A note on the manosphere
Last week, like a lot of people, I sat down and watched Louis Theroux’s latest documentary, ‘Inside the Manosphere’…
Something we’ve always preached, and still firmly stand by, is that no two businesses are the same.
Sure, from the outside, some of them might look like it.
But when you dig even the slightest bit deeper, you can easily see that it’s the unique combination of puzzle pieces that creates a distinct picture for every business.
Think about it: two businesses might have the same or a very similar product or service, and the same target audience. Same business, right?
Wrong!
When you add in the fact that one business started last year and the other kicked off three years ago, and that those economic environments, social environments, and political environments evolved during those years, you get difference.
When you consider that each business has founders and leaders that come from varied backgrounds, you get difference.
When you think about how they’ve shaped their brand narrative, what their story looks like, and perhaps most importantly, what purpose, other than making money, drives them, you get difference.
You get the picture. All businesses are different.
Despite all of that though, a few years ago, after decades servicing businesses across multiple industries, small to large, local to multinational, we had an epiphany.
Most businesses are also inherently the same.
There are fundamentals that just have to work in order for businesses to grow, succeed and stick around in a world where almost half of them won’t make it to year five (not to mention the 20–25% that don’t clear year 1).
And when we started diving further into this concept, what those fundamentals are, became very clear.
The truth is, every business wants to be successful, whether it’s the local green grocer, the sole trader selling handmade accessories, or the tech whiz with a start-up set to change the world.
They want to build their revenue, while hopefully ensuring their costs don’t increase at the same rate.
And to do that, most start-ups, small businesses, scale ups, and sometimes even larger businesses think their best bet is to jump head-first into promotion.
If we had $100 for every time a new client contacted us wanting to move straight into a Meta campaign without doing anything else first, we’d probably be sipping Piña Coladas on the beach somewhere right now instead of writing blogs.
But in many cases, what they’re missing is firstly the structure to support a campaign that actually does work, and secondly, the strategy to inform that campaign so it’s reaching the right people, with the right message at the right time.
They’re leaping straight in without even thinking about how they can assert their benefit, their difference, their unique approach to solving the problem their target audience has, and often without a clear and supported path from that moment of first contact to successful sale.
A few years ago we worked with a client who came to us because their marketing and sales teams were at each other’s throats. Sales were declining, and the team responsible for the leads blamed the team responsible for the conversions, and vice versa.
These were grown adults and they were literally yelling at each other whenever they got the chance, trying to defer fault and save their own skins.
In our experience, other than the yelling, this situation isn’t uncommon. Maybe you’ve seen it in a business you’veworked in? Maybe it’s a problem in your current business?
We say it isn’t uncommon because we’ve had countless clients before them and after them with the exact same issue – the arrow isn’t heading in the direction they want it to, and everyone is pointing the finger away from themselves rather than finding the flaw.
Where we always start (after our mandatory audit), is with the structural foundations. Right now, this business is experiencing a natural disaster, and we want to know if the walls and roof are built on a slab strong enough to carry the load.
What we find almost every time is the problem starts at the base. Usually the business is doing BD, they are marketing and advertising, they are even generating leads, but when we try to figure out what’s happening to those leads, it’s anyone’s guess.
When processes (for example, capturing data for a customer journey, making decisions, deciding who owns which responsibility) aren’t clear, or haven’t been purposefully created (they have ‘fallen into place’), things go wrong.
In the case of this specific client (and countless others), not only was their CRM not capturing the right data, or presenting any insights of value, leads were being dropped like hot potatoes at certain points in the funnel where no one knew who owned them.
By setting up the structure that drives the business properly, the systems that support operations, marketing and sales, you ensure the hard work you do later is worth it, and can actually pay off.
Once we have that foundation looking strong enough to withstand a stampede the size of the Boxing Day sales in New York, we take a look under the hood at the strategy that should be driving everything.
We want to know what the aim is, and how that is articulated, measured and shared. If that isn’t there, how do your people really know what they’re doing?
A strategy (as opposed to the plan) is the underlying, deliberate approach that defines how your business enters the ring, how it competes, how it wins, and what you prioritise to get there.
To really get the concept, unfortunately these days, you don’t even need to read Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’, you just have to look around the world right now.
When entering a conflict or competition, knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and those of your opponents is clearly going to lead to greater success than simply ‘flying blind’.
It allows you to move from a war of attrition, for example, to manoeuvre warfare where you are essentially outwitting your opponent with speed, agility and intellect rather than trying to outlast their spend or manpower.
Understanding, articulating, agreeing and leveraging your unique positioning, your deep audience understanding, your clear messaging and any advantage you have, is the absolute difference between a business that really can scale, and one that will at best, stall.
With a structure that supports growth efficiently and effectively, and a strategy that drives it, scaling suddenly becomes a much more informed activity, rather than the result of luck or chance or pure timing.
Scaling in and of itself, though, shouldn’t be something left to the gods, instead, it should be planned and executed with absolute focus and finesse. Informed by all the legwork done in the strategy, the thinking needs to become action, through regular short-term, tactical plans that guide all activity, and enable it to be monitored and optimised in real-time.
Why?
Because we don’t live, work and grow in a vacuum. On any given Tuesday at the moment, a new global event evolves the landscape and how people think and behave. A new product or competitor comes in and rocks the boat. A new influencer says they like theirs more than yours, and the game changes.
Plans should be in chunks of time (we always suggest quarterly), but should also be dynamic, to allow for these changes, to adjust to them, or take advantage of them.
At the beginning and end of all of this though – whether it’s structure, strategy or scale – is information.
In today’s business world, no one can afford to function on guesswork anymore. No one can just go on gut and hope for the best. No one can ‘play it by ear’ and see what happens.
Well, they can… but they will become one of the negative stats, not one of the successes.
Data, and the real insights drawn from it, will drive everything across structure, strategy and scale, and creating strong practices on that front from day one will save a lot of time and heartache down the track.
This structure, strategy, scale framework, along with triple bottom line thinking, is what underpins our Profit on Purpose program.
Reading this article, it would be easy to think this program applies only to start-ups – those businesses just setting out on their path to real growth.
But in reality, most of our clients have actually been established businesses, five, ten, even more years into their journey, encountering that same sales vs. marketing battle, that same decline in growth, that same conflict of how to create sustainable scale instead of riding the wave of extreme peaks and troughs.
Why is that?
Because every business begins as a start-up, and very few can afford to or have time to invest in their structure, strategy, and scale plans at that point (until now!).
Then they become scale-ups, and while joyfully, they throw off some of the many hats they’ve been wearing, their focus is so strongly on their scale ambition, that the structure and strategy parts are forgotten, leading to the problems we mentioned earlier.
Where does AI come into it?
These days, this is one of the best questions businesses looking for efficiency both in cost and time can ask, and in this case, the answer isn’t complex.
AI is only as good as what you put into it, and without strategic business and marketing expertise and experience to guide the process, knowing the right questions to ask, what prompt to give, what to believe and not to believe, an AI approach to this process very much falls short (we’ve seen it and fixed it for clients!).
If you are a start-up and want to set yourself up properly and robustly for growth, reach out. If you’re a scale-up, and you want to ensure your foundations can support the strategy that is directing your next moves, we’re here. And if you’re ten years in, things are ok, but your sales team has just tipped the marketing manager’s desk in a fit of rage AGAIN or you’re a founder looking to step back or exit successfully, give us a call.
Whether your business is just starting or it’s ten years in, this framework enables smoother operation, faster growth, and more sustainable success.
If you’re ready to set your business up to last, let’s connect.
Last week, like a lot of people, I sat down and watched Louis Theroux’s latest documentary, ‘Inside the Manosphere’…
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