I am the outside voice that tells you the truth

I run an agency, but the part of the job I am actually good at is sitting across from a founder and getting them to say the thing they have been talking themselves out of saying for years.

I have spent long enough in marketing to have sold most of the tactics myself at some point, which is why I am rude about them now. The pattern is always the same. Somebody buys a tactic, it works for a quarter, and then it stops, because nothing in it was ever going to make a stranger trust them.

So I stopped selling tactics and started interviewing clients instead. Once a week, every week. I get their words down, a senior team makes sure the right people find them, and I stay in the one seat nobody else can sit in.

I am not a coach. I tried the coaching position, it was suggested to me, and it does not work for the people I want to help. They are busy. They do not want homework. They want the thing done properly by somebody who understands their business well enough to be blunt about it.