set of words with a probability attached to them.

For example, here's how the output probability would look if I used the input phrase "Life is like a box of...?"

Using its token dictionary, a digit was associated with "Ch", and it was likely correct with a 75.40% probability. This quote shows up so often that other similar characters are likely to show up as well. The slash-n thing is just a "new line" (so the other option it considered was adding another line to the text).

So now you might be thinking: "Ok thanks Kenn, you're such a nerd. Now what?"

Well, now that I have given you an easy and simple mental model on how GPT works, let me tell you its problems, and how it applies to your work.

Ready?

Problem 1: Instruction Fine-Tuning Influences the Calculations from Input to Output

ChatGPT is not an expert, and you shouldn't rely on it for deeply technical work.

Let's continue with our word calculator analogy to understand why.

The difference between our fancy word calculator and a regular calculator is that Machine Learning Practitioners can teach this model tasks or patterns through a process called "Instruction Fine-tuning". This is one of ChatGPT's innovations.

Big word, but let's break down "Instruction Fine-tuning":

• It takes canned instructions as input and canned responses as output

• AI researchers fed these instruction-response pairs to fine-tune the model

• "Fine-tuning" means it "tunes" the parameters / calculations between the input and output so it's more likely to produce the canned response for the given instruction

Let me share an example:

• Let's say you want to teach the language model to be polite for a given "angry" instruction

• You can create 500 angry prompts or inputs, with 500 polite responses or outputs to the said inputs.

• This "fine-tuning" process changes the calculations within the model to make it more polite.

This instruction fine-tuning process helped companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and more with "model alignment". There is more to alignment than this, but let's stick to this fine-tuning concept for now.

Given this process, GPT was trained through an army of contractors to do the following tasks (this is from the InstructGPT paper):

The main challenge with this process is that Language Models can be heavily influenced by the annotators. Therefore, its expertise level is calibrated according to the level of its annotators (which are generally 25 year old freelancers).

The bottom line here is that while ChatGPT is strong at giving you the first draft, or sharing introductory concepts, it's not to be relied upon when you get very technical on a subject.

While benchmark results are quite impressive, there are limitations to situations that don't show up in a test. This leads me to the next point.

Problem 2: As language models calculate the most likely word, you get output people will most likely say based on the fine-tuning data

The major challenge with consumer-focused products such as ChatGPT is that it aligns with what is acceptable for the average person.

For instance, when I first used ChatGPT, I strongly disliked its writing style. Here's how a generic ChatGPT output would look (exaggerated a bit to show its commonly used words).

Are you tired of [product_name]? Are you struggling with [problem]? Are you looking for [solution]? Say goodbye to [problem] and hello to [benefit]. Join the ranks of [audience] and elevate your game by trying out the ultimate in [benefit]: [product_name].

Pretty terrible. Nevertheless, I don't blame it, as it's trained on contractors from Upwork and Scale AI, which aren't necessarily considered experts. Let's put it this way: no expert would want to be hired as a freelance annotator. They have better things to do.

Snippet from the InstructGPT paper:

Furthermore, given that the outputs are probabilistic, there is a non-zero chance of sharing wrong information. That's simply due to the nature of the neural network architecture shared above, where it produces output probabilities. And further, its calculations are influenced by the army of contractors who annotated the data, so it's skewed to reflect thoughts from the perspective of a junior hire.

What are the implications of this annotator background? The point here is that:

• If you're using ChatGPT for assistant-related tasks such as drafting an email, automating data extraction, or summarizing a piece of text, it is the right tool for the job.

• But if you're doing it for research, academic work, or programming, be aware that its skill level is likely similar to its annotator background (likely junior level, prefers contractual work than long-term employment), then you'll have a better appreciation of its limits.

Given these 2 major challenges, what can be done?

Solution 1: Bring your own expert data, or leverage specialized AI

The major point shared was that the quality of fine-tuning data matters a lot. For the InstructGPT paper, they used 13,000 instruction-response examples (and another 64,000 to align GPT to certain values).

The InstructGPT paper was published in Q1 2022, and there has been progress since then:

• Databricks has an open-source 15k dataset that replicates instruction-response examples, annotated by their own employees.

• The LongForm dataset is a 25k dataset based on publicly available data.

• The LIMA dataset proposes that you only need 1000 instruction-response examples.

• And the Self-Align proposes only 300 human annotations, which replace the 64,000 examples OpenAI used to align the model with values & principles.

Therefore, if you want to create a specialized, fine-tuned AI for your specific use cases, you'd have to collect about 300-15K data points for it to adjust to what you want. This still assumes that you need a foundation model like GPT, Anthropic, or PaLM as you need that as a foundation. I don't recommend training your own model as the going price for that is at least at least $450,000. But the difference here is that you can add an "expert touch" to your model if you have the right dataset.

If you don't have the resources or time to construct such a dataset, it's wise to leverage existing AI solutions that use a specialized dataset.

For instance, Mai is based on similar principles. We used an expert-annotated dataset (tens of thousands of marketing examples), and fine-tuned it on a foundation language model. We currently have custom Mai language models built on top of GPT, Cohere, and a few others. We use those to produce higher quality output and higher converting copies than ChatGPT would give.

We currently use Mai for our performance marketing agency. We've seen productivity shoot up to the point that we're considering a permanent increase in capacity (i.e. more clients per manager) with a concurrent increase in manager salaries (while improving company profit margins).

While there is an upfront cost to developing your own language model, if it comes paired with the right organization structure improvements, it pays out after 1 year.

Solution 2: Unique outputs come from combinations of your dataset's instructions

You may have tried some of the "prompting tricks" for ChatGPT and others, but it invariably fails in some specialized prompts, as we've noticed quite often.

For instance, if we laid out some marketing principles, here are some:

• ChatGPT doesn't know the marketing principle of "value reframing"

• It doesn't know "identification".

• No idea about "contrast".

• And it's pretty weak with "associations" and "problem agitation"

Our method to solve this is to construct our own instruction-response dataset that demonstrates to the model how "value reframing", "identification", "contrast", and "associations" are written.

By sharing these expert-labeled examples (which are in the order of hundreds each), the model then learns how to actually write it out.

No other AI provider currently does this.

And the benefit of doing this is that we can get our customized model to produce more unique outputs, as it's now armed with the marketing principles we've taught it to use.

And the key to allowing the model to do this is by feeding it with a specialized, expert-annotated dataset, which is what we've done.

Bullet Point Insights

Let's break down what you've read in this article:

• All neural networks are models comprised of 3 things: inputs, outputs, and calculations

• GPT is a transformer neural network that 'transforms' an input sequence of words into an output sequence of words, through a series of calculations.

• To train the base GPT to respond to instructions, it is fed with 13K+ input-output examples, written by human annotators from Upwork & Scale AI. This modifies how calculations are done, creating outputs that make sense to humans. This process (and RHLF, which is out of scope for this article) has produced ChatGPT.

• However, this set of instructions is biased towards what an average person or someone with the Upwork / Scale AI profile would prefer. This means that ChatGPT is suitable for tasks that you'd give to a person on Upwork, but it's not effective for tasks that you'd delegate to an expert.

• That said, given that the premise of this process is reliant on the dataset, if you used experts to construct the dataset, you'd get more expert-level output.

• Expert annotation (in the marketing sense) is what we've done with Mai, which allows us to offer above standard output for our customers. Mai is built by Monolith Growth Consulting, a performance marketing agency.

• Conversely, you can do the same for your organization, provided you have a clear use case to optimize for, and a team ready to construct the dataset. If you don't, it's better to leverage existing AI, such as Mai for various marketing tasks.

• You can create a more distinct set of outputs from your specialized AI, provided that a) you have an equal distribution of your input-output types and b) you can hard code specific principles or prompt phrases that will help steer your AI in the right direction.

• With the right organization restructure, you can improve your company's operational expense and hence profit margin with specialized AI.

With that in mind, you may consider the following possible steps.

Your Next Steps

Given all of what's shared in this article, you have a few paths to consider:

• Realize that your use case is mostly in the "simple assistant" camp, where you need to only summarize data or do data extraction, then ChatGPT is for you.

• Understand that you need better results from AI outputs, so you may need to consider a specialized AI trained on an expert-annotated dataset. If your use case is marketing, I encourage you to look at Mai.

• If you're keen to explore how AI can help you increase your profit margins in a meaningful way with some restructuring (in our case, it's about a 30% improvement from our estimate), then feel free to have an exploratory chat with me here. We can help you explore your options to train your own specialized model. You'll need at least $1,000,000 per year in revenue for a project like this to pay out.

Key points and ideas of this article was written by Kenn. Draft made by a developer version of Mai, a Generative AI writer. Help your customers better & accelerate your marketing productivity using Mai. Free plan available:

https://www.maiwriter.com/

Author Background: Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Ventures. Brands include Monolith Growth Consulting, a performance marketing agency, and Mai, a generative ai software for in-house marketing teams & agencies. Forbes 30 Under 30 2019.

Throughout my ~5 year entrepreneurial journey running Monolith, I've experienced some pretty wild things:

• Competitors have attempted to pirate my staff, some have succeeded and some have failed.

• Account Managers from all sorts of other agencies joining my webinars, and I’ve noticed our methods started popping up across different accounts

• Other Founders have started copying our organization structure. They’re still pretty bad at it, but for the most part, we’re still the only company who can pull off a Growth Manager centric organization.

But guess what?

I never really cared, and I still don’t…

… even when employees and well-meaning relatives nag me about it.

And even then, in January 2023, I launched a new Generative AI product in the marketing space, called Mai, embracing a new wide field of wild, well-funded competition.

So why don’t I care?

Because competition has never mattered.

I’ve learned from my corporate days and in entrepreneurship that only 4 things truly matter: Market, Technology, Concentration, and Unit Economics.

Let me explain each of these in detail and share some examples from my own experience.

1. Market: You Must Serve the Market in the Best Way Possible

The market is king.

No matter how many competitors try to copy your strategies or tactics, if you consistently serve the market in a superior and in a more distinctive way, you’ll do fine.

A common error I’ve seen people do is that they try to evaluate their company’s ability to serve the market by comparing their offering vs their competitors…

… they’d perhaps make a comparison table and tally all what others provide and they try to one-up the other business.

And they all say the same thing in pitches, which is “we are a one-stop shop”.

Anytime I hear that from an agency, I know they’re dead-on-arrival. It’s the laziest piece of thinking I’ve ever heard.

The problem with that thinking is that when you do start serving the market, you don’t really know if your people are actually solving customers’ problems or if you’re just fulfilling a random checklist.

Oftentimes, I hear new customers say that “our past agency did X thing”; but when we audit the marketing activities, there’s always a lot of things that are missing, or a lot of activities that don’t really matter (like tracking reach).

On a marketing agency point of view, it’s more important to get customers to express what their main problems are, then look to personalize your solution in the best way possible.

For example:

• Most agencies think shallowly and think that awareness is the problem.

• Less shallow agencies know that awareness is not really the problem, and it’s more about revenue and marketing efficiency.

• The least shallow agencies know that is not enough for retailers with principals across the world, and there’s also brand compliance, budget allocation requirements, DTI lead times, and the need for an audit trail.

So the main insight here is that you need to solve market problems in a deep way, not in a broad & shallow way. You must be the guy who can cure marketing disease, not the guy who slaps on a band-aids, checks the box, and calls it a day.

2. Technology: You Must Adapt to Technological Inflection Points

In his book "Only the Paranoid Survive," Andy Grove emphasizes the importance of adapting to major technological shifts. I couldn't agree more. To understand his point, let’s grab a page off his book:

“A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. The change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.” - Andy Grove

There is one recent example of this in the marketing space:

• 2010-2020: The Algorithmic Feed

  • When Facebook pioneered the algorithmic feed, two major concepts emerged: a) engagement & conversions now became a viable target for advertisers and b) content creators were born

  • Upworthy, Buzzfeed, and Tasty were the early winners when it comes to optimizing engagement. The idea of “clickbait” was born.

  • Elections were influenced by masses of microinfluencers. The idea of “movements” was born.

  • The early adopters of the algorithmic feed created what are now thriving ecommerce stores. The low demand yet high supply created a period of very low CPMs for a while, until the pandemic happened and everyone hopped on the digital train.

Bottom line: if you’re able to find inefficiencies in algorithmic feeds, whether its in Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or Tiktok, you will benefit from cheap CPMs and strong cost per conversions.

Starting from 2020, I’d argue that the next inflection point is Generative AI, started by Google’s Transformer Architecture, which is then productized by OpenAI in the form of ChatGPT. I’ll touch more on this in a future post.

Let’s now look at the 3rd thing that matters more than competition…

3. Concentration: You Must Limit Customer and Vendor Concentration

If most of your business is from one customer (>15% of your revenue) or controlled by one vendor (>15% of your inventory/supply), then your business is on shaky ground.

I’ve seen many agencies or companies in general get too proud when they get that “one large client” or that “key partner”. Oftentimes, I see these companies fail in about 3-5 years.

The reasons are always the same:

• They ran out of money (because they got cornered into bad payment terms)

• Abrupt change in contract (because decision makers in corporations change, and strategy & budget allocations change as well)

• Vendors vastly increased in price and they are locked in

While I don’t discourage folks to take on these engagements if it makes sense for them, I strongly encourage limiting customer & vendor concentration as quickly possible.

Ideally, they should control less than 15% of your revenue or 15% of your inventory or supply.

Imagine the worst case scenario, if a customer controls 50% of your revenue, if they suddenly stop working with you (and you can’t even pay for lawyers to go to court if you want to), then what’s going to happen to your operations & staff? Scary vibes.

Keep concentration low. This is especially true for service companies.

4. Economics: You Must Manage Unit Economics

Tracking margins on a month-to-month or even week-to-week basis is crucial for maintaining a healthy business.

When I started Monolith in 2017, money was truly tight, so I tracked our numbers on a week-to-week basis.

This meant I tracked things such as:

• Cash Profit Margin

• Software cost as a percentage of revenue

• Contractor cost as a percentage of revenue

• Marketing cost as a percentage of revenue

• Employee cost as a percentage of revenue

You’ll need to have percentage caps across the board, try to reframe all costs as a variable cost, and that’s how you get very lean and nimble.

As our financial situation improved, I transitioned to monthly and eventually quarterly tracking.

By keeping a close eye on our unit economics, we've been able to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions that have contributed to our overall success.

Competition? Who? That Dork? Ok. Give me 1 minute - I have do something for a client, yeah?

Now, let's circle back to the issue of competition.

Why don't I worry about competitors copying my strategies or tactics?

Because if you play your cards right, no one else can't replicate your 1) unique combination of market understanding, 2) technological adaptability, 3) concentration management, and 4) economic discipline that will ultimately drive your progress.

And if you want to be truly distinctive, have a differentiated culture & differentiated organization structure.

Competitors may try to copy you, but they'll will fail as they will inevitably copy someone else, fail at that too, and get confused what to do, then get FOMO’d into copying someone else, then gives up, then they buy some random NFT.

In summary, instead of worrying about competition, focus on mastering these four key factors: Market, Technology, Concentration, and Economics.

By doing so, you'll build a strong foundation for your business that will allow you to weather any competitive storm and come out on top.

Key points, ideas, snarky comments, and the “soul” of this article was written by Kenn. Draft made by a developer version of Mai, a Generative AI writer. Help your customers better & accelerate your marketing productivity using Mai. Free plan available: https://www.maiwriter.com/

Author Background: Kenn Costales is the Founder of Monolith Growth Ventures. Brands include Monolith Growth Consulting, a performance marketing agency, and Mai, a generative ai software for in-house marketing teams & agencies. Forbes 30 Under 30 2019.

One of the key points I’ve always been telling other business owners and my employees is that most problems are solved problems. And the same goes with a recession. There have been countless recessions, stagflations, and economic depressions before — 1930s, 1970s, and Japan in the 1990s. There have been proven methods before and it will continue to work today.

I’ve spent time over the weekend reading some recession or crisis-related stories, such as Accelerating out of the Great Recession (BCG), Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove), Getting to Plan B (John Mullins & Randy Komisar), and briefs from Bain & McKinsey. I’ll also share some strategies I used when I had my own business crisis in 2017.

I’ve consolidated these resources into a framework that will hopefully help SMEs tide over the crisis. I’ll also use this framework to make important changes in how I’ll lead my business.

The resources I used cover 90 companies during the Great Depression of the 1930s, 5000 companies during Japan’s Lost Decade of the 1990s, and 3900 companies during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2012. They’ve dug deep to find the outperformers and understood why they’ve established a strong competitive position despite turbulent times.

Despite the general malaise and fear that surrounds an upcoming recession, do realize that it’s an equalizer. Bloated, over-staffed market leaders will lay off staff, and companies that have taken on too much debt will start to play defensively.

This gives the frugal and prudent company the opportunity to catch up. A classic example of this is 1929 and after when IBM turned from a small business to a market leader in accounting machines (punched cards). They anticipated the need of companies wanting to convert labor into more efficient labor with the aid of accounting punched cards.

Beyond IBM surviving the Great Depression, companies such as General Motors at that time were profitable every single year using the methodologies I’ve outlined below.

The key idea is to prepare. You’re not alone in facing a recession, and history is your tool to help you win.

Let’s start with the big picture.

Monolith’s 5-Model Recession Growth Framework

All businesses have 5 levers towards driving better company value, whether big or small:

1. Working Capital Model (Helps you get more cash)

2. Organizational Model (Helps your team drive the right strategy)

3. Cost Model (How to manage your fixed & variable costs)

4. Innovation Model (Helps you get repeat customers & get word-of-mouth)

5. Revenue Model (How to find the right positioning for your company)

For each of these levers, let’s break it down into its component pieces and see what are the best actions to take in a recession.

I. Working Capital Model: Manage your Balance Sheet, Not your P&L

Most small businesses are happy with signing large contracts. But it won’t matter if your situation is like this:

• Contract Value: 10 million (due in 3 months)

• Cash on Hand: 1 million

• Incoming expense: 2 million (next month)

You’ll need to work on making sure that you convert contracts into cash fast. But how? Let’s break down working capital first:

1. Cash on Hand

2. Inventory

3. Accounts Receivable (money that clients owe you)

4. Cash Expenses

5. Accounts Payable (money that you owe suppliers)

From that 5 item list, you need to reduce non-cash working capital, which means:

1. Minimize inventory

2. Minimize accounts receivable

3. Maximize accounts payable

Minimize Inventory

Minimizing inventory is important as it frees up short-term cash that can be used for something else. In a recession period, it’s much more important to have an out-of-stock problem than wasted cash on spoilage. While it might limit your upside in terms of revenue, the same action limits your downside.

For example, if you’re in the food business, using the out-of-stock case;

• Let’s say you pay 1 million worth of inventory of beef, pork, and fish

• The sales value of this inventory is 2 million

• Demand is good, so you go out of stock. Your cash balance is 1 million.

Now with a scenario where you stock up:

• You pay 2 million worth of inventory of beef, pork, and fish

• The sales value is 4 million

• Demand covers 2.5 million in sales, which was the actual demand

• Your cash balance is 500,000

While stocking up helped you maximize the upside, you are still left with less cash than just letting yourself go out of stock.

The implication here as a retailer or if you’re in consumer goods is to 1) be very good at forecasting demand per SKU and 2) make sure that you stock “just right” to maximize cash on hand.

Minimize Accounts Receivable

Minimizing accounts receivable is more straightforward. But it implies perceived sacrifices as lower revenue.

Let’s say you’re a B2B service provider. In a typical negotiation scenario, a prospect might claim that the “standard terms” for a 10,000,000 contract is spread out across 12 months, with only 10% downpayment on the 1st month, then 50% on the 6th month, then the balance after there is proof-of-performance.

How I would respond to that situation is to offer a steep discount for upfront payment. It could be 10% or more, something that will please Business Directors, whose bonuses are based on the profit margin. If I am the only player in the market with proprietary technology, I would go even further and present it as a deal or no-deal type of situation: it’s either they take the discount or be left with an inferior or no supplier.

And once I do close the deal, I look to over-deliver on the promise and start to sell value-added services to make up for the loss in the discounts.

But even then, I don’t think it matters even if you “lost” 1,000,000. You have 9,000,000 cash in January in a deal with a steep discount as compared to only 1,000,000 cash with “great profit margin”. I’m sure you can think of something to make the services efficient enough to make the lesser revenue work within 12 months.

Maximize Accounts Payable

This is the inverse of minimizing accounts receivable in the sense that instead of offering a discount on a deal, you now offer interest for due payments to suppliers.

Using the same B2B deal earlier, let’s say you owe a supplier 2,000,000. You can say that you can pay the supplier in 6 months but with 10% interest. If the supplier has enough cash balance, the supplier’s CFO will appreciate it, especially if you have a good relationship.

Now, apart from the 9,000,000 in cash that you got from the “bad” deal with the client, now you have an extra 2,000,000 in cash from deferring a payment. Your profit will be worse (for now), but you have 11,000,000 to figure out your profit problems in 6 months.

That extra 11,000,000 can be spent to capture seasonal demand through short-term advertising & extra inventory, or it can be reinvested in equipment to make your operational expenses cheaper in the long run. Any of those two short-term projects can help you catch up to your target profit margins while still maximizing cash.

In a low-profit margin environment such as a recession, the importance of managing your balance sheet will be more important than ever.

Apart from maximizing your cash, you’ll also need to set up your organization for profitable growth. Let’s now dive into the organizational model.

II. Organizational Model — Restructure the Organization Around R&D, Marketing, and Sales

Most small businesses just cut costs blindly across all departments. This gets worse when you blindly follow an average accountant, who will just say to cut “discretionary expenses”, or expenses that are not related to day-to-day operations.

But instead of looking at things through an “operations” and “non-operations” lens, it’s best to evaluate functions based on “ROI-generating” and “non-ROI generating”. Peter Drucker coins these as Profit Center and Cost Center.

As a general rule, Profit Center expenses should be the same or higher than before and Cost Center expenses should definitely be lower.

Let’s start with what a Cost Center optimization would look like.

Where to Layoff (If you really need to): Admin, Manufacturing, IT, Non-Performing Assets

Driving down costs is not easy, especially in a crisis, but when the organization’s back is against the wall (and thus affects everyone), what will need to be cut first is:

• Non-performing assets (i.e. products / plants / equipment that’s not selling)

• Administration

• Accounting

• IT

• Manufacturing

If you’re a retailer or food business that buys a wide spectrum of supplies, apart from the ones above, you might need to cull the high-end and middle-market products as consumers will veer towards a better value option.

But you can’t just cut; otherwise, you won’t be set up for success against more aggressive competition. You’ll need to divert the newfound cash somewhere else.

Where to Build Extra Staff: R&D, Sales, and Marketing

To maintain or improve customer loyalty and drive new customers during down periods, these 3 elements are your lifeblood. There is no business without sales and good products; so these are the departments that must be kept as much as possible.

I’ll dive into the details of how to maximize R&D, Sales, and Marketing for my 4th and 5th points; but do know that your main KPI when it comes to an organizational restructure is that Marketing/Sales/R&D salaries, as a percentage of total salaries, should be higher than pre-recession periods.

The best case study of a company doing this is Samsung in 2009. In that period, which is in the middle of a recession, they 2x’d R&D investments and pirated the best marketing talent from L’Oreal and other FMCG firms.

That said, now that you know how to get extra cash in Part I, and know where to staff up in Part II, let’s now discuss how to recover your profit margin through optimizing your value chain.

III. Cost Model: Flexible Value Chain — More Variable Costs & Outsourcing vs Fixed Costs & Vertical Integration

The core idea of this section is that you need to maximize your variable cost and minimize your fixed cost. The basic idea is to evaluate your supply chain or value chain (if you’re in food / retail / manufacturing) or evaluate your fulfillment process (if you’re in the service business), and what you need to do is to outsource as much as possible.

The benefit here is that it allows you to be more flexible in the short term and not get into situations where you have unproductive assets when demand fluctuates and falls down.

The Value Chain of Most Retail and Food Businesses

For example, you own a butchery with this value chain:

• Rented space where you sell

• Everyone’s a full-time employee in your space

• 100% of your products are manufactured on-site

• 90% of your products are sourced from your farm

The above has very high costs and is generally “vertically integrated”, meaning that you own most, if not all, parts of the value chain, and none is outsourced.

One core idea in the “Accelerating out of the Great Recession” book that I mentioned is that you need to “minimize backward integration”, which is another way of saying that you need to outsource parts of your value chain and you need to use more part-time workers.

How to Limit Backwards Integration for a Food and Retail Business

Using the butchery example:

• Instead of a rented space, you do online delivery and attend bazaars. This lowers the fixed cost and changes it to 100% variable cost.

• Instead of full-time employees, use part-time employees and hand them an operations manual.

• 50% or less of your products are manufactured on-site, meaning that you may have to order from other butcheries which have the same quality

• 50% or less of your products are sourced from your farm

The net effect of all the activities above is more cash & profits, because:

• You get more cash as you don’t have to pay rental advances anymore, you have more profit margin with online delivery, and you can experiment & test which areas have more demand

• During tough months, you can easily reduce your part-time employees to maximize your profit margin, and you’re not locked into limiting labor laws

• Since fewer products are manufactured on-site, that also lowers the capacity requirements of your butchery, allowing you to get more profit margin by reducing part-time staff

• Since your farm now has fewer capacity requirements, you don’t need to keep buying animal feeds or calves to meet the requirements

While such a drastic shift in your value chain can cause worry about your operations, I would rather lose sleep trying to figure out my operations instead of losing sleep about not being able to pay my bills. It’s going to be tough, but proactive stress is better than reactive stress.

Your KPI in this scenario is simply to figure out how much variable cost you have relative to the total cost. You’d want to maximize your variable cost % as much as possible.

Now that you’ve figured out how to improve your cash & your profit margin, what’s next? You’ll need to look into offering innovative & high-value products.

IV. Innovation Model: Product Innovation Focused on Superior Customer Value

All of your cost restructurings weren’t for naught. It is all a setup for product innovation; specifically a low-cost business model. This is important as customers, given that they have less income to work with, will look for high-value options.

Uniqlo is the most famous example of a high-value, yet accessible brand that evolved right after Japan’s Lost Decade in the 1990s. In 1997, they pursued a private label model, outsourcing their manufacturing operations to China while hiring a brand consultancy in the US to create their designs. Their low-cost goods, new retail layouts, and great designs proved to be popular with Japanese consumers who are at the depth of the recession at that time.

Thus, one innovation area is to offer an “accessible” version of your product while using strong branding to drive up the perception of quality. The best Philippine example for this is Sunnies Studios. Their innovation is in the design. The build quality isn’t great, but they provide the highest value eyewear at the PHP 300–999 price point.

Deconstruct your Product or Service into Components, then Find Where You Can Be Better in with the Right Price Points

The central idea between the Uniqlo and Sunnies Studios examples is the concept of finding where you can provide a tangible “value add”. For both these companies, it was branding.

For our butchery example, they can use the extra cash to reinvest into new, low-cost product innovations such as:

1. Ready-to-heat meat, all packaged with marinade, to be sold to consumers

2. Ready-to-cook meat to be sold to convenience stores with microwaves

3. Ready-to-eat meat, if they invest in something like a Beef Jerky maker

4. Buy 1 Get 1 Promos, which are now profitable given their cost optimization work

If you’re a CPA lawyer, you can modify the way you deliver your service through these low-cost innovations:

1. Teaching people how to render the service through live workshops (example: consultingforlegals.com)

2. Transforming your process into a software solution (example: zegal.com)

3. Creating mini-courses (example: accountingtax.com)

The KPI for any of the activities above is the same as you would treat a franchise investment: payback period. To determine whether your low-cost innovation is a success or not, simply get the one-time costs of developers, machinery, or brand consultants, measure when you’ll get your money back, and it’s all profit from there.

But remember that just because you built; it won’t mean customers will automatically come. You’ll need to promote your regular & new products through marketing.

V. Revenue Model: Aggressive & Innovative Marketing & Advertising

Because of the recession, the prices of marketing & advertising will dip by quite a lot. Based on what I’m seeing so far, the cost per clicks have dropped by 40%-60%. That’s because marketing costs work in an auction; if there are fewer bidders, then the lower the price.

For companies who are able to save enough cash, recessions are the best period to increase visibility and a better return on their marketing than before.

From 1935 to 1937, Procter & Gamble doubled their spending on radio advertising, then doubled it again from 1937 to 1939. This was despite the fact that advertising spending for the rest of the country was declining. As a result, they gained market leadership for their core brands at that time.

Marketing spending’s effectivity is measured through Return on Ad Spend. Especially in digital, where there are tracking codes installed on the payment gateways of e-commerce platforms, you can get to see how much each dollar of advertising spend is generating.

Position your Product or Service around the idea of Price Anchoring. Offer long-term value through club subscriptions, bundles, and service leasing.

That said, the way you advertise also matters. In a recession period, you need to play the “value-for-money” angle. The formal marketing term is price anchoring. This is true regardless of whether you’re a luxury brand or a cheap brand. Examples:

1. If you’re selling bamboo bed sheets, you can position it by saying that it’s as good as PHP 15,000 hotel sheets… but it only costs PHP 5,000.

2. If you’re selling an enhanced glutathione capsule, you can position it by saying that it’s as good as PHP 20,000 IV treatments… but it only costs PHP 1,500.

3. In 1931, Chrysler launched the Plymouth PA model, which claimed the “smoothness of an 8-cylinder, but with the economy of a 4-cylinder”

4. In 1993, Asahi, which had a low market share at that time, distributed their products at discount stores, and changed their manufacturing process into non-heat treated beer so that they can position themselves with “№1 Non-Heat Treated Beer”. And they established that non-heat treated means “freshest possible beer”.

5. Bundles and larger canisters with discounts

6. Club subscriptions to create loyalty and offer customers access to special discounts

7. Lease ERP software with serial code licenses instead of forcing business owners to pay everything upfront. IBM did a similar model for their expensive punching card accounting machines in the 1930s.

In a recession period, the price anchoring strategy will work better than ever, and this is especially true if your product or solution fixes an expensive problem as outlined above.

Summary of the 5 Ways to Drive Growth in a Recession

These 5 elements should comprise your business strategy during a recession. In short:

1. Build a cash reserve by minimizing your non-cash working capital

2. Restructure your company around Marketing, Sales, and R&D

3. Improve profit margin by limiting backward integration and by outsourcing

4. Reinvest into low-cost, high-value product or service offerings

5. Establish value-for-money perception through increased marketing & advertising

Partner with People with a Relentless Growth and ROI Mindset

A relentless ROI and profit focus has always been the thrust of my growth marketing agency, Monolith Growth Consulting. We start with our clients’ ROI targets and work backward to find the right marketing model.

If you need 10x on your marketing investment, we’ll find the strategy that delivers. We have delivered from 5x up to 15x on marketing investment across e-commerce, B2B, service, & software businesses. And we’ll be honest in sharing if we can’t make it work — not all businesses are fit for our service.

If you’d like to see case studies, or just have a chat on whether we think it’s possible for your business to get those numbers in digital, schedule a call with me here.

For many entrepreneurs, the natural response to a challenge is double the effort — many business owners are now wearing multiple hats and working more than ever.

But for many, even if they’ve doubled up on efforts and investments, the results are still bad. It’s nowhere near what they had before.

This leads to frustration and burnout.

I myself am having a rather difficult time — I decided to keep my business growth goals for 2020 despite the situation and I just set myself up for some horrible burnout. I have a pretty good diet and I work out 6x per week, but I’m mentally tired. Before this week, I wasn’t sure why.

One thing that I’ve had to mentally agree with is the idea that certain problems can’t be immediately solved just with “hard work” and “smart strategies”. I actually felt that I worked really hard, did it very efficiently (I block & track every minute of my time), did the best possible strategies with the resources available, and the results still aren’t there. I’ve come to accept that there are 2 other variables at play: time and market conditions. Unfortunately, with the new situation, market conditions have changed and we’re in for a long ride.

What drives many business owners (or at least owners like me) are concrete outcomes and the feeling that you’re directly or indirectly responsible for every bit of it. Every sales milestone or award that you get is a manifestation of the strategies you’ve made, the relationships you’ve built, your discipline to execute, or your ability to influence.

The new normal gives us less power to drive these outcomes, and what has worked before is not giving us the same outcomes as we had before.

It shouldn’t be a surprise then that entrepreneurs are the highest-risk group when it comes to burnout.

The solution, I’ve found, is that you should ironically neglect business growth goals and instead you should focus more on organizational and personal growth.

I’ll touch on that a bit, but I want to make sure that you’re in a good position to focus on that first before talking about it…

But First, Protect your Business Fundamentals

This section acts as a disclaimer. If you are in a situation where you have less than 3–6 months of operational expenses in the bank and less than 18 months of cash runway, then you need to cut your losses and generate sales as much as you can to put yourself above water. If you don’t know what these two terms mean:

• 3 months of operational expenses in the bank: assuming no revenue, can you pay your staff and rent for 3 months straight?

• Runway: it’s calculated via (cash in the bank / loss every month). The quotient of this should be equal or more than 18 months.

I won’t go deep into defensive strategies for businesses, as I’ve covered it in Points 1–3 in this article: https://medium.com/@kennyfrc/driving-growth-as-an-sme-during-turbulent-times-20760c9bbd52

Once you have established your business fundamentals, the next step is to not do more of it, as it will lead you to a downward spiral of burnout and potentially relationship problems. This article aims to help you manage it. Let’s move on…

Let’s Understand Burnout

For us to be on the same page, let’s cover off how psychologists define burnout.

It defined as the mismatch between your results and your efforts.

In other words, if you doubled the effort, and if results were still half or worse than it was once before, then you’re going to be mentally burnt out and frustrated.

Many Type A or ambitious people crave the fulfillment of achieving something difficult through the honor of hard work and persistence.

But what if you don’t get it? That’s when the flood of negative emotion starts. “Why not lie low for now until the situation is over?”, you might ask. Some might even contemplate quitting and fall back to the security of real estate or a corporate job.

Do know and understand that this is normal.

But also understand that this is a crucible moment. It is a time that’s meant to test your character, and it’s up to you if you want to pause or to find wisdom from it. It is the time to draw water from stone.

So how do you deal with burnout? Some will suggest meditation, but while helpful, I think at times it’s a band-aid solution and does not solve the root problem which lies at the heart of your beliefs.

Let’s start with “commitment to change”.

Commit to Change, Even if you Disagreed with It

One of the slow, silent killers of many businesses is stubborn management. Being stubborn about a system has worked for years or decades will slowly kill profits until you’re at the stage that you must change.

A situation where you have sufficient reserves and declining revenue is a clear sign that you need to experiment with new strategies.

A good analogy for this is a relative who smokes yet their health is declining. If that person has breathing problems while they walk or work out, that is the perfect time to start changing their habits, and not wait until a mild stroke arrives.

You shouldn’t let time reduce your cash reserves and wait until the moment that you have to spend a lot on an emergency situation. Commit to change now, and you avoid large expenses (either through business pivots or something else) later.

Once you’ve committed to change, what’s next?

Change starts with your Expectations

Another slow, silent killer of many businesses is having the wrong expectations. In contrast to people who cling to tradition, this set of people bet big on 1 idea and have huge expectations for it. This might be true for businesses who are doing well during the lockdown period.

Even when things are going well, it’s still correct to apply good risk management. I’ve been fortunate enough to interact with many businesspeople who are more successful than I am, and a common topic has always been “reducing the risk & downside”.

It does not mean taking no risks at all. It means taking small ones relative to your cash balance (up to 5%-10%). For example, this means taking a $2 billion bet on a new business line if your cash balance is $20 billion, and that means making a $2,000 bet if your bank account is $20,000.

And when you make a bet, your expectation is that you might lose every single penny.

Even if you’re confident, do realize that market volatility is higher than ever, so a good sales month in July for example might not translate to a good month in August. That can be due to government changing their regulations, or the market shrinking, or something else. It is still good practice to bet wisely. Strong businesspeople and entrepreneurs are ultimately excellent risk managers.

Now when you hear that you should “expect to lose money”, this will naturally make an entrepreneur cringe. What’s the point, right? I don’t propose changing only your financial goals; what I mean is that you need to de-prioritize it in favor for something else.

And that “something else” involves changing the way you set goals at its core…

The Right Way to Set Goals When Outcomes Aren’t Going Your Way

In a risk-rich environment like where we are all in today, the best approach is to not set external goals at all. You shouldn’t target a certain revenue or profit target.

What I’ve learned from reading the biographies of high-level entrepreneurs, chess prodigies, golfers, and even legendary pro gamers is that in order for you to win consistently for decades without getting bored or burnt out, is to compete and do things for personal growth and improvement, not to win.

The best don’t have a “passion to win”. Instead, they have the passion to be best in their industry (and that means the best in ability or the best products/services at their price point, not trophies or business size). They understand that the “wins” in their field are an outcome of being the best, and they’re not the best because they win. Most people don’t look to “win” to validate themselves. The mindset is to be the best in skill first, then the world will catch up. Or to use a business example, it’s “to offer the best value to customers possible at your price point, then the market will catch up”.

Here are two quotes from Daigo Umehara that explain it perfectly:

“I’ve learned the value of honest, patient training through the shame of loss. No matter how hard you try, those who train only for a short-term goal without passion cannot hope to consistently take down those who love what they’re doing and have painstakingly explored every facet of the game.”

In business, “short-term goals” mean your financial goals. And “passion” here means how well your systems, technology, and skills serve customers. Sometimes, customers might not like what you’re offering. But are you in it for their money, or do you genuinely care about building the best business? The people who were in it because they thought it was easy money will quit. The people who genuinely want to improve will survive.

“The whole purpose of matches and losses is self-improvement. If you learned something from a match, it’s a good outcome. I’m thankful when a player beats me; defeats highlight my outstanding issues, and working to correct them is a chance to grow.”

In business, the concept of “matches” are your business strategies (you) and market irrelevance (the real competition). When people don’t buy, that means that your business strategies are simply losing ideas. Safe to say that all entrepreneurs face the shame of a losing idea at any point in their journey, more so during this time than before.

What should happen next? Here’s another quote from Daigo:

“The important thing [to stay on top of your game] is keep trying new strategies. Some will be more successful than others, and you will certainly question whether you’re trying the right thing at least a few times. Then, after three months or so, you’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel and settle on the form your big change will take. Of course, these tunnels of change come one after the other. Indeed, maintaining your strength as a gamer will mean passing through an unending series of tunnels.”

While many of us probably have heard of “being your strongest self” in one way or another, how do you implement it? Here’s my way.

Focus on Capability & Innovation Goals instead of Growth Goals

The best long-term solution to eliminate burnout is to plan for personal & organizational growth, instead of financial growth. Short-term financial goals should still be there, but it’s just serves as a check to keep you safe and in line.

Specifically, you’d want to define skill goals for yourself and your organization, and you’d want to plan for innovation (i.e. new / evolved products and new / evolved services). This requires you to stretch yourself to new fields, but it does not mean that it’s not achievable. A simple example is a generation-old restaurant business now looking to test out digital. I’ve shared the business rationale behind “innovation during recessions” in this article: https://medium.com/@kennyfrc/driving-growth-as-an-sme-during-turbulent-times-20760c9bbd52

Here are some examples of how I would define capability and service innovation goals for the organization:

1. Capability Goals: Pilot a 12-week online course and learn how to sell it, learn enough Javascript/Ruby/SQL to be able to launch prototypes and use it to pilot internal software. Get the team to acquire more certifications and double down on client management training and team management training while we have excess time. (done in Q2)

2. Innovation Goals: Launch a self-service digital marketing education platform in Q3, Launch AI-enabled marketing technology software in Q4

Does the above comprise more than 5% of my revenue base? Not at all. Will it even give me a little bump in revenue? I doubt.

But does it position the organization to differentiate itself further and potentially have 3 different and stable revenue streams in a couple of years? Yes. Will it help position us better in a post-pandemic world where there’s probably a larger market who will want to test out digital either for themselves (course), with an experienced marketing team (software), and those who want to outsource to highly skilled people backed with AI-enabled software (service + software). Yes, yes, and yes.

The above goals make sense for me as I want the organization to deliver unmatched value in the future instead of chasing for profit now. I want other marketing firms to be held against the “Monolith standard”. I want potential employees to see Monolith as a rich place to learn and the best launchpad for their professional career. Exponential growth in business, like many things in life, requires structural changes, and by focusing on capability & innovation (or “focusing on getting stronger”) is a superior and a more achievable plan than looking to hit financial goals in turbulent times.

I’ll end with another quote from Daigo:

“Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for growth. It’s where they show off their achievements. Once I made that realization, I finally started making continued growth my goal, rather than winning. Games enrich my life by allowing me to grow as an individual, and that’s what motivates me to keep ongoing.”

The best way to win in business is when your organization can do things your competitors can’t.

I used to dread the idea of turning 30. I had a specific business milestone by that age, and I was nowhere near it.

Ever since I turned 20, I didn’t enjoy any of my birthdays because I had 1 less year to hit that goal. I tried many things, like playing 4 concurrent tables of online poker with $1000 each (at 22), forex trading (at 23), briefly joining a funded startup (at 25), and countless more weird ideas that I don’t remember anymore.

When I turned 29, I got over it. I’m now much closer to where I want than ever before, and I’ll probably get it by mid-2020.

I always liked imagining how an older, stronger, and smarter Kenn would talk to me today; and here’s my list of advice to a borderline crazy 20-year-old me who liked to play with maximum risk.

Hopefully, you’ll find it useful too.

1. Don’t be Goal-Oriented, Be Habit-Oriented

What helped me most with my business growth was by being extremely militant about my day.

9am-12nn was blocked for writing proposals & lead generation. Afternoons were for client work and people management. Night was for international calls.

Whenever I’m in a coworking space, I don’t chit-chat like most people. I just work. I’m always alarmed to see “ambitious & independent millennials” gossip and rant their days away in these spaces. Ambitious goals don’t matter if you can’t focus and stay put.

2. Your ROI calculation should include all types of resources (like your time)

When I started out, I tracked each type of activity I did per hour using a time tracker tool and checked how much revenue or client retention I got for it. 3 hours per day was the sweet spot for growing the business. Anything less created stagnation or made the business shrink.

But it’s not just clocking in the hours, there’s also a minimum output required for those 3 hours. For me, it was at least 1 thirty page marketing audit, 5–10 personalized emails, 1 ad campaign, or PR work.

3. Improve your “Habit Batting Average” Over Time

Even if you don’t complete what you need to do within the allotted time frame, it’s okay. But it’s not okay to stay stagnant. Sure, you can start with 10% completion, but it needs to improve over time. Going beyond 90% is “reliable”.

It doesn’t have to be limited to work. The same concept can be applied to working out and dieting.

4. Maximize Variable Cost, Minimize Fixed Cost

As much as possible, avoid anything with contracts and installments. That means no car and no mortgages before 30. That will be a surprise to some, but it is the rational decision if the goal is to maximize the cash needed to reinvest into the business.

5. Learn The Right Behavior from Biographies

“Not having the right background” is not an excuse. You can get the context that you need for business by reading biographies. Robert Kuok’s biography is probably the best one. Benjamin Franklin’s biography and Erik Nordeus’ interview collections for Elon Musk is also good.

6. Be Impatient with Actions, But Patient with Results

If you’re 19 years old and think you should “work smart”, you can’t. Before you know what “smart actions” are, you need to try all types of actions. No one’s that smart to know it upfront, even with a lot of theoretical knowledge. You need to pay your dues.

And even if you do a lot of work, you also can’t expect results to come instantly. Realize that it’s an exponential curve, not a linear curve. So efforts in the early days have low ROI but things will feel like magic once you stay consistent for a few years. The curve starts to tilt by the 3rd year if you’ve been consistent and have paid your dues.

7. Business is Less About Passion and More About Keeping House

Business will feel like cleaning your room and doing your laundry. Until you figure out finding a purpose behind cleaning your room and doing your laundry, running a business during tough times will break you emotionally.

8. Change the People Around you If you Have to. Burn Bridges (And Know it Will Sting)

A pet theory I have about social mobility is that it’s hard for someone who comes from poverty to grow to middle income or high income because of the high social cost. Once a person has strong social ties, the person tends to stay in the same income or social bracket.

The only way is to only connect & love people who support your aspirations and shed away those who don’t.

It will hurt you for making such tough decisions, and it’s up to you if you are okay with that. I was okay with that.

9. You Don’t Have to Network That Much. Help Other People, and the Network will Come to You

20-year-old Kenn hates “networking and connecting”. 30-year-old Kenn also hates “networking and connecting”. Turns out we both didn’t need it anyway.

Grow your skills, help people in the best way you can, be more visible by paying for PR & news, and the network will start coming to you and people will start asking if they can partner with you. Your life will feel like it’s full of luck if you focus on improving yourself first.

It turns out that going out to drink to “network” or joking around to “create rapport” is non-factor. Creating value for other people is the only true way to network.

10. What You’ve Learned Will Become Outdated. Keep an Open Mind.

Theories and models work in context. When the context changes, you need to adapt with new theories and models.

Many small businesses stay stagnant because they stubbornly hold to what has worked before. Yes, you should stick to it *as long* as it’s working; but you should change when you see early signs that it’s not working like it used to.

Yes, every business is different. But it also doesn’t have to mean that you have to customize for every single business. You don’t have to.

If you can build or borrow frameworks, it’s becomes much easier for you to navigate through different types of marketing challenges.

The team and I developed a simple 2x2 matrix that serves as a starting point on how to serve clients depending on their industry.

Here’s the matrix:

This matrix has two vectors:

• Durable <-> Consumable Products

• Experiential <-> Functional Products

Let’s go through each quadrant, and I’ll share what’s the best promotion and content strategy for each.

Quadrant 1: Durable + Experiential Businesses

Examples:

Furniture, Beddings, Shoes, and Cameras

Promotion Strategy:

Durable products are typically not bought impulsively. It takes a few visits and considerations before customers pull the trigger. Many eventually lapse off and go to a competitor if you wait too long.

Thus the normal approach here is to offer deep, time-limited discounts (or gifts with purchases) to manufacture an artificial reason to buy.

Apart from discounts, exclusivity through limited edition / limited stock also helps. The marketing principle is the same as before where you’re pushing for scarcity & urgency.

Positioning Strategy:

Given that it’s an experiential business, the two most important things to drive conversion is aesthetic fit (i.e. “is this design right for me?”) and product innovation (i.e. “the brand always comes up with something new & fresh”).

It’s important for brands under this quadrant to be perceptually ahead that it’s a smart move to flush out old stock fast through deep clearance sales so you can make way for better product versions. A forward-looking product launch strategy is imperative.

Screenshot Examples:

60% Off Promotion from Home24

Aesthetic-based Categorization in Home24 (Aesthetic Fit)

Quadrant 2: Durable + Functional Businesses

Examples:

Electronics such as laptops, power banks, and speakers. Mattresses fall into this space as well.

Promotion Strategy:

Same as Quadrant 1. Deep discounts or gifts with purchases.

Positioning Strategy:

Given that it’s a functional business, the positioning is simpler in the sense that 1) it’s a better painkiller, 2) better authority / proof, and 3) better technology.

Experiential businesses fight over the best concepts, while in functional businesses, it tends to be an arms race — to whoever builds the best possible product first.

Screenshot Examples:

Communicate Why the Technology is Better (Xiaomi Scooter Pro):

Mix of Authority / Proof and Technology (Casper):

Quadrant 3: Consumable + Experiential Businesses

Examples:

Cakes, Salads, Beverages, Fragrances

Promotion Strategy:

Unlike durable businesses, which tries to create urgency & scarcity to close the deal, consumable products have it inherently (i.e. people get hungry, thus they buy food. People need a bath, so they need soap). Instead, the challenge of most consumables is that they need to encourage repeat purchase.

Thus, it’s fairly common in this industry to see subscriptions, bundles, and loyalty programs. If you have a lot of complementary products (shampoo / conditioner), go for bundles. If you want to drive habit creation, do subscriptions & loyalty programs.

Positioning Strategy:

Same as Quadrant 1. Product innovation is important (e.g. Mcdonald’s twister fries). And instead of aesthetic fit, what you need is “brand fit” (i.e. is this product right for me?).

Screenshot Examples:

Subscription as the Default (Blue Apron):

Quadrant 4: Consumable + Functional Businesses

Examples:

Supplements, Anti-Dandruff Shampoo, Anti-aging Skincare

Promotion Strategy:

Same as Quadrant 3. Focus on subscriptions, bundles, and loyalty programs

Positioning Strategy:

Same as Quadrant 2. Win with better technology or better authority / proof. If you’re doing a value play, then win with better supply chain.

Screenshot Examples:

Supplement Bundles (“Stack and Save” from PEScience):

Authority + Bundle (Influencer’s Stack)

Conclusion

By using matrices and frameworks, it becomes easy to figure out what’s the best and most strategic approach to solve any business’ problems.

If you’d like a smart & strategic approach to solve your most difficult growth problems, book some time with me here: https://go.oncehub.com/bookmonolith

Why is that many entrepreneurs can’t level up to become corporate executives and why is it that many executives struggle to get traction for their business? I consider both groups very smart yet it seems that the skills aren’t transferable.

I wasn’t satisfied with words like “resourcefulness”, “cunning”, and “savvy”, so I’ve always been very observant of others and open-minded about new perspectives & ideas.

Today, I think I now understand this.

This article is my attempt to explain the difference between corporate logic and entrepreneurial logic as applied in goal-setting and strategic thinking.

Let’s begin.

How Goal-Setting Works Differently for Corporate Executives & Entrepreneurs

Reflecting on the past two and a half years, I’ve noticed that there are two ways to approach goals: working backwards and working forwards. Both work, but only in very different contexts.

Let’s start with working backwards.

Working Backwards from a Goal

When I quit my job in 2015, I had one goal, which is to start my software company.

I had three tests in mind: 1) a free inventory management tool for sari-sari store owners where I’d sell the sales data to research agencies like Nielsen, 2) a marketing automation tool that makes it easy for advertisers to bid on the lowest CPMs and highest ROAS, and 3) join an existing software company and see how it works out.

I had 2 years before my savings ran out.

To try these 3 things, I worked backwards and determined that I had to do the following:

• Enroll in a 3-month coding bootcamp to get the programming skills I needed

• Fly back to Philippines, in a high-growth city that was both urban yet had a high density of sari-sari stores

• The city should also have emerging tech talent that I can partner with

I decided on Cebu City, a place I’ve never been to, because it’s the 2nd largest region behind the capital and it had a booming Business Process & Knowledge Process Outsourcing industry, which means it had a a lot of ambitious yet likely bored developers wanting to make an impact instead of working over the graveyard shift making boring internal applications for foreign companies.

For #1, I enrolled in bloc.io, which was the only online coding bootcamp at that time, and I immediately shelled out the $5,000 fees to learn how to code.

Now that I run a digital marketing agency, you’ll immediately guess that that none of these things worked out for me.

The problem with working backwards is that you’ll never get to an accurate conclusion on the cost and the time it takes to meet the goal.

So instead of 2 years, my savings in reality only had 1.5 years. And I while I b the inventory management application (you can see the prototype’s code here: Inventory Management App in Github and the marketing automation software (I’ve kept that private since I still want to use it), I realized that products need 2 years on average before it can pay off your living expenses so I had to scrap it.

I only had about a few months left until I changed the way I approached my goals.

Working Forwards to Find the Right Goal

For quite a while, a lot of my friends and my newfound connections in Cebu suggested that I should start my marketing agency.

They remarked how I always “knew my stuff” in that realm and I should start my own.

I dismissed it many times until I had a few months left in my runway.

Eventually, the pressure of having only a few months left in the bank spurred me to take action and try it.

And it worked.

However, I also realized that relying only on a network is not good for fast growth. I was deliberating on creating a website and fill it with content until I bumped into an interesting site when I browsing flippa.com, which is a marketplace for buying/selling websites.

The site was called growthhackerkit.com, and it was a free growth hacking course that had 3,000 subscribers. The source of traffic was high quality as it came from tech and founder centric websites such as producthunt.com and growthhackers.com.

I realized that it would be a good source of leads. So I bought that site for $1,500 and it immediately paid off for me as I got three clients there that I was able to retain for at least 10 months.

The difference between “working backwards” and “working forwards” is that in the former, you build a plan & process to get to your goal with the trade-off of time & capital. Working forwards mean that based on your own skills, your time, and your existing capital, you imagine opoprtunities that you can tap into.

Depending on who you’re talking to, “working forwards” means something that’s very flighty and spontaneous, but that’s the best way to find business ideas that you can reasonably do. The goals emerge from yourself & your environment. It’s not something you can throw in the air and hope to achieve.

While these stories are from my personal experience, there’s a lot of data that backs this up.

Let’s formalize this further.

Deterministic vs Emergent Strategy Development Processes

When I was working in Procter & Gamble, strategy development was straightforward:

• Find markets & customer segments that are large or fast-growing

• Identify a compelling marketing idea that captures the imagination of the market

• Link the idea to a product that is valuable & unique that people want to pay a premium for it

• Find distribution & awareness channels that best reaches that market

• Through concept & product testing, you reduce the risk of the launch

Once we’ve qualified the plan, we’ll stick to it for months. We would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and testing. Then spend a few million on marketing and distribution.

While the logic is sound, it is still very risky. Even for large, well-financed multinationals, the success rate of such projects is 5–30%. The top quartile of multinationals have a rate higher than that at between 30%-50%.

Despite that success rate, most multinationals understand that there are asymmetric gains among projects: some projects have significantly higher ROI than the rest. So they invest more on the best-qualified projects and the math works out towards sustained profitability.

The CEO job of the biggest multinationals is no different from being a portfolio manager of an asset management firm — projects are just like stocks and your allocate your money on those with the most value & growth.

For entrepreneurs, you don’t have the luxury of managing a portfolio of projects. You need to get at least one of your two or three projects right. Many have the budget for just one project.

So how do they strategize for that?

For entrepreneurs, the strategy development process is different:

• Who you are

• Who you know could be customers

• Who you know could be partners

• What you know

• What you can build

That’s it.

Large corporations start with the “market & customer”. While entrepreneurs start with the “self”.

Based on an MIT study, the average successful entrepreneur is 45 years old. It’s not some 19 year old hotshot that the media likes to talk about.

Middle age is the best time to become an entrepreneur for simple reasons: unless you come from an entrepreneurial background, you need time and investment to build a reputation (who you are), build a network (who you know), and build skills (what you know & what you can build).

So even when people ask me for advice on when’s the best time to become an entrepreneur, I always say to do it when you’re older and more stable. I was an outlier when I started at 26. And there were many times I had to show & demonstrate that I was wiser and savvier than my age in countless sales meetings. It’s not easy.

As you can see, corporate strategy is deterministic: you set a goal, set a plan, and you reduce the risk of that plan. Entrepreneurial strategy is emergent: starting with yourself & your peers, what possibilities can you imagine?

But while the logical processes are different to succeed in corporations as compared to entrepreneurship, it doesn’t mean you’re stuck with one.

One day, entrepreneurs need to make that shift.

But when does it happen?

Breaking Out of the “Traditional Business Owner” Ceiling

In Southeast Asia, there’s a very defined image of a “traditional business owner”: ROI-focused, pragmatic, operationally involved, and stubborn to old yet proven ways.

But inevitably, this person hits a ceiling and the business stagnates. While it is stagnating with slow growth, the person and the family’s already living a comfortable life. It then leaves them with a choice: stay in comfort or apply more risk to the business?

Many opt to stay in comfort as they understandably had to go through a lot to get to that point. There’s nothing wrong with that at all.

But for those who want to get to the next level, they now have the resources to unlearn everything and start adopting the corporate approach.

And that means they need to buy their way into their goals and bite the bullet: raise debt, raise equity financing, hire external managers, and invest in new-to-their-world services such as research & concept testing.

Few take that big of a risk (remember that the success rate of projects is only 5–30%). But for those who take the plunge and let themselves go through the unlearning process, then they’ve mastered what it really means to become an elite businessperson.

Schedule for More Insights

If you want to grow your digital business to the next level, I offer free marketing audits. Book some time with me here: Kenn’s Calendar.

Digital marketing overwhelms you with jargon: CTR%, CVR%, EPC, ROAS, and more.

It also doesn’t help that agencies and consultants just add more jargon to mix: “Impression Share”, “Relevance Score”, “Social Proof”, and more.

I know it’s ridiculous. But it doesn’t mean you have to dive deep into it.

Instead, this article keeps it simple by mapping digital marketing with something you already know: building relationships.

What is marketing anyway but building relationships with people?

In the 5-part framework that I’ll teach you, I’ll give you a step-by-step journey on the role of digital marketing & its stages. And I’ll explain it in the context of relationships.

Let’s start with the first stage.

Stage 1: Awareness (Or How to Let People Know You Exist)

The first stage is awareness.

While you may like yourself or your product / service, it doesn’t matter if people don’t know you. You need to get yourself out there.

There are two ways to start awareness: outbound marketing and inbound marketing.

Let’s look at outbound first.

Awareness via Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is when you’re actively looking for someone.

Say, you like to read fiction. And you want someone who shares that interest in fiction.

The first thing that you need to do is to find out where people like that hang out. Examples include book fairs or reading groups.

So what you’re trying to do here is that you first:

1. Identify your market

2. Figure out where your market likes

In digital marketing, this means the exact same thing.

You can use Facebook Advertising to find their interests. Using that same example, if you were planning to sell a fiction book, you’d want to target people who liked popular fiction books.

You can also use Linkedin to find & join groups related to writing or reading.

And you can use Google Ads to place yourself on search engine terms that fiction readers like to use (like “best fiction for 2019”).

Awareness with Inbound Marketing

The second type is Inbound Marketing. It’s the inverse of outbound marketing, when you’re not really looking for someone.

Instead, they found you.

One example is when you’re organizing a fiction writing workshop. Or you’re holding a fiction talk in a local meetup. You’re just doing your thing until you bumped into a person who seems to be a good fit.

Same goes for marketing.

On your website, you write short stories to build an audience. Or you share snippets of your upcoming novel to generate some interest.

Over time, more and more people drop by to your website. And just as you realize it, you now have thousands of interested people on your website’s email list.

Unlike outbound, where you go to them. In inbound, you show & create value and people come to you.

Stage 2: Acquisition (Or Getting to the First Date)

In the last stage, you’ve created awareness through that fair or workshop.

The next step is to trade contact details.

Of course, you can’t just blurt it out on your first sentence.

Instead, you’ll need to show that you’re worth sharing details for first.

You could, for instance, invite the person to a date at a museum. Or invite them to go to your next workshop.

The rule here is that you give some value for their contact.

In marketing, “value for their contact” means a form on the website that offers things like a free ebook, a free webinar, or a free newsletter subscription.

It’s those pop-ups that you see on websites all the time.

Stage 3: Activation (Or Checking if You’re a Match)

So you got the contact. The next step then is to ensure that you give a great first experience.

Just because you have credentials doesn’t mean you can seal the deal. You need to show you’re fun in the first place.

During the date, be yourself, crack jokes, share your passion, and have fun.

All dates won’t work out for you since not all people are like you.

But if you’re yourself, then the right person will want to hang out with you more.

In marketing, that means people click-through in your newsletter, people stay through until the end of the webinar, and people want more of your content.

But many will fall off, unsubscribe from your newsletter, or even think your content is dumb.

That’s fine, because there are many markets. And not all are right for your business.

Stage 4: Retention (Following Through)

Trust is built in the succeeding dates. When everything feels right on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th date, or more, then it starts feeling right for you and you know that you’re with a person you’d enjoy spending your time with.

But of course, you’ll need to be consistent and you’ll need to follow through. If you don’t contact & invite the person, why would you expect a second date?

In marketing, you’d send email broadcasts, chatbot messages, marketing automation systems, and SMS reminders.

Keep following through to get mutual value: your business gets a potential sale, and the prospect gets value & ROI from your help.

Stage 5: Revenue (Closing the Deal)

Finally, you can close the deal. Great first experience. The feeling of trust & fun never wavered, and you now plan to get into a long-term relationship.

In business, you start signing deals. Maybe it’s a few purchases on your ecommerce site, a subscription to your SaaS or studio, or a long-term B2B contract deal.

Either way, you’ve earned the deal. And the counterpart feels excited to work with you.

This Tool Will Help You Analyze All Marketing Material Out There

When you think of every marketing material as a part of a relationship-building process, you get to see how your competition or how a brand tries to create a sale.

You saw a dramatic TV ad? You now know it’s an awareness generation campaign. They want buzz to get attention in a crowded market.

You saw a Facebook Ad about a free ebook? You now know it’s an acquisition campaign. They’re trying to get your contact details.

Amazing 50-page free guide? They’re marking sure that you feel like they know what they’re doing.

Email newsletters? Chatbot followups? You know they’re building you up & retaining you. Further building trust.

Transaction done? There’s belief that there’s lasting value for both parties.

You can Now Think Strategically About Marketing

From now on, you can think through marketing with an expert marketer’s lens.

As an exercise, assess and classify any marketing material you see, and put it in the context of the framework.

If you like the marketing asset, take a photo of it or take a screenshot and save it when you need ideas for a specific marketing campaign.

Good luck!

One of the reasons why I decided to start & run an SME-focused marketing agency is that I get to work directly with business owners or founders.

I don’t come from an entrepreneurial backgorund, so the only way I could learn entrepreneurship was by copying and emulating my most successful clients.

Over the past 2 years, I’ve been fortunate to work with one founder who started & grew a SaaS business to $100,000,000 in annual revenue and another who built an ecommerce business to $10,000,000 in annual revenue.

After working with over 50 clients, I couldn’t help but notice that their unique behavior, apart from their results, stood out like a sore thumb.

And I’ve started to believe that these are the traits that led them to their success.

This article is my attempt to articulate two of their most distinct habits, and how we can all learn from them. Let’s start with the first.

Triangulate and Launch Fast (Be Productive, Don’t Over-rationalize, and Learn from the Market)

“H” was the best entrepreneur ever I worked with, not because he built a 9-figure business, but because he was inhumanly productive.

I remember a regular Monday when I recommended that he make three landing pages and five long-form ads for his marketing funnel.

By Tuesday, he was done with 3,000 words across his landing pages and 1,500 words across the long-form ads. By 12nn. He started on 8am.

This came as a surprise because I always felt that I was a productive person; but this freakshow took it to the next level.

I couldn’t understand how he did it until I started noticing something that annoyed me:

“Kenn, look at what this guy is doing” — *shows landing page*

“Kenn, I like his funnel here. Do you think it will work for us?” — *shows another landing page*

“Kenn, I saw this new format — long-form sales page on a free ebook. What do you think?” — *shows a book*

“Kenn, do you think this kind of story from XXX works? — *shows another page*

Initially, this annoyed the crap out of me because I felt that he wasn’t trusting my ideas.

If he hired me to be his consultant, why does he have to look for random references, right?

But I eventually realized that he needs those references to help him decide what format and style to choose for this work. And my role in the engagement was to choose what are the best references and why they are the best references.

It all started to make sense for me when he kept talking about “copying” and “building on” existing funnels from other people.

But it didn’t stop there.

What was crazy for me is that he kept doing this non-stop. He kept throwing ideas almost weekly and we found ourselves building a new marketing campaign or evolving an existing campaign every 2 weeks.

The best word I can come up with to describe this behavior is “Conceptual Triangulation”.

He would normally take two or more marketing assets, find patterns across those assets that validate a concept, build a system around that concept (e.g. a copywriting system for his sales pages), and then just run with it.

He never thought of any concepts or theories of his own. He always looked at other people in the market and just learned from what they did and remixed it into a new plan that’s new yet rooted in ideas that’s proven in-market.

But that’s only his starting point.

Because after he has that idea, he would release a new funnel or a new landing page within half a day. In about 4 hours. He also did free youtube videos and maintained a blog.

He was crazy productive because he modeled an existing format, just filled in the blanks, and didn’t overthink if it would work or not. Putting it out in market ASAP and seeing how the market reacts will answer that question.

When I saw that, I realized that was his “superpower” and I tried my best to copy it in my day-to-day work.

So much that I’ve tried to build it into an organizational development system that can you can read here.

But H’s story is for founders who love to do marketing work with their bare hands. What if you don’t and you’re better at leading and working through others?

This is where my second story comes in.

Stubbornly Open-Minded (Innovate by Always Testing Out New Channels & Ideas — even if it doesn’t make 100% sense to you)

The second story is about “L”. He doesn’t have the same marketing chops as H; but he has the same triangulation mindset:

1. He would look at the market for best practices and businesses to model instead of relying on his own theories

2. Whenever there was a new feature in Facebook or Google, or a new channel that’s emerging like chatbots, he’ll dive right in and figure out a way to integrate it in his business

3. He likes to read and listen to podcasts (in fact, he became a client of mine because he heard about me in this podcast episode: https://unofficialshopifypodcast.com/episodes/4435cb6b-4435cb6b)

But once he has that new idea or concept in his mind, he’ll push — HARD.

I’ve met people who were stubborn with their own views; but this guy is a different and weird kind of stubborn — if there’s a new idea or a new best practice, he wants to try it out and he wants to see it in market ASAP.

Let’s call it “stubbornly open-minded”.

They understand markets evolve all the time and there is a glass ceiling if you stick to old practices and routines for years.

Sticking to old routines may work if you’re in a traditional business like hardware retail or houseshold repair; but even they are slowly getting chipped off by specialty ecommerce stores and robotics.

Traditional brick & mortar just has a longer evolution cycle than digital businesses.

Growth is Under your Nose (Ever Wonder Why Many Billionaires and Millionaires Are Undereducated?)

Over the years, I’ve learned from “H”, “L”, and countless undereducated billionaires that the answers to the “rapid growth problem” can’t be found in a guru’s management theory book.

The best growth plans come from an open mind and it comes from the humility that the great plans you’ve made a year before may not work a year from now.

Markets always evolve, and you should too.

But you don’t have to go at it alone. If you’d like to grow your business faster, cut your learning curve, and get a wealth of new ideas to try on day 1, book a complimentary 30 minute consultation with me and let’s talk on how I turned these two insights into solid growth plans for my clients.

Our results speak for themselves:

In my ecommerce agency, I’ve iterated through 4 different organization training models over the years. Many of them “broke” under the pressure of scaling. But today, I think I’ve finally found the one I’m confident will help us retain better as we put on more marketing budget.

This new training model has helped me train my team from almost zero marketing knowledge to a team that churns out results for our clients day in and day out. Many are fresh graduates.

Snapshot of Our Results

Furthermore, we got reviews such as this:

Most importantly, this training model has helped free up my time to do more “CEO work”, such as sales, marketing, and strategy.

To start, I’ll share the training models that didn’t work for me.

Three Agency Training Models that People Said Would Work (But Didn’t)

For the first couple of iterations of my training model, I’ve tried to learn as much as I can from agencies who came before me. After tapping my network and consuming lots of courses, the common denominator was that I needed to put everything into a standard process.

EMyth-style Processes Don’t Work for Complex Knowledge Work

While this process has worked for a while, I’ve noticed that the lifespan of my Standard Processes was very short.

For example, I couldn’t use a process that has worked well in Ecommerce to Lead Generation. Nor could it last through a change in toolset or even a simple UI change Facebook. There was always a new theory or methdology that broke my processes.

The lifespan of a process was about 6 months. And I usually had to spend 45 days or more just to complete a 1000+ page marketing playbook. And I did I rewrote that playbook three times, each using different formats. I tried a procedural approach, just like what you’ve seen in E-Myth and I tried programmed learning, like what you would see in this chess book ( Bobby Fischer Teaches chess) and in this programming book( The Little Schemer).

Eventually, what I realized I needed to do was that I needed to teach my team how to reason and think like an elite marketer.

After failing a third time, I started researching heavily into how programming and chess coaches train their mentees fast. And from that research, I finally found a training method that stuck well with my employees.

Below shares how it looks like in three simple steps.

The Digital Marketing Training Model I Learned from Chess FIDE Masters and Open Source Programmers

We can distill the training model that helped develop my employees fast into these three stages. Apart from Kathy Sierra, I also mixed in ideas from Erik Kislik & Dan Heisman (Chess), from Zed Shaw & Marc Andre Cournoyer (Programming), and I made a generalized model for it.

1. Learn Marketing Concepts fast with Labelling Exercises

2. Learn Well-formed Marketing Thought Processes with Copywork Exercises

3. Innovate & Break the Rules of Marketing by Extending & Combining Mental Models

It looks like a lot of theory, but I’ve backed these with real action and real results. And as you go through it below, I’ll share practical steps complete with screenshots straight from our internal playbook.

Here’s step 1.

Step 1: Learn Marketing Concepts fast with Labelling Exercises

In this step, you’ll first need to find marketing concepts through some introductory course. You normally bump into these in your reading or in a forum. Here’s a starter list:

Once you have chosen a concept, it’s not important to get the rationale and theory right. Instead, you need to master how it’s best implemented. That means you need to gather about 10 or more examples of each concept.

Labelling is Perceptual Learning in Action

The big idea here is that by gathering as many examples as possible, you develop a “gut” for the concept. We call this training model as Perceptual Learning and has proved to be a solid method for training painters, architects, pilots, and others.

After gathering a long list of examples, then begins the next phase, which is an exercise that I call labelling.

Labelling is when you tag an ad, a sales letter, or a landing page with concepts. You then teach this annotated ad, letter, or page to your staff. This step is important because it allows your team to “learn in context”, not “learn from theory”.

I’ve found this to be a simple yet powerful method to get people to have a “gut” for marketing fast — even if they have zero experience.

This is not something I made up.

Examples of Labelling from Chess and Drawing

In chess, one of the best validated tactics for beginners is to dive head first into tactics. The guideline is that you need to keep doing it until your ability to label / find the tactic correctly is more than 85% and you’re able to solve it within 15 seconds.

There are chess books with 5000+ problems / examples and there are chess sites dedicated to pattern recognition.

In drawing, the same concepts apply where one learns perception of soft/hard edges by example, perception of spaces, and more.

Below shows some examples how I do this exercise for my team.

Below contains a list of annotated ads and landing pages that I’ve made for my team. I have about 100+ annotated ads for their perusal.

Examples of Labelling for Digital Ads and Sales Pages

(Digital Ads Example) Here’s an ad that does lead generation for a dance studio:

(Digital Ads Example) Here’s an ad that sells tickets for a workshop:

(Advertorial Example) Here’s an annotated advertorial that sells a book:

(Sales Page Example) Here’s an annotated sales page that sells Japanese pork:

How The Team Does the Labelling Exercise Themselves

After they go through it and immerse themselves with clear examples of each concept, the next step then is for them to start labelling ads themselves.

I then tell them to open up the Facebook Ads Library and then go through an ad of interest and start labelling them and explaining why it’s effective or not.

Every single new person of my team, zero marketing experience or not, goes through this on their very first day.

By the end of that first day, they have a visceral, concrete understanding of what “Social Proof” is instead of banking on some fluffy words that they had to memorize.

Practical knowledge is built.

While this improves pattern recognition, how do we help them translate this into strong, well-formed execution?

This is where copywork comes in.

Step 2: Learn Well-formed Marketing Mental Models with Copywork Exercises

The second stage is copywork.

In more traditional fields such as painting, this meant copying by memorizing. A painter would look at a masterclass painting (Picasso’s, Van Gogh’s), then they’ll attempt to emulate the brush strokes as much as possible straight off their memory.

Plus points if they can articulate in their mind the concepts that they used (e.g. negative space, edges, gestalt, and more).

If they get one thing wrong, they repeat the copying process all over again.

Rote Learning & Exposure Creates the “Marketing Gut” You’ve Been Looking For

This ridiculous rote learning is important because it helps you learn the techniques that may not have been articulated in books or in person. It helps you learn techniques at a visceral level.

This is as important as a pianist doing their chords, a basketball player doing their drills, or a chess grandmaster replaying & memorizing classic world championship games.

In our agency’s case, the way I’ve coached the team is by getting them to copy lots of analysis. Analysis of what Facebook Ads, Facebook Targeting, landing pages, and or emails worked and didn’t work. This allows them to think and speak using technical words.

I get them to start off with a template like this: Quip Template. This forms the initial thought process that everyone should follow.

Then they start filling out the blanks.

Once they fill it all up, the output is well-reasoned analysis.

Analysis, that if they verbalize it well enough, they can have a good conversation with a client.

Knowledge of marketing jargon and how to discuss it with the rest of the team normally happens by the 2nd week inside Monolith.

Step 3: Innovate & Break the Rules of Marketing by Extending & Combining Mental Models

The third and final stage is innovation through remixing.

There are two conditions that make that happen:

• The manager should have a large collection of benchmarks or references

• The manager should have had experienced a wide variety of client cases, with a deep knowledge of what worked and what didn’t work.

Armed with what worked before as a baseline, the manager can then mix various benchmarks or references into a new & innovative solution.

This works as innovation is about stepping on the shoulders of who came before you. By mastering through copying, you get to have intimate knowledge of what worked for others. By having a solid thought process (also by copying), you get to test out these ideas and see what has worked for your specific context.

After enough reflection, you can arrive at new & innovative ideas to test.

Here are Two Examples of How We Break Rules & Build New Marketing Strategies for Clients

Below, we developed a new ecommerce strategy matrix based on what we learned — this has proved to be stable across 95% of our client base.

Below, we decided to go against best practice and added 6form fields on a product page of a client. It worked for them as this market wanted a lot of customization (i.e. it’s a cake ecommerce store and we added the message, the number of candles, events, and ideal time for delivery fields)

In short, this is a space where most businesses grow up from “tactical” to “strategic”. A short-term, tactics-oriented approach gets results, but there’s a ceiling to copying your competition.

When you find yourself stagnating in growth, that’s a sign you need an innovative shift in strategy to break out of it.

Summary

For any self-funded services company like ours, capability-building should be at the forefront. It has helped me build an organization starting with only $1,500 (legal costs) and grow it purely from profits.

If you’d like to strengthen your marketing team’s capability through coaching / mentorship, or if you’d like our services in helping you grow your revenue & leads, I invite you to a free strategy call with me here: schedule a free 30-minute strategy call with Kenn.