Wow! It's been over a year since I posted here. A lot has happened since then, and I have not had time to write about it. Or do any long-form posts.

Let's try and recap:

Websites & Consulting

I had a flurry of work landed last June, taking on a handful of many small—to medium-sized web development and consulting projects. This new work took up a lot of my time. However, I found it challenging to scale and balance with non-client projects, so I had to cut back a few to ensure I maintained a decent work-life balance. But it was fun, varied, and challenging! It’s a shame I did not document here for prosperity.

Pooling Freelancers

I took on some projects I could successfully outsource to a pool of freelancers I had curated. It wasn't always straightforward, but I was able to turn over a few Shopify websites without hardly writing any code. Like a proper agency!

Oh Baby!

Various projects kept me very busy until everything stopped in December. I took five weeks off for paternity leave to spend quality time with my newborn and tied up most of my active projects to balance my time with...

Basker

At the start of 2024, I co-founded a new startup called Basker, a new content platform and website builder for live events. I've had my head down for the last six months, building it with a small team. We've made something rather special!

You can check it out here: basker.io

Looking Ahead

I have been running both startup and agency simultaneously, and much of my energy and focus has gone into launching Basker. I've been in "maintain" mode with Patch Digital, supporting my existing clients without taking on any significant projects or work. Both are long-term commitments, although I've had to temper my ambition to grow Patch Digital into a fully-fledged agency and more of a pooling of talented freelancers who can work on smaller projects. True Patch Work.

Doing the Business

I will update this newsletter to reflect the occasional thought piece about "doing the business" rather than a regular accountability/journey guide.

Not sure what the exact content will be, but I do hope you stick around.

Subscribe now

GPT and the surge of new applications integrating with Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted how generative artificial intelligence will transform how we use software to get things done.

As a self-proclaimed neophiliac, I have worked with GPT since late 2021. It was effectively one of our stealth co-founders for a startup venture, and at the time felt like an ultimate life hack!

People who happily adapt to technological advances will soon discover a new work environment infiltrated by AI systems and workflows. Working with and the ability to orchestrate AI systems will be a new essential workplace skill. It will sit proudly next to “Experience with Microsoft Word and Excel” on job descriptions for years to come. Until the job is no longer required, of course. 🤖

Although the tech world is ultra-focused on AI at the moment, we are far from Crossing The Chasm with LLM applications. However, I would say we’re a long way from the work of Alan Turing and more towards the start of the “(AI) home computer” revolution. The recent advances by OpenAI and the democratisation of the tech have allowed hobbyists and early adopters to start hacking solutions together. “ChatGPT doesn’t know” sounds similar to frustrations and concerns about the limitations of earlier operating systems and desktop applications. The emergence of the “Prompt Engineer” are the people who had the time and determination (plus a magazine subscription) to spend hours programming their Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum to make something “different” happen.

There is an innovation gold rush on, and I’ve been reflecting and thinking about how LLMs could transform how digital agencies do business, add value, and how to develop a lean McKinsey-style consultancy model to help clients select and use AI tools. And I’ve been thinking about getting some of that gold in the process.

In this post, I’ll walk through one of the most time-consuming areas of new business within an agency: responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP).

Let’s dive in. 🏊‍♂️

New Business

Much effort goes into qualifying, responding to RFPs, and pitching for new business. Even so, some argue that charging for pitches should be an industry standard, while others say it is necessary to demonstrate value add from the get-go.

Every opportunity is a calculated risk, a strategic use of an agency’s time and resources to win new work. There is generally no dedicated “sales team”; the agency pitch team is a motley crew of account managers, creatives, and techies -- a rag-tag coalition with the sole mission to get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

Furthermore, RFPs are notoriously challenging to write, and by virtue, the majority of them suck. A bad RFP can quickly suck the creative juices from a response, forcing an agency down a tick box-checking exercise so that they can get into the room to pitch. And yes, there will always be a gap between the requirements articulated in an RFP -- part of your job is to point them out.

A flashy proposal might get your foot in the door. Still, when the logical justification comes into play, a vague or exaggerated requirement can come back to bite you in the delivery of the project. Or rule you out of the process entirely. A proposal isn’t something you can bodge; a dodgy proposal can also set the relationship and project on a death march.

OK, so let’s picture you’ve got this email:

Dear Agency,

We invite your agency to participate in our Request for Proposal (RFP) process for Lovely Website: Design & Build.

Attached to this email is the detailed RFP document in PDF format. It outlines project requirements, evaluation criteria, and submission guidelines.

To express your interest, please confirm by this Friday.

Best regards,

John

You know John. He is in your network and promised to send you an RFP once his team has finished working on it. They’ve spent 6 months with their Chief Procurement Officer to develop a points-based evaluation criterion.

Oh, joy.

You make a call that this is worth your team’s mental calories, so you drop the PDF on the #newbusiness channel on Slack and go to work.

The Proposal

There are three core elements of a proposal:

• The Persuasive; this is where you win over the hearts and minds of the target audience, the decision-makers. You address the spirit and underlying purpose of the RFP head-on, supported by a thoughtful, creative approach or compelling technical solution. It provides an authentic shared vision of what life could be like if they went with your agency.

• The Meat; this is where you address the detail of the RFP line by line. You logically and comprehensively provide a plan of accomplishment that handles everything in the RFP, fully costed, with timescale and delivery.

• The Furniture; these “generic” slides in your proposal fill the gaps and generally form part of your ‘proposal template’ (or the latest / most appropriate proposal keynote).

Unless the audience is highly technical, the ‘persuasive’ is the most critical aspect of the proposal. Despite all the rigour and process to remove bias with scoring systems and whatnot, a client will ultimately select an agency on cultural fit, a good impression, and an authentic pitch that persuades them you’re the right agency for the job. The ‘meat’ of the proposal is the logical justification on whether to justify this or an excuse to rule you out if they didn’t like you.

It’s like choosing between an Apple and an Android phone. Customers don’t meticulously parse through the technical specifications for each device; instead, they buy into the lifestyle that each device promises.

Let’s start with the persuasive.

Tools like ChatGPT are great for researching and tossing ideas around. Loading your thoughts and elements of the RFP into ChatGPT is a very effective way of getting past writer’s block. You can give it a prompt (e.g. You are ProposalGPT. You write proposals now…) and start thinking aloud with questions you might ask yourself about the client (e.g. how does my client help people?).

For me, just getting a proposal started is often the most challenging part. And guess what; I’m writing this post to put off writing a proposal myself!

I like to think of it as putting yourself in a superposition of states; you have a finite amount of time to write the proposal, and you can use LLMs to quickly draft and explore different ideas and see what they might look like on paper without committing the time to write it.

Here is another hack/technique. You can use something like PrivateGPT or a similar LangChain-powered app to ingest your past proposals, winners or losers. You can then generate possible outlines or even an example persuasive that your team might write yourself.

The idea is not to copy and paste from the tool verbatim but to evaluate the most convincing narrative to spend your precious time on. You ultimately need to go through the thought exercise and writing process — the very act of writing changes how you think. Only after writing and revising the proposal document will you have clarity on how your team will deliver the project. And be frustrated by your team when they eventually diverge their thinking beyond the proposal you wrote (which can be good or bad). The full force of generative writing comes into play when getting into ‘the meat’ of the proposal.

Thirty minutes or so conversing with ChatGPT will give you plenty of food for thought as you get another cup of coffee before knuckling down to bash it out. Once you’ve got a first draft, you can self-evaluate quickly without drawing in other team members. You can ask your ChatGPT thread, for example, “How does this persuasive address the brief?”, “Are there any inaccuracies?”, “If John was reading this (paste in LinkedIn profile, current job description etc.) What objections might he have? What concerns have I not addressed?”

Requirements Lists

An RFP usually has an extensive list of requirements, which you can respond to directly or more broadly. These requests range from very specific (e.g. Must use CMS FIELD X and Y), where you need the technical chops to both make sense of it and then write an appropriate response, and the very broad, typically quality-related, and challenging to put an exact number on (e.g. Must be user friendly).

The first job that GPT can help with is formatting these into a table for you. I use the GPT Playground for this, as the list of requirements tends to be larger than what ChatGPT is happy to deal with.

You can also use GPT to create a response to each requirement. In your prompt, give a high-level description of the intended solution (e.g. a Shopify website that integrates with ERP System X) and other elements of the technology stack and have it write short responses to each one.

I appreciate that you need to be skilled enough to understand the responses to each requirement to discern whether the generated responses are rooted in reality and what to tweak to align them with your agency. Again, this is simply an anti-writer block trick.

Another exciting thing; you can have GPT assign relatively effort scores in the Fibonacci sequence (with a rationale!) and use this as a yardstick for breaking down the work into sub-requirements (i.e. the ‘big ticket’ requirements). You can even play your own game of planning poker! Agencies need to get things done quickly, so a large requirement might mean you need to leverage third-party tools to get the job done (e.g. rather than build this complex site search requirement, use Algolia!)

You need to be careful with this. These Fibonacci scores must be translated into actual hours and grounded in reality. Sure, it gives the non-technical person some anchorage when working on the estimate, providing them with a way of participating in technical discussions. Please don’t sacrifice your own intuition in favour of the AI gods, though (i.e. I remember the last time we tried something like this, it took 4 weeks, and it was a nightmare!)

Finally, you can self-evaluate your requirements list once you're done with it. You can quickly hone in and ask questions such as:

• Does the intended response address all the requirements in the RFP?

• Where is the technical risk?

• What are the known unknowns?

• What are the project dependencies?

Code Intelligence

For digital agencies that sell technical solutions, you typically need people who articulate your proposed technical approach. A lesson I’ve learnt over the years is that the overall solution architecture is driven by the structure of teams and the agency's strengths. If you’re not a .NET shop, you won’t win or be happy working on a .NET project. There is no point say designing a 100-strong microservices architecture when you have two cohesive platform teams. The only thing that will matter is the interaction between those two monolithic systems.

So, with that in mind, the agency owner or the management structure of your teams determines the software architecture for the solutions detailed in your proposals. This is something you should not delegate by abdication. The closer your technical solution is to reality, the faster you will deliver it.

In an RFP process, however, sometimes you’re asked questions prematurely and may be required to make architectural statements to appease the technical requirements of the prospective client. Sometimes these are harmless and well-intentioned asked. Other times, they can be an “IT power move” by a detailed oriented or controlling client.

To get these answers, you often must interrupt flow-aligned team members, technical leads or platform specialists, whose time is expensive and can be grumpy.

There are many early LangChain-based tools where you can ‘talk’ to your codebase and effectively ‘hive the minds’ of your developers. For example, the RFP might require how authentication works or if your system supports 2FAA. By talking to the tool rather than your developers, it could provide details on how exactly authentication works or how it might work to integrate with a third party using OAuth. It could give you a ballpark estimate and use commit history to evaluate the best developer to allocate the work to.

This is very much in line with the idea of a Digital Twin — simulating the process of getting estimates and technical approaches from your developers based on everything they know, every commit they’ve made, and every email or Slack exchange they’ve had. And at the same time, it allows you to maintain a solution grounded in reality and how you want to grow your company rather than the next ‘best practice’.

Project Timelines

Similar to the Requirements List in your proposal, you need to produce a timescale for the job. You might have several ways of doing this; you might do a lot of work upfront with your studio manager to “pencil in” alongside confirmed work. Or you might be more flexible and speculative with resourcing (i.e. you’re hiring staff or freelancers after you win the gig)

In any case, you typically need a list of milestones or a high-level Gantt chart describing the overall plan. GPT can help with the leg work of getting this formatted for you. Your prompt can even provide you with a rough schedule if you provide your team’s availability and critical milestones, ask it to consider UK holidays and more.

It can save you time when you need to make changes, too. In natural language, you can get your AI assistant to reformat your schedule if things change as you proceed through the project. Or even figure out a provisional plan for the company-wide resource planner.

Proposal Furniture

With the ‘proposal furniture’, much of this will come from your template. You shouldn’t be starting each one from scratch. When you review and evaluate the proposal overall, you will take out slides or swap in new ones to make them more applicable to the proposal. For example, you might need to revise your ‘rate card’ slide to use EUR instead of GBP.

I think you get the idea—the Proposal Furniture doesn’t make or break the proposal. It mainly helps deal with awkward questions and to cover your bases. You can use GPT to ensure you’ve got all the necessary Proposal Furniture and give you more confidence before you hit the magic ‘send’ button.

Reflection

On the flip side, we can’t let clients go rogue and start generating 99-page RFPs using ChatGPT now -- that would most certainly cause an extinction event. I did start building a product to help people write better RFPs called RequireMate. Think OmniOutliner integrated with ChatGPT. It was a bit terrifying how quickly I could automate writing requirements for niche technology. I might rebuild it using LangChain.

Does AI eat human-centric processes for breakfast?

In this post, I’ve essentially outlined some process “hacks”. And as a solo entrepreneur and a one-man sales team, I’ve found some of these techniques valuable to produce a proposal that I know would usually take me weeks with the help of 3 or 4 other team members. I only have to convince myself adopting X and Y is a good idea.

Hopefully, this illustrates the infancy of LLM tooling and the opportunity for a new breed of SaaS tools to fundamentally change how we iterate and collaborate with AI tools on problems such as delivering a proposal. You can’t run your new business through ChatGPT, but there are some compelling use cases where generative AI can accelerate your proposal-building process.

Knowledge is vital to the growth of a digital agency. Knowledge of their niche, the tools and technology they offer as services, and the injection of new ideas they offer to clients they partner with. It is only natural then to leverage AI to access their own knowledge (i.e., to ‘hive’ that of their employees and own services) to focus on the more novel aspects and thus create new knowledge more effectively.

Proposal writing is an art. So, despite all the workflow optimisations discussed, it takes one person (and the right music) to pull it together. Due to its very nature, there will never be a turnkey solution to produce a great proposal without this person’s drive and determination. Sure, there will undoubtedly be tools to generate “good enough” proposals that might win by just turning up. And possibly help make all your pixels line up on your proposal furniture. In most cases, it won’t erase the need for an authentic voice.

Should you train everyone to be Prompt Engineers?

It would be nice, especially if you want to leverage today's raw tooling. And its probably better than misusing GPT badly, like school children cheating on a test. But like the ZX Spectrum programmers, the need for crafting clever prompts will be replaced with applications requiring less cognitive burden. We will eventually develop easy-to-use apps and provide abstractions to hive the minds of your workforce. Promoting an open mindset around leveraging AI tools to get things done is probably more important at this stage. And preparing for a world where your team works with copilots and digital twins of agency staff, past and present. 👻

OK. That’s a wrap. The next post in this series will look at the Discovery process. 🌈

Thanks a million,

Shay

Status Update

So, I started this newsletter with a track record of being utterly hopeless at blogging. Surprisingly, I kept up the motivation to keep writing and publishing articles.

Part of the inspiration for writing a Newsletter in the first place came from #buildinpublic folks on Twitter. However, I’m very much aware I’ve leaned into writing more long-form essays without giving any updates on how my venture is going!

That said, I plan to post a ‘journey log’ now and again. Not sure exactly what this will look like, but here is a start:

Work

• I’ve been doing a lot of Shopify work, both in terms of ongoing client project work and building a product on the platform.

• I’m meeting with a prospective client next week to discuss a new website! Somehow I’ve managed to find someone who is still using Drupal 7.

• As a favour, I’m doing some ongoing innovation and digital transformation consultancy for a small company. This is driving some of my own process development and consultancy techniques.

• This newsletter! Each article takes a considerable amount of time to write, but from a personal perspective, I’m finding value in thinking and writing these articles. Thank you, my beautiful subscribers. 😍

• I’m working on a brand-new identity and web design for patch.digital. Unfortunately, this is at the bottom of my to-do list.

• Oh, and I filed my Company Accounts for the last financial year.

Agency Metrics

Clients

Active Accounts: 4

Websites Launched: 5

Active Projects: 3

New Business

Proposals: 5

Won: 3

Lost: 2

Qualified Lead: 1

Products

In Development: 1

Product Failures: 2

VC Pitches: 1

Team

Employees: 1 (me)

Freelancers: 1

Hiring: ❌

Office: 🏡

Financial

Profitable: ✅

London Living Wage: ✅

Target Net Salary & Dividends ($5k per month) : ❌

Want to work with me?

You can email me at sealan.cronin@patch.digital! 🚀

Thanks a million,

Shay

What this looks like exactly differs from agency to agency. The account management service is shaped according to the client; there is no one size fits all approach. Factors include the agency’s size, niche, market positioning, resources, and team experience.

In the beginning, identifying innovative ways to solve your clients’ problems is your task to solve, motivated by the success or failure of your business. You are also the face of the agency and are ultimately responsible for delivering client services. However, as your client list grows and you begin to delegate the technical work itself, there reaches a point where you need to implement a client services strategy and account management structure, which is necessary to scale the agency beyond yourself.

How can digital agencies instil an entrepreneurial mindset into their account management service, transforming and scaling it into an innovation-driven function that uncovers and addresses clients' needs?

In this post, I will introduce the idea of embedding a culture of proactive innovation within your account management service through practising Customer Conversations. More than just a friendly chin wag with your clients, Customer Conversations refers to finding and evaluating Customer Jobs and applying the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework principles to get your team proactively pitching solutions your clients will pay for.

The Death of the (Traditional) Account Manager

What is a ‘traditional’ account manager, anyway?

Picture the “Mad Men” era in the 1960s during the ‘Golden Age of Advertising’ —a time before digital advertising and when agencies truly began to leverage creative and strategic brand building to drive advertising campaigns. The early prototype for the Account Manager role would be part of the old boy network, a smooth-talking, whiskey-drinking character whose primary aim was to keep clients happy. So long as the Account Manager was likeable, good at storytelling, got on board with the campaign, and understood the creative well enough, the primary objective was to build trust and maintain client satisfaction.

The role of the Account Manager would retain this shape albeit with more structure until the digital revolution in the late 90s and early 00s transformed the advertising landscape. The web created a huge flattening effect and introduced new and exciting ways to reach customers through digital advertising. This demand and opportunity produced a new breed of creative agencies who were either digital-first or incorporated digital services into their existing print-based offering. For the Account Manager, this meant becoming more delivery focused across multiple channels, which required understanding the detail, becoming more data-driven, reporting quantitative outcomes, communicating technical requirements and talking about features and platform integrations.

"I already told you: I deal with the goddamn customers, so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

Tom Smykowski, Engineer Liaison @ Initech

The increasing complexity of digital projects also required more structured project management (e.g. agile methods) and Project Manager roles in the form of either dedicated PMs or Studio / Traffic Managers. Around this point, the idea of a ‘traditional’ account manager fragmented into the multifaceted and often misunderstood role it is today. SaaS, complex third-party integrations and more advanced tech dragged the Account Manager into the detail and moved well beyond “noted” or “let’s circle back on that” order taker.

Instead, the Modern AM gets pulled in all directions and, through the sheer degree of context switching, often becomes some of the overloaded and reactive characters in the agency, which caused many agencies to think differently about their overall account management service.

The global pandemic saw an acceleration in the adoption of novel business models as digital agencies pivoted to embrace remote ways of working and respond to the change in demands of their clients. To survive, some agencies regressed to a combination of an AM/PM role — a Jekyll and Hyde character with mismatching attributes.

Some agencies, however, used the pandemic as an opportunity to reimagine the role of the Account Manager. They recognise that the position within their organisation has been poorly defined for many years, and a more specialised or suitable job description was required. In some ways, this led to the adoption of more specialised AM variants, such as the Digital Producer.

Today, whatever you call it, the expectation of an Account Manager is a configuration of the following:

• Client Relationship Management

• Product, Project, or Campaign Management

• Strategic Planning and Innovation

• Data Analysis and Reporting

• Financial Management and Forecasting

Customer Conversations

So, we’ve established that Account Managers have many essential roles to play in delivering client services:

Where does innovation come into play?

Innovation begins with understanding your clients’ problems or JTBD. As an agency owner, when you delegate talking to your clients to your client services team, you give up the opportunity to listen and identify your client’s problems first-hand. A necessary step to scale the agency but, as a result, you rely on the team to have the same entrepreneurial instinct and motivation to find Customer Jobs.

Like the other business areas, you need to develop a repeatable and reliable process for innovating through your client services. As part of this, you must transform your AMs into expert Customer Job Hunters.

‘Customer Conversations’ is one technique that can help with this. Practised in the startup world, it involves directly engaging with customers to uncover their underlying needs and pain points. As described in the book The Mom Test, it involves conducting thoughtful and unbiased conversations that delve beyond surface-level opinions to gain genuine insights.

Account Managers: I recommend you read this book, which provides practical tips for developing an entrepreneurial mindset for Customer Job Hunting!

Here are a few techniques mentioned in the book:

1. Avoid pitching: I find this difficult; avoid pitching your ideas or solutions when your clients give you a glimpse of a problem. Instead, focus on understanding the client’s perspective, needs, and challenges without biasing their responses.

2. Deflect compliments or requests for a solution: If a client compliments you for an idea or something you’ve done, you have become the centre of the conversation, not the client. You want to quickly move out of this position away from you and any hypothetical/half-baked solutions. 

3. Ask about specifics: Encourage clients to share specific examples from their experiences rather than hypothetical scenarios. For example, your client might go off on a rant about something that sounds important only until you drill down to the specifics, and it turns out it is a minor concern compared to more pressuring issues. You want to cut the fluff.

4. Use open-ended questions: Frame questions to encourage clients to provide detailed responses. Open-ended questions prompt clients to share their thoughts, motivations, and experiences, enabling you to gain richer insights.

5. Seek evidence and details: Challenge vague or general statements by asking for specific evidence or examples. It helps ensure that responses are grounded in real experiences rather than opinions or assumptions.

6. Listen actively: Give full attention to the clients during the conversation, actively listening and seeking clarification when needed. Demonstrate genuine interest and engagement to create a comfortable environment for open dialogue. Don’t waste each other’s time.

7. Focus on the past: Ask clients about their past experiences and behaviours rather than hypothetical future scenarios. Past actions and experiences provide more reliable insights into clients’ motivations and decision-making processes.

8. Find patterns and commonalities: Look for recurring themes or patterns in the responses from multiple clients. Identifying commonalities helps uncover broader market needs and trends across your client base that can inform product development or business strategies.

9. Embrace discomfort: be willing to explore challenging topics. Addressing sensitive issues can uncover valuable insights that may not crop up in more surface-level discussions. Learn to ask why multiple times.

As the people actively engaged with your clients, your AMs are in a unique position of trust and can use these techniques to bring problems out into the open. The next part of the puzzle is identifying Customer Jobs on the fly and having an effective process for capturing them.

Customer Jobs

I can’t find the YouTube video where I first came across this note-taking technique for Customer Job Hunting. However, I have adapted to use the Jobs as Progress method by Alan Klement.

Essentially, at the start of each call you have with a client, grab a sketchpad and draw the following diagram:

Have this in front of you during your call. As you get down to business, note any problem areas as you discuss the client's struggles broadly and openly. There is a bit of dance where you’re trying to qualify whether a problem is worth diving deeper into. Sometimes the client isn’t in the frame of mind to go deep and instead needs some agency therapy!

Note that you may also carry a lot of solution bias into the conversation. If, for example, a client is telling you something is not a problem but is based on your experience (e.g. other clients), this is a problem, you should seek to understand rather than create an argument for creating a problem. Maybe there are more fundamental problems to be addressed beforehand.

Conversely, the client may ask you for a product and service (i.e. build me a website), inhibiting your ability to dive deeper into the underlying problem. If someone walks onto a lot looking for a car, the salesperson will sell you a car when a bicycle might have done the job just fine.

Once you uncover a pain point, you need to qualify it using the customer conversation techniques described above:

• How many clients does this same problem impact? (you want many)

• How frequent is the problem? (every or multiple times a day)

• How expensive or time intensive is the current solution to deal with it?

You want to find the thing that your client dreads the most. The thing that keeps them up at night and lies awake questioning their life choices: a problem so painful that they would bite your hand off for a solution!

When you’re onto something, try to engage your client with questions to understand the demand for solving this problem, and fill in each section of the Forces of Progress diagram above.

Demand Generation

• Push: What is driving this change? These can be changes imposed on the client from an external source (e.g. decisions by leadership, a new law to comply with, or a global pandemic) or driven by internal needs (e.g. a new ‘head of marketing’ needing to make their mark) that ‘push’ clients to seek a solution.

• Pull: What does this change look like? If you solved this problem, what would the clients’ life look like? And what would cause a client to choose one solution over another?

Demand Reduction

• Anxiety: What keeps the client from choosing a potential solution today? Why did they abandon or stop using previous attempts to solve this problem?

• Inertia: What are they habitually doing at the moment as a workaround that a new solution must compete with? How much does your solution require a behaviour change?

One example of a “candidate point” for Customer Job Discovery is finding a “compensating solution”. If your client is actively creating a sticky tape / hacky solution to their problem, it is a clear sign of an unmet need and, in most cases, a subpar solution already in place. It also could indicate a similar job exists in similar organisations. In any case, it is a good launching point to discuss the underlying problem (e.g. what did you try before putting this “compensating solution” together yourself?)

After every call, you should be able to take all your notes, file the Customer Jobs in a shared workspace (e.g. Google Docs, Notion), and throw away your paper notes. Your team should meet weekly and spend some time evaluating Customer Jobs:

• On a strategic level, how valuable are the problems you’ve identified? Would solving this problem help our client significantly increase revenue?

• Are we the right people to solve this problem? Is this in our wheelhouse? Do we need to act as a strategic partner, or will we deliver the complete solution?

• Is there a turn-key solution we can offer our client? What is the MVP way we can help our client out?

• Can we develop a solution or product for multiple clients with this problem? What is the scope (e.g. large, medium or small)?

If you have something, you should pull on the broader team to develop a proposal for a solution, and then hey presto: you’re proactively pitching solutions to your client’s problems. 🌈

Reflection

I wrote this post thinking about what a modern account manager looks like today, reflecting on my experience in the industry so far. You often see discussions about blending the role of the Project Manager and the Account Manager, but there are few practical models for embedding innovation within your client services team. Since innovation stems from understanding and talking to your clients, I think there is a strong argument for AMs in a flat or horizontal structure to lean closer to trustworthy strategic thinkers rather than the more sober, practical PM thinking.

Today, there is plenty of spontaneous Invention for sure, especially if you have a talented bunch of superstars: a clever GPT wrapper, a developer’s weekend project in React, or an ‘internal project’ mandated from the top is often quickly spun off into a ‘product’ or ‘project template’ clients services can start pushing onto their clients. More often or not, your clients will run with it (because they trust you) and may give you a false sense of progress. 

However, are you solving the right problems? Are you placing risky bets with your resources and clients’ time? You risk missing the mark with technology-led innovation, especially when you jump on trends yet to cross the chasm!

Purposeful innovation, on the other hand, is client driven. Innovation is problem-led; when you understand your clients, and their business, identify deep pain points and the underlying JTBDs. You take the time to listen and identify the most valuable problems to solve for your clients. And it puts you in the position to consistently and proactively deliver new solutions your clients will value.

Thanks a million,

Shay

This post will discuss a fundamental characteristic of the entrepreneurial mindset required to overcome the “entrepreneurial seizure”:

You are many things, but you are not your business.

This mindset is essential to build a business fulfilling your primary aim. Your primary aim as an individual and your business goals and objectives are distinctly two different things. You must develop a business strategy that is separate from your identity.

A bit of back story first before we dive in.

The Patch Identity

I had many options to consider when I started my business in 2021.

I first considered trading as a sole trader under my name or setting up a limited company (similar to an LLC in North America) called “Sealan Cronin Ltd.” or something similar. My company would then be me and forever me—a company of one. This approach would’ve been a much simpler concept to reason with and, in hindsight, would’ve more accurately reflected the contracts I was working on.

Instead, I skipped the freelancer part and formed a private limited company under a separate identity.

Patch Digital Limited was born.

Why the name? Well, I’m glad you asked! 😉

I nearly began Patch Digital when I was freelancing back in 2009. Buster, the family Jack Russell Terrier, provided the initial spark of inspiration, with his big brown patch covering his left eye, as he would lay his head lovingly on my keyboard as I plugged away programming.

So, I ran with the word ‘Patch’.

Of course, before I did anything, I checked if a good domain name was available, claimed my Twitter handle, and started to post-rationalise from there. I remember playing word association games in my head, beginning with the dictionary definition and exploring the etymology. I liked the idea of a Patch Request (HTTP Method) or digital agency that would “mend or strengthen” websites for clients.

Without too much thought, I went with it. Still, I won more work by presenting as a digital agency rather than a freelancer. I could use my little agency background to provide clients with the necessary level of client experience to make it work. After about seven months, however, I felt I had more to learn, wound down my shop, and returned to working full-time.

So here I am now, giving Patch Digital a real chance at life.

Company of One

One of the first things I did to get the ball rolling was create a simple web page. I launched this without much fanfare, and other than breathing new life into my social media handles, I tempted any marketing efforts until I had a plan.

At this early stage, I didn’t need to spend too much time developing the brand (as tempting as it was), so I kept everything relatively straightforward. However, strangely, I struggled to write a simple “about us” blurb:

Is it “we” or “I”?

The lack of vision was one thing, but I knew it was important to remain honest and authentic in creating a separate entity. But I also knew my immediate clients were hiring “me” at the end of the day. I didn’t want to instil a false pretence that Patch Digital was more than just me until I hired someone.

I could only dwell on this briefly as I had taken on lots of work to pay the bills. I bodged it, and in typical “Cobbler’s Shoes” fashion, my web presence and minimal identity for “Patch Digital”, quickly fell out of sync with my active projects. In many ways, it didn’t represent me or the company I wanted to build. It still doesn’t (stay tuned?)

I later learnt that this was another fairly common problem people face when starting a business for the first time and again discussed in The E-Myth Revisited in detail. The solution to break free of this identity crisis was to develop my ‘personal’ aims to guide my decisions and actions in my personal and professional life. Only then could I more confidently create a business with a clear and authentic value proposition and evaluate the opportunities ahead.

Your Primary Aim

Here are some tough questions for you:

• What do I want my life to look like in five years? Ten years?

• What do I want to be doing every day?

• What do I want to have accomplished in my personal and professional life?

Woof.

From how I see it, there were two parts to the puzzle to answer these questions:

1. Identify your short, medium, and long-term needs.

2. Create a rich picture vision of what you want your life to look like.

With these two activities, you can create intentional actions to help you reach these goals and design a business to serve you, not it.

Let’s start with “needs”.

Needs Analysis

We all have different needs that drive our motivation to do things. To understand this, we often point to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

We often conceptualise Maslow’s theory of motivation internally as a rigid pyramid that we all must climb neatly stacked upon one another. In reality, the intensity of each need fluctuates as we work on ourselves. Nonetheless, it provides a good starting point to level your short and long-term needs:

Let’s break it down.

Humans have some basic needs to survive: access to food, water, shelter, and warmth. Even if you’re wealthy, it’s essential to have these needs met before pursuing higher goals.

In the startup/bootstrapping community, having enough savings to cover these basic needs is known as “having a runway”.

Prioritising your mental and physical health is essential when starting your own business. With our basic needs met, we can focus on our psychological needs, which are crucial for our well-being, mental health, and self-esteem. These needs include belongingness, love, and other interconnected factors that affect each other.

At the top of the triangle is self-actualisation *heavenly sound effect* is the highest level of personal growth, where we become the best version of ourselves and realise our potential. This holy grail involves personal growth, creativity and self-expression, and finding purpose and meaning in our lives. As an entrepreneur, this could mean seeking professional development, being innovative, and finding meaning in our work.

In my view:

However, you can’t just jump to the top. You have to build the business from the ground up. Understanding and addressing your needs across all categories — ‘basic’, psychological, and self-fulfilment—is crucial for creating a successful and fulfilling entrepreneurial journey.

To get a clear picture of your immediate, short-term, and long-term needs, take some time to brainstorm and evaluate how your personal and professional life aligns with these categories. Identify areas that require immediate attention, needs that should be satisfied soon-ish and long-term goals that can form the foundation for future projects.

I use Freeform for this.

By prioritising and addressing your needs systematically, you can create a more balanced and focused approach to your entrepreneurial endeavours, ensuring that your business venture achieves financial success and contributes to your overall well-being and personal satisfaction.

The Big Picture

Next, create a vivid and concrete vision of your future:

1. Imagine accomplishing your personal and professional goals five or ten years from now.

2. Consider various aspects of your life, such as financial stability, property ownership, relationships, family, hobbies, travel, personal growth, work-life balance, and community involvement.

3. Visualise the details of this future world, including the activities you’ll engage in daily, the people you’ll be surrounded by, and the impact you’ll have on your community.

I used Freeform to visualise the elements that would make up this future world. I then picked out all the aspects, wrote SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) like goals, and wrote a small paragraph describing each. When do you want to be mortgage-free? How do you want to give back to society?

For example, my primary aim categories include:

• Financial Stability & Security 💰

• Property Ownership 🏡

• Marriage & Family ❤️

• Hobbies & Interests 👾

• Travel & Adventure ✈️

• Personal Growth & Learning 🧠

• Positive Work-Life Balance 🧘‍♂️

• Community & Social Responsibility ♻️

Once you’ve painted this vivid picture of your future, ask yourself:

How much money do I need to achieve my goals? 💰

Creating a business with $1mm annual recurring revenue (AAR) is much easier than creating a $50mm one. So, be realistic in your assessment, and determine if you need a specific amount o accomplish everything you’ve envisioned. This exercise will help you set realistic financial targets and align your business objectives with your aspirations.

Pitch Yo’ Self

So, you’ve figured out what you need, and you’ve got a vision for the life you want. Now let’s make it happen.

How does this business help you satisfy those needs and help you get what you want?

You may be rushing to invest in yourself, but are you willing to invest in the business? One way to think of this process is creating a pitch deck for yourself, where you sell the business idea to yourself, ensuring it’s worth your time and effort. Treat it like Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank.

If you have a partner, get up and project your slides to the TV and torture them until you come up with something you both believe in!

In the same light, be prepared to walk away from a business. You can decide which entrepreneurial opportunities are worth pursuing by carefully evaluating and pitching the business to yourself. Like leaving a job, it’s better to cut an experience short rather than spend years of your life on something that doesn’t get you closer to where you want to be.

Reflection

Working at a job for a long time becomes a big part of who you are. This welding of identities is especially true if you put much effort into helping the company succeed, as I did as President & CTO of a digital agency. I was paid a six-figure salary and enjoyed lots of responsibilities and perks, so my job became a big part of how I valued myself.

A person’s job can play a significant role in shaping their identity.

Understanding the distinction between yourself and your business is crucial for achieving success and personal fulfilment in your entrepreneurial journey. You’ve taken the necessary steps towards aligning your personal and professional goals by identifying your needs, creating a vivid picture of your future, and pitching the business to yourself.

It’s essential to remember that your aims and your business objectives may evolve (mine certainly have!) As you grow and learn, your priorities may shift, and it’s crucial to reassess your needs and vision periodically to ensure that you’re still on the right track. Always be prepared to pivot or make changes to maintain alignment between your personal and professional life.

So, what did you discover about your needs and your future vision? How does your current business idea align with your aims? Are you willing to take the risks and sacrifice to achieve your goals?

Thanks a million,

Shay

In this post, I want to examine the opening scene from an innovation and sales perspective. It struck me as a powerful illustration of the importance of understanding customer needs. We’ll talk about Jobs to Be Done, which I’ll introduce briefly in the context of understanding what “job” a lunar timeshare could possibly satisfy. 🚀🌕

Note, this post contains light spoilers for the show Hello Tomorrow!

Your Brighter Tomorrow, Today

Nat’s Diner Bar. Tuesday night under a full moon.

Sal, downing his pint, slammed his glass down on the bar.

“Hit me again, Nat,” he demanded.

A levitating robot clumsily approached Sal from the other side of the bar. Nat’s chest compartment opened, revealing a crystal-clear pint filled with freshly poured lager.

“Hey there, fella. My eyes are up here,” Nat teased.

Sal is shaking all over. Visibly enraged by the inauthentic interaction, Sal pulled himself back from the brink yet again. He shakes his head as Nat served him another perfectly poured pint.

“Bottoms up,” Nat said, pivoting away awkwardly in a jittery, robotic fashion.

As Sal sighed and continues starring into the void, a sharply dressed man in a greyish suit, light blue shirt, and dark navy tie took the seat next to him.

“How’s that soup there, boss?” the man, Jack, asked.

Sal replied absentmindedly, “It’s probably cold,” staring into the distance.

Jack pointed to the oyster crackers and remarked, “Well, at least they’re still shipshape.”

Sal shuddered and scratched his head, clearly uninterested in the food, or Jack for that matter.

Jack’s demeanour, charisma, and choice of words are all part of a well-calculated plan. Sensing an opportunity, Jack meticulously arranged his place settings and went to work.

“So, is the wife dying?” Jack asked.

“Pfft, what?” Sal scowled.

Now I have your attention, Jack thinks.

Jack continued, “Or… or did she pass away already? Is that what you’re over here drinking at?”

“I’m just after some peace and quiet,” Sal muttered.

“Well, that’s good news about the wife. Family. Man’s top treasure,” Jack said, undeterred.

He continues to press, “Your house didn’t burn down, did it?”

“Look, mister, I got enough problems of my own. I don’t need you coming here and making up more for me, okay?” Sal snapped.

Jack leaned in, his eyes gleaming with sudden clarity. “Wait, wait, I got it. It just hit me. You’re a good man. You’ve worked hard your whole life to give your family the life they deserve, and it’s left you drowning in debt, surrounded by the latest, most useless junk. You’ve got an ulcer, haemorrhoids, and heartburn so fierce it’s like you guzzled jet fuel and lit a cigar. Sleeping is torture, but who needs sleep, right? Especially when they gave your job of 30 years to some floating tin can and took your dignity along with it.”

Sal sighed heavily, the weight of his life bearing down on him.

At this moment, Jack had successfully established an empathetic bond with Sal. He successfully managed to understanding and express compassion towards Sal’s struggles, Jack positioned himself as someone Sal could confide in and potentially trust.

Jack continued to qualify and hunt for his prize, “So, it’s no surprise, no shame. You’re sitting here, daydreaming about the getaway of a lifetime, maybe even taking a dive off the nearest bridge.”

After planting a seed in his mind about escaping, Jack pauses his monologue to check in with Sal, peering over cautiously.

“But the fact that you haven’t slugged me yet means you’ve got enough hope left to hear the one word that’ll save your life.”

Sal clicked his tongue, a sardonic smile on his face. “You get hit a lot?”

Jack chuckled, “Well, every time I’m wrong. But it’s been a while.”

Sal’s smile faded, and he sighed. “You left out the part where I have a daughter who doesn’t pick up the phone when I call. You got a magic word that fixes that one?”

There it is. Jack had just found the problem he was looking for—the most painful problem. Jack had now uncovered a profoundly personal and emotional issue for Sal. This information provided the perfect opportunity for Jack to solidify the connection and present his sales pitch as a solution to Sal’s most pressing concern.

It was time for Jack to start his pitch.

Jack held out a small object, a glint of excitement in his eyes. “First, I just want to show you something, okay?”

Sal furrowed his brow. “What’s that?”

“That is from the Sea of Serenity. It’s 243,000 miles above us, on the bright side of the moon. My son picked it out for me. That’s my prized possession.”

Sal sighed, clearly impressed. “Wow.”

Jack grinned. “Ah, well, there you go. You said it yourself.”

“What?”

“Wow. That’s the one word none of us can live without. And I promise you this, hand on heart, with hundreds of happy folks to vouch: You’ll be saying, ‘Wow, I love living on the moon.’”

Jack smoothly pulls out a brochure:

EVEN YOU CAN LIVE ON THE MOON!

Sal’s face fell. It just sunk in; he’s talking to a travelling salesman. But the sale had already begun well before Jack walked into the diner.

“That’s another thing I can’t afford.”

Jack waved his hand dismissively. “Where’d you see a price tag?”

“I’m not stupid, mister.”

“No, you’re just so beat down that when you see something you like, you think it’s out of reach.”

Nat interrupted in her robotic tone. “Hey there, fella. My eyes are up here.”

Sal glanced at the brochure, trying to regain his composure. “Is this the one here with the pool? Or...”

Jack nodded. “That’s the same model I’m in. I’ll tell you what, it’s big enough that you can invite the mother-in-law and not see her for days.” 

He chuckled.

Sal chuckled too. “You have that?”

“Yep. Me and my family, right there in the C-Plex.”

Sal seemed to soften. “Wow. Why don’t I, uh, take it home? I’ll give it a think.”

Uh oh, Jack instinctively knew this is a red flag. It was now or never.

It was time to close the deal. 

Jack feigned surprise. “Oh, right. The pros and cons.”

“Exactly.”

“You know who does pros and cons? Hunks of metal like her.” He gestured toward a robot.

Sal chuckled, and Jack continued. “Which is why she’ll never fall in love or drive too fast or have kids or do any of the crazy things that make life worth the price. And it’s why she’s stuck in the same day, every day. While fools like me and you, we get to dream of a better tomorrow.”

Jack paused, noticing Sal’s expression. “Ah, sh*t. You’re smiling.”

Both men chuckled.

Laughter had replaced the tension and despair that once filled the conversation, signalling a newfound sense of camaraderie between the two men.

Sal shook his head in disbelief. “Jesus Christ. This is nuts.”

Jack leaned in, grinning. “How’s it feel to be back among the living? This time, don’t let it slip away.”

Sal smiled, realising how much he missed feeling alive. Jack presented a contract for a lunar timeshare, “Hey, you wake up Tomorrow, you don’t like it, we rip it right up. But, you know what? There is a catch, though.

Jack withdraws the order form back towards himself.

“You’ve got to promise me that you’re gonna call your daughter. And you tell her life is too short, and you love her. And her room is ready whenever she wants to fly up and spend some time with Dad.”

Sal’s lips formed a silent, heartfelt agreement. “Okay.”

We later find out, of course, these condos do not exist. The whole business is a fraud. His story about his family living in the C-Plex? A lie! Jack even has an estranged son he’s never met.

Poor Sal, you might think.

However, in the following episode, Jack receives a short video message from Sal, reunited with his family. Smiling, happy, and filled with hope about his new life. The timeshare solved a deep emotional need and allowed Sal to reconnect with his family and rediscover a sense of purpose—all for zero down, $150 a month. Bargain?

So, why did Sal buy these lunar timeshares?

There is a Job To Be Done

Let’s dive into some innovation theory with a look at Jobs To Be Done.

What do we mean by innovation theory? A way of reasoning about creating new products or services that help customers achieve their goals and solve their problems. Or simply, a change in behaviour that creates value.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is one such theory, providing an analytical lens for understanding innovation, which I practice in my work helping clients innovate and make progress.

Clayton Christensen lay the groundwork for JTBD in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997). He uses the concept of “job” to explain why some products or services succeed while others fail. He argues that customers “hire” products or services to do specific jobs in their lives, and if a new product or service can do that job better, customers will switch to it.

Christensen’s follow up book Competing Against Luck (2016) provides a more complete version of the JTBD framework, and an essential read. I’ll guarantee you won’t look at milkshakes in the same way again. 🥤

By understanding Customer Jobs, businesses can create more effective solutions that better meet customer needs. Focusing on understanding the underlying “Job” customers are trying to achieve is the key to successful innovation, rather than the external problems existing solutions aim to solve.

We’re going to use JTBD to understand why Sal “hired” Jack’s lunar timeshares to solve his most painful problem; mending his relationship with his daughter. Before diving back into the scene, however, we must highlight two different interpretations of JTBD brilliantly described by work of Alan Klement in his book When Coffee and Kale Compete.

The first is Jobs-as-Activities. A customer has a goal in mind and is actively engaged in finding a solution to reach that goal. This way of thinking about Customer Jobs is similar to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) principles and Cognitive Task Analysis. To me, this is a very narrow and functional way of looking at Customer Jobs; I’ve spent years designing websites to creating novel forms of selling event tickets online, focusing on the functional activity of a user wanting to buy tickets for a show.

On the other hand, Jobs-as-Progress focuses on the broader context of the customer’s life and the progress they are trying to make towards achieving their goals. This view of Customer Jobs recognises that customers are not just looking for a tangible solution to a specific task or activity but are seeking to make progress in their lives. The product or service is ultimately a means to be an end. With the ticketing example, customers want to experience a show, not buy tickets.

I believe exploring and solving customer problems with a Jobs-as-Progress lens is the key to disruptive innovation instead of sustaining innovation.

Lunar Transformation

So, let’s analyse the scene above using the Jobs-as-Progress model from Jack’s perspective:

Jack is focused on the Customer Job that his product gets hired for. Yes, he is aware of the features, the pros and cons of owning a condo outright, but these details are for the motivated buyers, for customers who are actually in market for a condo on the moon.

At the start of the scene, Sal’s emotional struggles are evident before a single word. He is drinking alone. Cleary the food isn’t the problem -- this would not cause someone to be this upset, would it? Jack quickly identifies these signs and builds rapport, demonstrating his understanding and empathy for Sal’s situation. By connecting with Sal personally and emotionally, Jack can uncover his deeper needs and frustrations, such as losing his job, health issues, and most importantly a strained relationship with his daughter.

Jack is focused on the “job” that his product gets hired for, but the features.

By probing Sal with the right questions and focusing entirely on Sal’s problems rather than any facet of the product he is trying to sell, Jack avoids getting physically hit by quickly identifying the primary JTBD: to regain a sense of purpose and connection with his family. This understanding allows Jack to create a rich picture of a better world for Sal, reunited with his family, a world that includes his product, a easy to access getaway on the moon.

Throughout the encounter, Jack employs several techniques to appeal to Sal’s emotions and convince him that the lunar timeshare solves his problems. He shares a (fabricated) personal story about his son, which resonates with Sal’s longing for a better relationship with his daughter.

As the conversation continues, Sal begins to envision a better life on the moon, free from the burdens of his current existence. The timeshare represents a means to escape his problems and start anew, fulfilling his emotional JTBD. Jack uses the power of storytelling, painting a vivid picture of how life on the moon could be, further tapping into Sal’s emotions and desires.

Furthermore, Jack cleverly positions the lunar timeshare as something attainable and within Sal’s reach, contrary to his initial belief that it would be too expensive. By dismissing the idea of a price tag and emphasising the value of the experience, Jack reassures Sal that this opportunity is not just a dream but a viable reality.

Finally, Jack closes the deal by addressing Sal’s most pressing concern: his relationship with his daughter. He asks Sal to promise to call her and tell her that her room is ready whenever she wants to visit. This emotional appeal becomes the deciding factor for Sal, as it directly addresses his primary JTBD, which is to reconnect with his daughter and rebuild their relationship.

Customer Obsession, not Competitor Obsession

There are many ways to centre a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.

Jeff Bezos

When we think about innovation and developing a new product or service, we often fall into the trap of focusing too heavily on the competition and the functionality or logical aspects of their solution to an external problem.

For example, I have a spreadsheet called Competitive Intelligence, analysing hundreds of UK-based digital agencies I’ve spent hours building, drawing information from many data sources, and trying to identify the strengths and weaknesses. It is a necessary exercise from a market research perspective, helps with positioning the agency, and can help provide a rich picture of how things are today, but it gives a restrictive view of what a client needs from a digital agency. It’s not the place to start your innovation journey.

What will give you a real competitive advantage is focusing on your customer’s problems rather than what all the others are doing. This idea is something Jeff Bezos has repeatedly stated over the many years running Amazon; by intensely listening and understanding your customer, you will identify the real competing solutions for problems in your customers’ lives, along with the anxiety, inertia, and forces that push and pull people away and towards your product or service.

Jack knew his competition. He wasn’t another travelling salesperson hawking lunar timeshares. He was competing with Sal to maintain his status quo, anxieties, trauma, and other attainable solutions that could practically resolve the pain or numb it entirely:

Doing Nothing 😶

Sal may consider not making any changes and continue to cope with his current life and its challenges. If Sal chooses to ignore his problems and maintain the status quo, his emotional and financial difficulties may worsen over time, potentially deepening his despair and damaging his relationship with his daughter.

Doing nothing is the obstacle that all innovators must overcome; genuine innovation is to change a customer’s behaviour in a way that creates value.

Competing against ‘doing nothing’ means creating a vision of real progress and taking them on a journey to make a single and straightforward call to action. Jack follows the principles of AIDA in this scene to guide Sal to take action:

• Attention: So, is the wife dying?

• Interest: Jack discusses the lunar timeshares and presents the brochure, sparking Sal’s curiosity.

• Desire: Jack shares his experiences and the potential benefits for Sal and his family.

• Action: Jack offers a contract and encourages Sal to reconnect with his daughter.

Seeking Professional Help 🩺

Sal may have been considering professional help through therapy or counselling to help deal with his emotional struggles and improve his relationship with his daughter.

In theory, therapy would be the most logical way to deal with the issue, and if Sal were to post his situation on Reddit, this would probably be the top-voted comment: “Seek professional help”.

Therapy, however, is not a turn-key solution. It takes time, money, and commitment. There is no guarantee of success, either. 

Jack offered something more immediate and actionable than seeking professional help by presenting a tangible solution to Sal’s problems.

Pursuing a New Career 🧠

Sal could try to get back on his feet and seek new job opportunities to regain his dignity and financial stability after losing his job to a robot.

Easier said than done. Sal’s skills and abilities might not be a good market fit. And it also means relying on a company or government department to create the job for him.

Jack enticed Sal with the promise of a new life that could provide financial security and personal fulfilment without starting a new career—much less work.

Drinking Alcohol 🍻

Sal may continue to use alcohol to numb his emotional pain, which could lead to addiction, exacerbate his health issues, and further strain his relationship with his daughter.

Jack immediately acknowledged Sal’s alcohol consumption and countered it by offering a more favourable solution in the form of lunar timeshares, focusing on the potential to improve Sal’s life and relationship with his daughter. A lesser of two evils?

Reflection

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.

Steve Jobs

Did Steve Jobs have a strong bias towards JTBD, given his surname, Jobs? I like to think so. He reportedly used elements of the JTBD framework to guide the development of products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. All succeeded by better addressing the jobs customers wanted to do.

Of course, you can look at this scene in many ways. Sal is in a vulnerable state and desperate situation, deeply enumerating his problem, beer after beer.

Jack capitalises on these using nearly every sales technique in the book:

• Building rapport 😀

• Active listening 👂

• Storytelling 🦸

• Overcoming objections 👨‍⚖️

• Leveraging social proof 🗣️

Jack even offered a trial period.

Was Sal swindled if he ultimately benefited from the purchase?

Was Jack disingenuous? Definitely! I wouldn’t encourage fabricating false narratives for a ‘sale’, especially if you want to build long-term client relationships built on trust.

Ultimately, however, Jack solved Sal’s most painful problem by focusing on him rather than the product he was selling. He created a vision and a world showing Sal making progress, a world where Sal could take one easy action to make this a reality. And he did in some respects.

Now, imagine applying these same techniques to a product that helps people make real progress and is something they want.

Today, think about how your product or service is helping your customer progress towards a better tomorrow and how you’re talking about it. Unlike Jack, are you rushing up to everyone in the bar, leaping straight into a “sales pitch” without hearing a word they’re saying? Or are you too focused on your competition rather than doing everything you can to understand your customer’s JTBD?

Thanks a million,

Shay

Today I want to share a concept called Ikigai, which has helped me find fulfilment in my entrepreneurial expeditions. In this post, I’ll introduce the concept of Ikigai and show how it can help you build a purpose-driven enterprise.

London. Summer of 2004.

There’s nothing like summer in the city.

I had just turned 18, secured a place at university, and had tickets to my first proper music festival. I had a lot to feel good about. But before any summertime shenanigans could begin, I buried my head in Ian Marcousé’s Business Studies: Second Edition textbook, studying hard for my A-Levels.

In the run-up to my exams, I’d locked myself in the upstairs study, which I had exclusive access to. Day after day, I sat at an old Edwardian desk with all my notes and flashcards laid out. I vividly recall learning about Kaizen and Lean Manufacturing techniques, as their emphasis on efficiency, waste reduction, and self-improvement resonated with me. Often debating out loud with myself, this inspiring textbook would cause the technician inside me to stand up and pace, imagining a world where I use these techniques to run my future imaginary business.

Little did I know these many topics would stick with me throughout my working life as a web developer, as I would later learn these concepts significantly influenced the field of software engineering.

Working with Agile

When I started my first programming job in 2008, the management team was already hard at work introducing concepts like 5S (another JIT method) to improve the delivery process. So, there was great alignment when a know-it-all graduate arrived on the scene (me), advocating for Agile and running projects through sprints. I’d introduced ideas like burndown charts and quickly gained perspective on the real-life commercial aspects of delivering software in a digital agency.

In the 15 years that followed, most of my working life has been delivering projects with a strong bias towards Agile as it became a checkbox for RFPs and procurement processes. Through predominately WAGILE (Waterfall + Agile), I’ve helped structure work for numerous projects, itemising tasks and bugs into Kanban boards and tracking progress.

Of course, in this time, I’ve come to appreciate the realities of managing complex digital projects and that Agile is not a silver bullet.

Starting a Business

In 2021, armed with all my technical skills and hard-won project delivery experience, I quit my job to start my technical consultancy business. As I sat down to write a business plan for a bank loan, I found myself caught up in the almost unlimited possibilities of where I could take the business. How could I best use this money? The more market research I did, the more gaps I could see that needed to be filled. I couldn’t do all of them.

For my company to succeed at anything, I needed focus.

In search of sage wisdom, I was surprised to learn from a friend about another Japanese concept called Ikigai.

Ikigai roughly translates to “a reason for being” or “a reason to wake up in the morning” and represents the intersection of four key elements:

• What do you love? ❤️

• What are you good at? 🧠

• What does the world need? 🌍

• What would someone pay for? 💰

The idea: if you find activities or work fulfilling all four elements, you can find a real sense of purpose and meaning in life.

I was sceptical initially:

Can something as important as the meaning of life be handled by yet another neat concept similar to the ones that help shape my working life?

To summarise, the process itself is simply asking yourself these four questions and then finding the overlap:

1. Start by asking yourself what you love. What brings you joy and makes you feel fulfilled? It could be a hobby, work, or anything that gives you a sense of purpose.

2. Identify what you’re good at. What are your skills, talents, and strengths? What do you enjoy doing that you’re also good at?

3. Consider what the world needs. What problems or issues do you see in your community or the world? What kind of work could you do that would positively impact others?

4. Reflect on who and what people will pay for. How much money do you need? What kind of work could you do that would provide you with financial stability and security?

5. Look for the overlap between these four areas - what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what brings income and wealth. This intersection is your Ikigai or your reason for being.

Finding my Ikigai

I left that business plan blank. I needed to pay the bills, so I took on some freelance work doing what I instinctively knew I loved: building websites for people. I put my developer hat on, sharpened my tools, and got to work programming.

It wasn’t long, however, until I began to experience what Michael Gerber calls in his book The E-Myth Revisited, an “entrepreneurial seizure”. My ambition quickly outgrew what I could physically deliver. The business became an unsteady juggling act of managing the work, doing the programming, and winning new opportunities. On top of that, I was working on a separate high-growth startup venture, another distraction, so I was working 12+ hours a day on two businesses!

With all this self-inflicted stress, the novelty of being your boss wears off pretty quickly. Without focus, the freedom to build and do anything you want is overwhelming. It is easy to go through the administrative motions of setting up a business, but creating a clear vision for a successful company you want to work on, and staying focused on it, is much more challenging.

I knew I couldn’t sustain this effort. I took time to reflect on all the irons in the fire and narrowed my choices to one clear fork: should I reign in my lofty ambitions and be content with a ‘lifestyle business’? Or should I focus on building something great, with structure and process, a ‘growth business’ that could scale beyond just me?

So, I stepped back from what I was doing and shifted my thinking to “working on the business rather than working in the business”, creating a clear vision of what that might look like. A vision worth fighting for.

Here are some of my insights:

What do you love?

If you’ve ever visited a WeWork, you’ve probably held one of their branded mugs inscribed with the slogan, “Do what you love”. I’ve been meaning to steal one of these mugs. A cliché yes, but it is a powerful question to ask yourself each day: are you doing what you love?

I’m no Hitch: the reason for love is complex. Examining your inner child is an excellent place to start, identifying any themes or types of activities you’ve carried through life rather than just looking at what you’re doing now or paid to do. You could do this with a friend, taking 5 minutes to write down everything you love (or loved) to do, then talking through each one and seeing where that takes you.

Me? I love working with computers, building websites, and connective software with purpose over utility. However, despite the extent of automation today, there are parts that I would rather avoid doing. And there are other aspects where I have much better taste than ability, so I’d rather have someone better do it. So, if I wanted to build websites that matched my aspirational standard, the missing piece of the puzzle was a team—my very own quilt of Patch Workers.

What are you good at?

A better question might be, what are you good at right now?

We all have the potential to ‘get good’ at almost anything we put our minds to. In the 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that it takes 10,000 hours (approximately ten years) of deliberate practice to become an expert in something. So, if you believe in “practice, practice, practice”, identifying all the activities you’ve already spent time challenging yourself in is a great start.

Start with a personal ‘SWOT analysis’. Write down all your achievements, merits, and what you have done, and self-evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. You may instinctively know what you’re both good at or an accomplished expert in. The things you can improve upon are your opportunities. Threats could be skills that are quickly becoming redundant or commoditised.

With a “growth agency”, it is essential to identify what you’re “not good at” early on and create a structure or organisational strategy to get someone in to do that work for you. And eventually, as you scale, you will have to step away from detail to some extent. Building a company is like building software, so I’m happy to delegate and oversee. Or, more accurately, an operating system. Its well argued that software architecture mirrors the communication structure of the people who build it (see Conway’s Law).

What does the world need?

The world needs you to solve problems.

We’re going to talk about solving problems a lot in this newsletter.

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Taking a bottom-up approach, satisfying a world need through creating a business is an exercise in product or service market fit. Then, by consciously working through the value chain, you can evaluate the net benefit of your contribution and the industry overall to all people, communities, and the planet. Think B Corp movement.

A great business will aim to solve a profound and painful problem experienced by a sizeable population repeatedly. The more severe the pain, the more urgent the need for a solution. The more people it impacts, the larger the potential customer base. The greater the problem frequency, the more repeat business will drive growth and profitability.

How do you find these problems? One way to approach this is to research and segment an existing market today with a market mapping exercise. First, focus on a particular industry (e.g. live entertainment) and group together, and create relationships between the key players. Then, you can examine each product or service category and the underlying internal or philosophical problem the company is trying to solve.

At this point, you have a choice on how you contribute to the growth of this industry and perform further research to quantify where the business opportunity lies. Does the industry need (10x) better products or services than currently available? Or can you innovate and create brand-new product or service categories within the industry that solve painful problems?

Does the world need another digital marketing agency? Well, the world doesn’t necessarily need another run-of-the-mill digital agency, for sure.

The UK digital agency market continues to grow as agencies maintain a critical role in helping clients survive and thrive. The industry is constantly evolving and growing, and there is always room for new agencies to enter the market. The question is more about positioning yourself within the most valuable market map and helping clients with missions worth supporting.

What can you get paid for?

Job hunting is an essential entrepreneurial skill. I’m not necessarily talking about trawling through job ads in moments of anxiety and self-doubt, but the ability to systematically break down the “job to be done” by people, products, and services.

Now, if you’re in a full-time position, a deep understanding of your job purpose is critical to understanding how you add value to the company and ultimately negotiate compensation. Are you a replaceable part in a machine? Or are you deeply interwoven in the growth of sales, revenue-earning potential, and company future?

With a business, a strong correlation exists between how much you get paid and the perceived value you can provide your customer. Perceived as you will in good faith, either oversell or undersell your services, however hard you try. You create value for your customers by solving their problems consistently and continually and improving their lives with your product.

How do you find value? In a word, empathy: you talk to, listen to and understand your customer’s problems. This is a topic for another post.

How do you measure value? You combine empathy, problems and context. Like a web design process, prioritise the most painful problems in a requirements list and understand all the actors and scenarios involved. You create a rich picture of the problem space and an exact measure of the progress made if you solve this problem. You then draw a line between the progress and the commercial nature of the customer’s business: does this outcome increase or guarantee revenue?

How much money do you need? Treat this question seriously by developing your life aims and objectives (i.e. you have a specific number to reach). While always going after the most profitable opportunity is tempting, you may break your back for nothing if you only need half as much.

When do you need the money? Cashflow is essential, but it would help if you considered the pros and deltas between instant and deferred gratification. With a “lifestyle business”, for example, you reap the benefits of your labour within each tax year, minimising your tax burden as you go, and invest only the capital necessary to create value and make money for personal needs. Once you stop, however, the dividends stop, as you are likely the only value-generating aspect. A successful “growth business”, on the other hand, lives on and grows without you working “inside it” but requires much more investment up front. You also create jobs and income for other people, too.

Reflection

I have my Ikigai printed on A4, and pinned to a corkboard to remind me why I’m building a digital agency.

Like Kaizen, building a strong sense of purpose through Ikigai is an iterative process, nurtured rather than defined in stone. The more progress you make, the more you evolve with the changing world. Focusing on ‘your why’ and aligning yourself with these four questions help you align your actions and priorities with your true purpose.

One important thing to take away is that your purpose is different from your company’s purpose. In a future post, I’ll discuss why separating your primary and business objectives is essential when understanding your company’s vision.

What is your Ikigai? 🤔

Are you working on building a digital agency or business? What changes can you make to centre your purpose and lead an authentic life? Create a list of all your activities, business or pleasure, and work through the process. Share your Ikigai, or any thoughts, via email sealan@substack.com or comments. 

I hope you find Ikigai beneficial in whatever situation you find yourself in.

Thanks a million,

Shay

Welcome to my weekly newsletter Doing the Business.

This newsletter is my journey from a lifestyle business to creating a digital agency from the ground up.

If you want to build your agency or someone interested in starting a business, this newsletter is for you. Each week, I'll share personal insights, experiences, practical tips, and strategies for building a digital agency.

This newsletter also serves as an exercise in accountability. I'm committed to sharing my journey with you, and I hope you find inspiration and motivation in my story.

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Thanks a million!

Shay