Zuck's perfect fit, Ursula steals voices, and The Obvious Answers Factory™️™️™️

FWD Edition 107

A lot of consulting is theater.

This was a hard lesson for me when my business shifted underneath me from "company who makes marketing shiny objects that we want but then eventually won't use" to "company who gives us advice that we can't find anywhere else about how to grow authentically and not by some tired playbook."

I liked being the second company better, even though I didn't know to go looking for it. But my clients did. That's what they kept wanting to pay for.

And for a brief minute, I was in the blissful "ahh... consulting" era. Until it ended.

It didn't take long, that like almost any other B2B venture, consulting was a box that CEOs and their C-suites had a set of expectations for:

1. Lots of talking about big worded stuff
2. C-suite performs, mostly for themselves, their best intentions
3. Consultant nods heads at good intentions and doesn't question them
4. Consultant gathers sound bytes that sound really good to put in deck.
5. Deck happens. 🎉🎉🎉
6. Advice should be relatively benign, stuff that they could have figured out on their own, probably repeated from the last client, but perceived valuable because see #5.
7. All of the above are preferred if you can claim status with somebody else's very glossy framework: Storybrand, Traction, or various Pat Lencioni-isms.

What the "consultant" box had little room for was free thinking, challenge, outright disagreement with your client, and the effort to build a custom roadmap that wasn't a madlibs of someone else's work.

Basically all the stuff I wake up enjoying.

And the road hit me hard while I was running it. I lost deals because we "had the best insights, but it was too much to think about." Or the client went with another provider because they were selling a familiar playbook.

Don't mention the tomfoolery of buying a playbook to solve the problem of "we're not distinct in the marketplace." That's a newsletter for a different day.

I asked myself ridiculous questions like, "Should I turn CultureCraft into an Obvious Answers Factory™️ just to keep our case load full?"

No, of course not. We could not take a business wholy grounded in naming and claiming where the puck is going for growing businesses by selling other people's ideas and calling them innovations. We could only be a business that succeeded by being true to our unique value, knowing it was only for a rare few.

We exist to find your unique unknown unknowns. When we find them you may not want them. Maybe they stayed "unknown" for a reason. But we can help you be the kind of leadership team that learns to love the unfound spaces. The ones made for you. If you'll let us.

This newsletter, FWD, one of our three major publications, is a practice field for you to explore unfound spaces. We address the places the world is shifting and commentate so you can start to examine our voice.

As you saw above, I briefly considered joining the ranks of firms that collect fees for not thinking about you at all. And that was something I couldn't do.

Forward, forward:

YES to calling out M&A 🐂💩

Kudos to Allen Darby at Citywire who editorialized the gamesmanship in M&A valuations. For those in the know, this is old news, but its become as prevalent as inflated college tuitions with fake discounts called "scholarships" in the higher ed arena.

RIAs as an industry are busier selling the benefits and strategy of M&A than they are selling financial advice, and their organic growth numbers prove it. We love a little inorganic growth when it takes tired firms and invigorates them with resources and professional leadership.

But 7/10 times, that's not reality in the RIA world. It's shareholder-exclusive prioritization, and it assumes the clients will go along for the ride.

NO to outsourcing decisions

As digital word-sorting copycats (aka AI) gets better at cosplaying as intelligence we will all be more and more enticed to outsource thinking to our Judy Dench-sounding digital overlords.

Thinking is hard. And highly frowned upon in our reactive, truth-decaying era. But my vote is with Tolkien, whose century-old metaphor for technology as a tool for human subservience still holds. The latest fanfic iteration, Rings of Power, spouted this line a few episodes back and it felt more than apropos for our current milieu:

Maybe we were right?

Lots of people had their usual fun calling me a doomsayer when, months ago, I said we all needed to take a big step back and realize the internet is not what it was promised, and we would have to reconsider what to expect from it.

Despite my warnings, I keep posting here—like bottled letters thrown into a sea storm—because "I wanna be where the people are"... until we are all silenced by bots impersonating us with their stolen IP. (Someone should name their AI "Ursula". It's RIGHT THERE.)

I felt pretty vindicated last week when King Koopa himself, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that content creators (the people his ads will tell you Meta products are made for) way overvalue their own worth, and it's not such a big deal that his service agreement allows for basic wholesale theft. (I'm paraphrasing... allegedly)

Simultaneously, he and the tech media tried to gaslight us that this looks good 👇 and we all need screens seared to our eyeballs. If it wasn't such a tragedy it would be the a comedy worthy of a Golden Globe (that you paid for with swanky dinners to sway the voters).

SERIOUSLY, what's that mean?

We are no longer Very Mindful, Very Demure. Brat Summer is over. And the sigma rizzler is now ruling the 4th grade, so he's SOOO out of vogue.

Marketers are dying of TikTok fatigue trying to keep up with verbal trends faster than Chappell Roan goes hot then cold, then out for mental well-being again.

But even if your business is too serious to be playing in meme-i-verse, you are always chasing language trends. I loved this post from serial great marketer, Megan Bowen, CEO of Refine Labs, where she breaks down the breakdown in even TALKING about marketing today and how rarely are using words in the same way, causing even more confusion from the people who buy marketing services.

NOW, for the speed round.

Here's all the headlines we couldn't hit hard this week, but either made me laugh, think, or think about laughing. All worthy pursuits.

• 🔥 How Memes Work - Loved this primer from Medium (another brand fighting for relevance) in a world where the most powerful meme in the world is a baby hippo played by Bowen Yang on SNL.
• 📲 iPhone Eats Its Young - Nothing spells how growth eventually kills growth like the iPhone. Loved this deep dive from Infinite Scroll/The New Yorker on why we don't need an iPhone 16.
• 🥸 Bad for Thee, But Not for Me (Private Equity Edition) - Peter Mallouk was onstage at Future Proof proclaiming the dangers of "minority interest private equity" all while simultaneously finalizing the largest private equity deal of his career. Sometimes, the headlines write themselves. Too bad none of the financial media want to talk about this irony, because well... you don't bite the hand that feeds you.
• 👻 For Profit has a new meaning - OpenAI simultaneously announces it lost $5B this year and that it's actually a for-profit company. You can't make this shit up.
• 🍿 This is no Apocalypse Now - I went to go see Francis Ford Coppola's self-indulgent Ayn Randian mega-mess of a movie Megalopolis this weekend. Apparently, I was one of like 1000 people worldwide to do so. It made $4M back of Coppola's $120M personal investment. See... now don't feel so bad when your small business needs a little cash infusion during the dry season... at least it's not $100M.

If you need someone who can see what you can't see inside the walls of your business, you know where to find us.