I’ve been slipping a little bit on the daily writing. The problem (I think) is my instinct is to try to look good. This gets exacerbated when when I get or lose some momentum.
Needed to call myself out on that so there. Onward.
I’ve been going back and forth between whether I should do “tutorial” type content or “think by writing” to develop a point of view.
The problem with developing a point of view is that by definition you already have one, and as I’ve try to develop it more, I just end up poking holes in my opinions and being less sure than when I started on a given topic.
Untangling ideas, turning them over, having conversations about them, asking, “is this true?” It’s all been an awkward exercise.
So to organize it a bit more, I’m taking a “point of view” audit.
The first “point of view” I had with work was that big business type companies are bad. I know growth is the goal so of course there are going to be winners and losers, but got it in my head that the smaller the better.
So when I started freelancing I wanted to help local businesses compete better with larger competitors moving in on their markets.
It all felt very clear cut and mission-y.
A problem I found was that a lot of small local companies were that way for a reason – they didn’t really want to grow. They were happy with the status quo. In many cases they were being slow boiled out of existence but not willing to really look at what was happening, let alone change.
Around the time Ann and I started working together, some clients we worked with that wanted growth got it. In the process they started sharing characteristics with the bigger companies they were aspiring to be like.
Some things were good. Openness to trying new marketing thingz, appreciating data sophistication, having a marketing budget; all cool things.
And then some characteristics felt not so good – like putting short term conversion rates over their customers or running discounts too frequently or prioritizing ad spend over payroll.
So I guess I learned that its more complicated than big is bad.