When trust is the only thing that matters

Yes. Trust industries like law, education, advice, and consulting have consistent frameworks that depend on trust for growth. That's not to say that every venture in these categories is a trust business--some go to great lengths to NOT have to depend on trust (more on that below).

All categories slowly
decay to commodities where the only option is to compete on price. Trust
categories should (strong emphasis here) slow that decay, but bad actors speed
it along.

By our definition, we look for three things that define a trust venture:

1. You build long-term relationships. Trust businesses avoid
   transactionalism.
2. You require high-dollar investments from clients /
   customers / constituents. High-dollar can be relative, but whether you are a student paying for tuition or an investor paying for investment advice, your financial commitment must feel substantial to you.
3. You deliver intangible value. When the benefits of your services are hard to measure, trust is always in play.

When buyers in a category don't know how to connect their pain to your solution, you have a Bad Buyer Problem. For example, marketing services--once upon a time a trust category--lost their trusted status partly due to the Bad Buyer Problem. Customers misdiagnosed their problems as marketing problems and turned marketers into commodity sellers. Marketing agencies, by and large, have been willing to be order takers to protect their painfully low margins, further undermining trust and making bad buyers worse. 

Institutions of higher education have succumbed to a Bad Buyer Problem, too, not because they sell to teenagers, but because they allowed the marketplace to convince parents of teenagers that the purpose of higher ed is the salary you make your first year
out of college.

Once you have a Bad Buyer Problem, a category is poisoned, created by a vicious cycle where the buyer's ignorance is both symptom and cause.

Because the essential nature of trust supersedes superficial dualities like B2B vs. B2C, startup vs. enterprise, or profit vs. non-profit. Ventures, in our definition, are things that set out to take people on a valuable journey. Some of those journeys require a lot of trust. Those are the ventures we are consistently speaking to.

Let's start with an example. One would assume that wealth management is a trust business. Nearly everyone in it would attest to this statement. However, prominent players in the industry have gone to great lengths to avoid needing to be trusted. They've acquired massive capital, rigid operations, and extensive digital footprints where front doors are easy and back doors are locked. Their primary growth is by consolidation. They can produce a massive return on investment for their shareholders without actually improving the lives of their captive clients. 

Certain product vendors selling wealth management tools that are hard to get out of are doing the exact same thing, pounding a hard-packed path to the trust escape routes.

Predictable trust escape routes:

• High-volume digital advertising
• Large scale M&A
• Brand gaslighting

It's poison for a trust venture. Over the past 20 years, we've seen the rise of "internet businesses" where the brand depends on flooding the market with impossible-to-refute claims, usually conspiratorial. "Everyone else is saying blah, blah, blah. No one is willing to tell you the truth, but we will. Buy our course for $799." Only some people in internet marketing are doing this, but many are drifting off a model that is nothing more than a late-night Home Shopping Network except on Facebook. 

They lead people to believe that only insane people would ignore this brand and that the spokespeople for the brand are the only valid voices in the space. They are preying on your insecurity and using sophisticated digital marketing techniques to rewire your perceptions.

That's a whole book in itself, but we would be remiss not to acknowledge that the power of internet platforms like YouTube and platforms like Instagram and TikTok's ability to use algorithms and your personal information to make you feel attraction to a brand without actually doing anything to earn your trust. It's important to understand that the internet's fundamental systems are not built for trust. They are made for attention. Attention is an addiction that can often erode trust when the habit is broken. 

Ventures that command trust can use the internet as a distribution tool for advertising, community, and engagement, but they understand the name of the game is all customer experience. From the second they contact a prospective client, a trusted venture must earn actual trust, not cosplay it.

In a trust venture, culture is brand up close. There is no natural line between culture and brand. The internal life of the company, the quality of the team, and how it interacts are the soul of what earns and replicates trust for customers and prospects. Trust ventures are masters of culture.

Trust should flow through your venture like water, and you should regularly see signs of its expansion. So, a growing experience cannot depend on the confidence of the past; it has to deposit in the bank constantly. Signs that the bank is running low can be: 

• Siloed departments
• Employee turnover
• Stalled growth efforts
• Unsuccessful product launches
• Conflict and tension in M&A
• Leaders feelings "misunderstood"
• Team members saying one thing and doing something else
• Expensive marketing with declining ROI

The core factors we look for are waste, resistance, and stagnation. 

1. Waste is anywhere you're spending money, but you can't
   say it's working. Usually, it's money you've gotten in the habit of spending and fear letting go, like SEO or a highly comped legacy sales rep. But it can also be the flagrant costs of a spendthrift leader who never saw a shiny object she didn't want to try.
2. Resistance is where one part of the org tries to move forward, and another is passively or actively keeping that from happening. There are two types of tension in a venture. Creative tension produces ideas and validates healthy risk. Resistent tension creates conflict and misunderstanding.
3. Stagnation is when the organization keeps bumping up against similar growth ceilings. Often, this takes the form of cycling through a revenue
   range year after year but also can show up as cultural stagnation, where you often recycle your category's repeated tactics. When your best ideas come from your peers at conferences, you are likely in or on your way to a period of stagnation.

Hire us. (Kidding a little.) Whether it's us or someone else, you need an outside perspective who understands the dynamics of trust-made growth and is not just selling some tired industry playbook. Your first job as a leader is to define reality. You are often too close to the problem to see it—trust bottlenecks in a few reliable ways and places in a venture. You need to find out which one is yours.

Not to answer in a snotty way, but we work in trust. We've applied these principles to everything from a butcher to a software company to a significant wealth manager. "But a butcher doesn't meet your definition of a trust venture? Aren't they transactional?" They can be. But this one couldn't survive that way. Their premium positioning and dependence on recurring clientele meant they couldn't only sell tasty proteins at a health markup. They needed to sell perspective. Their category was a commodity, but their strategy was to break the category. 

The inverse can also be true. We have about 40% of our clients in the Registered Investment Advisor space, supposedly a trust category. But 3/4 RIAs know how to talk trust, but their organization needs to show interest in building it. We do not want those 75% as our clients. They are trying to make the most money on the least trust possible, or they must become self-aware enough to address trust-breaking habits.

In our view, yes. We built the Growth Check to surface an actionable "unlock" to trust in your business in less than 30 days. You can also book a 30-minute call with Nick, our Founder. He'll talk to almost anybody and has a way of finding at least one thing to help you be better tomorrow than you were today. 😎