Your Core Values Are Useless. Here's How to Fix Them.
Your values workshop died when the posters went up. Revive it with a scrappy exercise that turns ideals into owned actions, prioritizes easy big wins, and proves the values matter.
Brand & Positioning Insights
Short, practical perspectives on market stance, differentiation, and brand strategy — focused on what actually moves the needle for founder‑led service firms.
Your Invoices Might Be More Important than Your Ads
Your brand lives in invoices, contracts, and handbooks. Make every document on-brand, human, and unmistakably yours, with a clear positioning line and a next step. Trust grows in the details.
Stop Talking About Customer Experience (And Start Doing It)
Your brand story might be a glossy promise your operations can’t cash. Peek behind the ads to the tiny moments that prove who you are and decide whether you’re different.
You Don't Get Long Walks on the Beach with Your Customers
Customers will not study your product. This piece shows how sharp positioning, emotional cues, proactive feedback, and relentless messaging create attention fast and convey your value proposition before interest fades.
What Ancient Greece Taught Us About Innovation
It’s a little disturbing to realize how much of what we do is simply imitation. If you start analyzing your business objectively, you’ll probably come to the (somewhat depressing) realizing that a lot of it is simply rehashed ideas and behaviors adopted from your competitors, the way you did things …
Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
Skip vanity metrics and chase real relationships. Engage, listen, and give value. Grow steadily without viral fantasies. Show up where your audience lives. Create original work people actually care about.
After Money, then What?
At larger companies, the phrase “maximize shareholder value” has become a trite summary of what they believe is their core purpose. At smaller companies, it’s usually translated into plain English: “Make the owners a bunch of money.” If you dig deeper, the actual purpose is almost always different. …
Clear Purpose, Clear Decisions
Stop hemming and hawing. A clear purpose turns messy choices into reflex, rallies your team, justifies tough sacrifices, and keeps you advancing like a disciplined chess player while competitors scramble.
Purpose-Driven Companies Make More Money
A slogan won't cut it. When purpose saturates every role, performance explodes. The data's staggering and the wake up call stings. Get uncomfortable, get aligned, and watch revenue multiply.
Six Hard Questions Every Business Owner Should Be Able to Answer
Rediscover roots. Trade trend chasing for clarity by answering tough questions about purpose, values, positioning, audience, style, and vision that realign teams, sharpen decisions, and build momentum.
The Power of the Purpose-Driven Company
Picture this: You’re standing in the middle of a beautiful meadow on a sunny day. In the middle of this meadow is a large, heavy rock. Your assignment is to move that rock. So, you tie a rope around it, and you start pulling to the north. It’s heavy, but you’re determined to make it happen, so you p…
What's Your Business Really All About?
Purpose isn't a slogan. Assemble a team, share stories, ask whys, and craft a bold phrase. Keep it short, stop committee creep, and make it worthy of a flag.
What's Your Company's Internal Compass?
One of the hardest questions we ask in our discovery workshops is also one of the simplest and most fundamental: “Why does your company exist?” You’d think most CEOs would have a ready (and passionate) response to that question, but most don’t. When asked that question, they usually keep their compo…
What is Design Thinking?
There’s a common thread between companies like Tesla, Airbnb, Uber, SpaceX, Spotify, Square, Netflix and others that have successfully overturned decades of convention and built business empires around solutions that rendered their competitors almost instantly obsolete. It’s called “design thinking,…
The 5 Key Customer Motivators
Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they want, add it to their cart, a…