2025: Love is for the ones who love the work

FWD 113: 2025 Predictions Edition - How to Thrive in the New Dynamics of Trust

I know your days are precious on this earth
But what are you trying to be free of?
The living? The miraculous task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
- Joseph Fasano

There is a narrow bandwidth of challenging yet rewarding work worth doing in 2025. Much of the sirenic calls you’ll be beckoned to by industry norms and "best-in-class" vendors are an exercise in mediocrity. Along the way, many will practice the usual fearmongering. Remember, as always, the “do this or die” technofascism threats are just that: empty threats. 

Leading in 2025 will be the product of passion, of vulnerability, of joy. It will belong to those who still believe in something worth making, not just moving around the furniture for an eventual 10x sale. 

Your prospective clients, like you, swim in a sea of cynicism. They are tired. Tired of the conflict, tired of the mediocrity, tired of the firewall the incumbents have put around opportunity. They’ve been lulled into complacency that the grass is never green anywhere, neither this side of the fence nor the other. Your messaging’s constant barrage of “it’s great over here” sounds like the echo of someone else’s gong, a clanging cymbal.

Think about yourself, all the work you have to do to stay inspired, the way your vendor set is more often a burden than an accelerant. The meetings are full of decks that you can’t decipher, promises you can’t check, tactics that feel old and increasingly frail.

That feeling that you have is the pervasive perverse reality here in the wild: post-trust, anti-nearly everything, crossing fingers that this time it's different.

In the Wild

In the wild, we are all asking consistent questions about our future advisors, educators, vendors, and partners that will require very personalized answers:

• Are you built for me? Are you thinking about me at all?
• What do people like me do?
• Can I trust you to protect me against a system trying to extract from me?
• Do you have the right mix of grit and belief to navigate the unknown?
• Do I belong here?
• Mistakes will happen. Change will be needed. Uncertainty is everywhere. Will you be stable, secure, and honest in the unmapped areas of the wild?

Organizations built and branded to speak on these questions to a particular community of people with transparency and trust will win. 

Growth is a required feature of 2025. Without it, the cynicism will rise to dangerous levels. Team members will shift further into “I guess this is all there is” and reputations will falter into the fog of familiar. We know that growth is a convergence of six strategic factors: Positioning, Value Creation, Org Design, Community, Point of View, and Culture. While tactical advantages show up now and again, these strategic arenas are where the game is won and lost.

So, for 2025, I want to address each category through two lenses:

• Where’s the trap? AND
• Where’s the advantage?

Because the incumbent norms are in a storm for their survival, big players are consolidating power and vendors are doubling down on playbooks they know don’t work but don’t have time to replace. 2025 will be a loud time. Echoes of all too familiar things and threats of “get on board or die.”

None of this is where the winning is. 

Ventures that grow are beloved. They are loved not just by their carefully cultivated long-term clients but by the people they partner with, the communities they work in, and the prospects they are working so hard to earn. Love is for the ones that love the work. And you’ll find it in the nuance, in the sophistication of change, in smart, quiet transformation in a loud self-aggrandizing time.

We've covered a lot of ground these past few weeks, and many of you have asked for a deeper dive into exactly what you should do next. How all this applies. So I'm doing something I've never done. A Map of Where We're Headed with a full Ask-Me-Anything. If anything has intrigued here in the last 5-6 weeks, you don't want to miss it.

Traps/Advantages

Today, my goal is to give you the outlines of the map. As you saw above, I’m going to be doing a deeper dive on “the Map of 2025” on January 9, and I hope you’ll join me there. But for now, you subscribed to this newsletter to get value here, so here you go: Six traps and six advantages for next year’s growth (sorted by trust-made growth factors)

Org Design: How you allocate power

 TRAP: Obsess over efficiency; add as much automation as possible to techno-strategies already suffering fatigue. This trap will be particularly laid in the so-called “funnel” (an imaginary thing if ever there was one) where promises of AI will quicken your pace and save you in “human overhead” (yikes, what a phrase) on strategies that don’t really work anyway.

ADVANTAGE: Reallocate go-to-market leadership. Move the G2M function into the President/CEO chair. Reallocate their time to allow for 30-35% of their best attention toward defining a modern growth strategy. Budget for outside resources that understand the landscape, know strategy, and can pull you back from the tactical abyss. G2M is what you’re building the business around to win. It’s not a function like accounting that gets insourced to a departmental silo. Marketing and sales leadership has to be in the conversation, sure, but the President/CEO should run this show. For many CEOs and founders this will require support and education because their awareness of how to do this may be several years or even decades out of date.

Culture: How your identity shapes the work

TRAP: The draw of soft culture initiatives (values exercises, in-office incentives, teambuilding programs, etc.) will continue as large enterprises figure out how to make the call back to the office sound strategic. In many orgs, team members are returning to work only to sit on Zoom calls at their cubicle instead of at their home office, so the Culturati in the consulting world will be obsessed with trying to get paid to make this work. Soft culture initiatives only go so far, and in a management/employee environment like the one we have today that is contentious and fraught, pizza parties and big posters of your values will likely only increase cynicism. The tension between management and labor is peaking, discount it at your peril.

OPPORTUNITY: Get honest. Radically define “Team Member A.” Who thrives here? How do they make decisions? What inspires them? We’ve seen a lot of “diversity of thought is valued here” rhetoric without the psychological safety to produce it. The opportunity in Culture is clarity. Throw out all the dead words that show up in every teamwork exercise and get very, very clear on what it takes to win inside your organization. Then build pathways to manage and mature your team toward those objectives. Fire “productive” toxic characters. I don’t care if they make you money, they also make you look like a liar. You can make money anywhere, once your team knows you will sacrifice them for the guy who treats everyone like crap, you’re toast.

Value Creation: how you deliver across the client experience (CX)

TRAP: Spin up a new offering. With lending and investors loosening, entrepreneur optimism rising, and industries contracting, the temptation will be to spin up offerings on either end of the spectrum—either a low-cost entry product to attract people to the aforementioned imaginary funnel or a high-cost bespoke product to drag the business up market. New products or service models are risky and should only flow from a radical understanding the needs of your ideal client, not an attempt to differentiate.

OPPORTUNITY: Upgrade the client journey/value ladder. Figure out where you’re the very best in the business. For one client, we discovered their highest point of Value Creation was the impromptu call from long-term clients on the drive out of the city every night. Their depth of understanding, empathic listening, and speed to value were put to the test, and the clients loved it. So we worked with them to build their entire value ladder from thought leadership to sophisticated bespoke service centered around THAT experience. Everything you do should be an interation of your best source of reputation.

Community: who you choose to trust and who is best suited to trust you

TRAP: Keep broadcasting. After the marketing chaos of 2024, the digital media gurus will tell you that they’ve cracked the code of the AI wet blanket that now overlays the internet. SEO is back. There are new algorithms to game, trust Google to find your client etc. etc. Hungry hammers in search of nails, the lot of them. The digital platforms are built for two tactics: paid ads and influencer media. If you aren’t fully committed to one or both of these (with time, money, talent, and consistency of content) you don’t have a chance to win the digital game. And even these will become even more competitive.

OPPORTUNITY: Get painfully specific. Almost every business we meet is targeting a total addressable market that is 5x to 20x too big for them. They’re terrified of getting specific, and when they do they are using old media persona tactics to “niche down” into silly categories like “people who love cats that make $300,000 a year and live in Oregon.” You are here to win the game of trust. So building a target community is about getting very specific on the personality and decision-making factors that make someone most likely to trust you. Who is that? How do they think? Why aren’t they trusting you now? What are their key decision-making points?

Positioning: where you choose to win

TRAP: Keep trying to market or sell your way around it. This is the rare case where 2025 will look a lot like its preceding years. Thought leaders and gurus will continue to ignore positioning entirely, suck you into the tactical hamster wheel, and assume branding (name, logo, messaging) is some reasonable substitute for an actionable differentiable strategy to win. Positioning is arguably the most important factor in your ability to win, and the gross majority advice confuses it with logos and taglines.

OPPORTUNITY: Let your community lead. Part of the reason Positioning gets ignored is because it requires a strategic view on Community. Winners in 2025 will have a strategically narrow view of their total addressable market, understand the category dynamics of that market (Who else is here? What is driving competition? What do clients value? Is it crowded? Undifferentiated?) and then carve out an uncrowded slice where they can win. Unless you are a $100M+ business (and even then it's debatable) you will thrive only in subcategories. “Career prep students in greater Omaha” or “pre-retirees in the Houston suburbs” are not categories you can win. You will need to get narrower and more relational, more psychological. Then, align the above referenced value ladder of services, the CEO-driven go-to-market, and behaviorally-consistent Culture, you have the makings of a transformative growth strategy.

Point of View: How your value appears to strangers

TRAP: Keep trying all.the.things. If you’ve gotten this far you may be wondering, where is all the marketing stuff in this 2025 outlook? Which social platforms should we use? Do we still do SEO? First, you need to realize that in the absence of the above strategic moves, those questions mean almost nothing. The trap is to spend the next year trying to game the same games you and most everyone in your industry have been losing at this far. There’s a reason why the companies that own these platforms have had the lion share of marketcap growth in the last 5 years.  Due to this, I can almost assure you that going into 2025 there are tens of thousands of waste dollars in your marketing budget right now. And if you do one of our Growth Check programs, I’ll prove it. Success next year will be doing fewer things in a much more targeted way. 

OPPORTUNITY: Build a base of sharp, differentiated content and repurpose it in a targeted way for your priority prospects. Most service businesses are not running a high volume G2M, nor should they. You need 10 or 20 or 30 good new clients this year above a certain size to be the foundation of your growth. Your core “marketing” activity needs to produce a truly distinct voice (talking about stuff other people won’t talk about, with insight others don’t have, targeted to your very specific group of prospective clients.) As that content gets produced, it should be repurposed to feed particular content channels to particular prospects through referral sources, direct email and mail campaigns, custom video SDR work, etc. This is not a numbers game anymore. This is a carefully targeted game of quality and value.

All of this looks like work love

 The traps work—extracting value out of your organization and reinforcing the incumbent leadership of your category—because they feel like shortcuts. They make you believe you are in the fast lane while others are in the slow.

But avoiding the fundamental work of taking control of your growth plan is costing you tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in both hard costs and lost opportunity. You can’t and shouldn’t tackle all of the opportunities above. One or two of these factors are the right fit for you, though it may be hard to decipher which ones to start with.

At a base level, I would recommend our free Trust-Made Growth Assessment. It will give your highest and lowest of the six factors, pointing toward where to start. More proactively, our 30-day Growth Check Intensive will directly answer where your waste and opportunity are across the six factors and draw a specific roadmap for your firm of where to head for the next 12 months. The timing couldn’t be better. 

This is our second to last edition of the year, we’ll see you next week for my favorite post of this and every year: The Good List 2025: What I Loved from the Year that Was.

See you then.