The expensive illusion of doing more

Hi there

I find it surprisingly easy to mistake a bigger number for a better business. More reach, more features, more decisions made before lunch. The uncomfortable bit is asking whether any of it made a difference to the person paying. That is the thought I keep coming back to: growth sometimes starts by changing what we count, rather than doing more of what looks impressive on a dashboard.

Reaching someone is not the same as being noticed

Mark Ritson has been questioning one of advertising’s favourite assumptions: that getting an advert in front of someone once counts as reaching them. Writing in The Drum, he examines Lumen research across 270 campaigns suggesting that cumulative attention explains more variation in brand lift than the number of exposures.

I like the distinction. An advert technically appearing on a screen is not the same thing as someone absorbing it. There are caveats, including Amazon’s involvement and the fact that brand lift is not sales. But for a smaller advertiser, the useful question survives: are you buying genuinely noticed communication, or an attractively priced report? I would rather reach fewer people properly than congratulate myself on thousands who never looked.

Read the article here.

Your buyer may want the thing you nearly overlooked

Cloudflare is acquiring Deno, the company behind a programming runtime, to improve its Workers platform. The price has not been disclosed. What caught my attention was Cloudflare’s enthusiasm for Deno’s open-source implementation of its own programming model, alongside its argument that giving customers an escape route can be good business.

For founders, this is a useful reminder that strategic value does not always sit where your revenue report points. A buyer may particularly value your people, technical approach or ability to make its existing product better. That is not an excuse to neglect profitability. It is a reason to understand the specific problem you could solve for an acquirer, rather than assuming every buyer will value the same things.

Read the article here.

A clever price can still be a bad bargain

Walmart has again defended its pricing practices, saying it does not and will not use digital shelf labels for individual or dynamic pricing. Retail Dive reports the dispute around patents describing capabilities the retailer says it is not deploying. A patent is not evidence that a pricing practice is happening.

What interests me is the commercial problem underneath: customers can become suspicious before a business has changed what it charges. Pricing is also an explanation of how you treat people. If customers cannot understand why the next person pays less, an extra point of margin may cost more in trust. Before introducing a clever new pricing mechanism, I would test whether a customer could explain it to a friend without feeling foolish.

Read the article here.

The humble shopping bag can do serious marketing

Target’s current brand campaign makes its familiar red shopping bag a central character. Marketing Dive describes adverts, creator partnerships and real-world activities built around customers and their purchases, rather than an entirely new visual identity. The campaign runs through the end of October.

I like work that gets more value from something a business already owns. A distinctive bag, colour or phrase can become useful through repetition, not endless reinvention. The temptation is to replace familiar assets because the team has grown bored of them. Customers rarely spend enough time thinking about us to share that boredom. Before paying for a fresh identity, I would check whether the old one has actually been used consistently enough to become recognisable.

Read the article here.

Delegation fails if you keep the decisions

A practical reflection from Stanford’s Shannon Santanocito describes finally handing her team responsibility for reports that had helped keep an outdated system alive. She trained them, defined the outcome and stepped back. The team retired the system and began teaching one another instead of waiting for her.

I prefer this kind of specific example to another instruction to be more strategic. The work was trainable; the bottleneck was a leader continuing to hold it. Delegation needs enough clarity for someone else to make decisions, not merely complete your instructions. For an owner hoping eventually to sell, that distinction matters twice: it improves the business now and gives a future buyer evidence that capability belongs to the company, not just its founder.

Read the article here.

Better sales can disguise a thinner business

ICAEW’s latest Business Confidence Monitor contains a useful warning beneath the headline recovery in sentiment. Annual input price growth was 3.9 per cent, while selling prices rose 2.2 per cent. Those are different measures across many firms, not a direct calculation of anyone’s margin, but the pressure is clear.

I would look at that through the customer book rather than a national confidence score. Which contracts still make economic sense after wages, materials and the awkward extras are counted? Revenue growth can conceal a lot when owners absorb higher costs to avoid difficult conversations. A customer who buys more is not automatically becoming more valuable. Check contribution by customer and service before celebrating the bigger turnover figure at the next management meeting.

Read the article here.

Your service dashboard is not the customer’s experience

Salesforce’s service research highlights an uncomfortable gap: 61 per cent of service professionals say their organisation addresses issues proactively, while only 33 per cent of customers say the typical company does. These are different perspectives, not matched scores for the same businesses, but the distance is worth considering.

I would treat vendor research with the usual caution. Salesforce sells the tools it recommends. Even so, the underlying question is useful: are you measuring work completed inside the department, or a problem removed from someone’s life? Closing a ticket is not much of an achievement if the customer has to open another one. Try following a handful of recent problems from first contact to actual resolution, including every handover and repeated explanation.

Read the article here.

An AI assistant needs boundaries before ambition

Ethan Mollick’s guide to using AI contains a wonderfully practical example. He asked two systems to prepare teaching materials and handle related messages. One drafted an email; the other sent it, because he had previously given it permission. The difference was not intelligence. It was authority.

That feels like the management lesson behind the impressive demonstrations. Asking software to research a supplier is different from allowing it to place an order. I would start with a contained task, a clear definition of success and an explicit boundary around actions needing approval. Then inspect the finished work. The opportunity is substantial, but counting tasks completed misses the point if nobody has decided which decisions the system is allowed to make.

Read the article here.

Decide what enough looks like before adding more

Luxury Presence founder Malte Kramer describes a quarterly habit: spending an hour writing a one-page plan covering purpose, longer-term direction and near-term commitments. The valuable part, for me, is his insistence on comparing the next review with what he previously said mattered, rather than inventing a new definition of success.

This is a personal practice, not proof that one planning method suits everyone. But it tackles a familiar founder problem: every opportunity looks attractive when you have no stable filter. A growing business can still carry you away from the life you meant to build. I would rather choose a few commitments deliberately, including the personal ones, than finish another quarter with impressive activity and no clear sense of progress.

Read the article here.

There is something encouraging about all of this. Improving a business does not always require another platform, a larger team or a heroic burst of effort. Sometimes it starts with noticing what already matters and giving it proper attention. I hope the week ahead brings a little more of that, and some satisfying progress.

Cheers!
Adam

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