I saw a really interesting post from a semi-famous Twitter user @shl
While I normally disagree with such broad statements I actually really agree here. The most successful people I see are mostly better at describing their craft to the “normies” than they are at actually doing it. I used to organize a fairly large startup meetup in Denver and we had an agency owner come in to speak to the crowd once about his experience building a PPC shop. He said that early on he figured out that he was better at selling the service than doing it and that’s what enabled him to grow his company so quickly.
I think about him saying that often, and I realize that frankly, he’s right. When I marry that with what Sahil is saying above I’m beginning to think that the people that win in any given vertical are going to be the best content creators and content marketers. Delivery and customer experience matters, but only in so far as you do a very good job versus a perfect job. When it comes to advertising finding the right offer with the right creative is 70% of the battle. You add in some good media buying and you’re at 95%. That last 5% being the difference between good and perfect probably takes up 50% of the effort. For most companies if you’re delivering a 95% experience by spending half your time on the work and you spend your other half of the time on your content I think you win every single time over someone who spends near 100% of their time on the work. Most clients only care that you hit or exceed their targets but that last 5% may or may not get rewarded commensurate to the effort put in.
As I personally move forward I’m trying to prioritize education through content and spend more of my personal time writing and distributing my content about my job as well as actually doing the work. To me though that means bringing in some really energetic people that have some skills and are hungry to learn while I direct them at a high level. This has been a good fit so far and can scale up Moonshine Marketing for the foreseeable future. I think planning for anything beyond that is a bit of future proofing. One side benefit of all this content creation is that instead of being heads down in accounts I’m actually able to gain perspective and learn new tactics to implement from being out in the world. Ironically dialing the effort back just slightly and focusing on learning has driven better results for our clients so far.
What do you think? Am I mad or did I unlock the cheat code to business success because honestly after years of struggling it kind of feels that way.