Thoughts
How I think through the problems founders and operators bring me, written down so you can see the reasoning before we ever talk.
Diagnosis
The problem you hire for and the problem you have are often different. How I find the second one, and why the answer is usually already in your data.
- A job posting open for a year is a roadmap nobody wrote I read the public job boards of 2,798 funded companies. The stuck reqs point at a product problem that companies keep trying to fix with recruiters.
- The fields nothing writes to A CRM full of empty fields usually holds the questions your business still asks out loud, and the answers it throws away every day.
- Audit the plumbing before you touch the faucet Most marketing problems are reporting problems wearing a campaign costume. Check whether your numbers can tell a good month from a bad one first.
- "What's our ROI?" has five questions inside it The north star is revenue, and every metric under it is an instrument. Asking for ROI on a long, committee-driven sale quietly asks how much you trust your attribution model.
- Your tests are grading the copy Every handoff loses something. Pick one source of truth, write it down as a schema, and measure "are we done?" against it instead of against the last copy.
Positioning
Who you're for, why they buy, and why now. Most of the lead problems I get called in on turn out to be positioning problems wearing a different shirt.
- Optimism doesn't buy The founder who believes they can figure it out is the best audience you'll ever have and the slowest buyer. Write for the one who can feel the ceiling.
- Don't shrink the market to fit your data When your signal only works on a sliver of your market, the easy fix is a smaller market. Keep the target and change the instrument.
- The hottest leads in the pipeline that could never buy A lead score is an ideal customer profile nobody wrote down. Anything that behaves like a buyer scores like one, and the higher the score, the worse the fit can get.