Better business, built from the inside out.

Is the Business Finished, or Just This Version of It? Before you close it, cut it or keep investing in it, take one clear-eyed look at what still works, what has changed and what may be worth carrying forward. When the question changes There comes a point when “How do we grow this?” is no longer the most insightful question for a business struggling through successive periods of decline or failing to scale. Sometimes you can see that point coming. Sometimes you realize you crossed it three...

When the Store Disappears, What Builds the Brand? As customer journeys fragment across platforms and channels, the brand has to work harder to stay whole. As businesses chase efficiency, convenience and scale, more of the customer experience is moving beyond the physical business itself. On paper, the logic is hard to argue with: fewer steps, faster transactions, more self-service, more delivery, lower operating costs and greater reach. But efficiency has a habit of moving work around, not...

When Your Value and Your Visibility Don’t Match What Being Underestimated As a Leader Is Actually Telling You Resilience: rĭ-zĭl′yəns (noun) The power or ability to recover quickly from a setback, depression, illness, overwork, or other adversity; buoyancy; elasticity —of people. Fair warning: this article asks a lot of questions. That’s partly because “just be more visible” turns out to be a surprisingly incomplete answer. It has been years since we transitioned to a corporate paradigm that...

Your Customer Shouldn't Need to Become an Expert to Buy From You Retailers have spent years making more information available. The next advantage may be helping customers do less interpretation. While working on a project to improve the customer experience in a highly specialized retail garment category, I became interested in a deceptively simple question: How easy is it for the customer to actually make a decision? Purchase journeys are rarely linear. Consumers search, compare, read...

We Want AI to Find Us. We Just Don't Want it to Eat Us. How much access to our thinking are we willing to exchange for discoverability? For anyone publishing on the open web, AI discoverability is becoming inseparable from content strategy. Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is where a growing share of discovery happens, and showing up in AI-generated answers and recommendations isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's the job. The Old Bargain Is Breaking The old digital bargain was simple enough:...