What If You Had A Sorting Hat For Your Customers?
Alidus Faren runs a beautiful bookstore three doors down from Flourish and Blotts in Diagon Alley. The shop specializes in advanced treatises on Arithmancy, collected volumes of Transfiguration theory, rare astronomical charts, and first editions of magical history that most wizards have never heard of. The kind of books that make a Ravenclaw’s pulse quicken. For years, Alidus kept his shop welcoming to everyone. He never wanted to turn anyone away. Traffic from all four
Why Explaining Kills Sales
There is a fundamental difference between the learning moment and the decision moment, and most business owners collapse them without awareness. In a learning moment, additional context can help. You are building understanding, exploring options, gathering perspective. The goal is comprehension. But in a decision moment, extra context creates friction. The goal is not to understand more. The goal is to choose. When you introduce more variables at the decision point, you are not clarifying.
Speaking the Right Language: Why Clarity Fails Before You Ever Say a Word
That translation is friction. And friction cannot be eliminated by adding more words.
This is where most business owners make their first mistake. When a message fails to land, they assume the solution is explanation. They add detail. They clarify further. They repeat themselves. What they’re actually doing is increasing the translation load, asking the listener to work harder to interpret meaning that was never native to them in the first place.
Translation kills clarity.
Is Your Failure Baked Into Your Launch?
Most founders fail before they launch because they're solving the wrong problem. Not a fake problem. Not an unimportant problem. The wrong one. They hear complaints and rush to fix symptoms without asking what's actually broken underneath. They build accountability tools when the real problem is lack of purpose. They build organization systems when the real problem is unclear priorities. The symptom is visible. The root cause is structural. And if you can't tell the
Clarity Isn’t a Feeling. It’s a Discipline.
You’re waiting for clarity to arrive like inspiration in the shower. It won’t. While you’re refreshing slides and tweaking language, hoping something will finally “click,” your competitors are doing the unglamorous work you’re avoiding: defining constraints, exposing contradictions, naming essence. They’re not more talented. They’re more disciplined. The gap between murky thinking and precise communication isn’t creative. It’s mechanical. And most founders never learn the difference.
The Law of Unintended Messages
I spent forty years watching smart people destroy their own credibility with a single sentence. Not because they chose the wrong words, but because they never noticed the second message riding underneath. This is about the gap between what you think you said and what your audience actually heard—and why that gap is where most businesses quietly lose.
The Founder’s Blindspot: You’re Too Close to Your Own Work
You’re explaining yourself constantly but still not landing the sale. The problem isn’t your expertise—it’s your proximity. Three psychological forces are sabotaging your messaging without you realizing it, and working harder won’t fix them. You need external thinking to extract what’s already brilliant in your work and restructure it so people actually get it.
BACK TO THE PAST: Turning Icons Into Marketing Messages
Sometimes, a marketing message can be embedded in a cultural icon. When Toyota wanted to announce its new hydrogen cell car, the Mirai, they used a simple icon (“Mr. Fusion”) made famous by the classic movie, “Back to the Future”. Now, watch what they did with it. The fact is, there are many pre-existing cultural elements that you can “borrow” to help get your message across, and you don’t need to pay
How Apple Wins again by Changing the Rules | Apple is now securing your devices against illegal (and LEGAL) searches!
If you can’t find a solution to your business problem, perhaps it’s because the problem is really in how you are looking at it, and not in the problem itself. As Apple usually does, they have followed one of the things I teach people as a strategy coach when faced with what appears to be a problem without a solution: Step back. Move up a level. Change the rules. What Apple has done is removed
How’s That SEO Expert Working Out For You?
I love it when a plan comes together! I was just reviewing a new client’s old website, and the SEO was pretty bad. In fact, it was so bad, I decided to check out the company that had built his site for him. (Their name was littered all through the source code of the client site, as they were piggybacking his site on their company’s hosting account.) This web designer’s site has, as its ONLY