Speaking
Forty-four years of building companies across logistics, music, film, publishing and technology — and the willingness to talk about the parts that did not work. I speak to founders, operators and marketing teams, usually about the distance between what a business plans and what it actually does.
What I speak about
Each of these is something I have written about at length, so you can hear the argument before you book it.
Why founders strategize themselves out of business
The difference between preparation and avoidance, and the three questions I use to tell them apart. Read the argument
Building a company that can run without you
My first company stalled at a hard ceiling for a year before I worked out that the ceiling was me. What has to change structurally — and why hiring more people does not fix it. Read the argument
The referral economy is a constraint, not a channel
Every project my agency has taken arrived by referral. That sounds like a boast; it is really a limit, and it decides pricing, capacity and who you are allowed to turn down. Read the argument
What answer engines changed about being findable
Search stopped ranking and started answering. Being quotable is now a different discipline from ranking, and most marketing plans have not caught up. Read the argument
Managing people you cannot see
I have run distributed teams since 2003, well before it was anyone else’s problem. The hard part was never coordination — it is that the signals you used to read without thinking are simply gone. Read the argument
On stage
Three decades of rooms, in two industries that do not usually overlap.
- CEO Hangout Marketing Summit · 2015
- Featured speaker, Bangalore — a panel on what was then still called digital marketing. I also contributed four bylined articles to CEO Hangout between 2015 and 2017.
- International Music Summit · 2001
- Featured speaker, New York City. I was there on the back of building Fortune Entertainment and securing national distribution for it, which for an independent was the whole game.
Earlier than either, and not a speaking credit but the reason the music-industry rooms opened at all: Big City Records, the label I launched in the mid-eighties, was one of seven independents whose acts were invited to perform at Jack the Rapper — the same bill as Cypress Hill and Naughty by Nature.
Formats
- Keynote
- Thirty to forty-five minutes on one argument, built for a room that has heard the optimistic version already. I would rather leave people with one thing they will act on than five they will forget.
- Panel or fireside
- The format I have done most, and the one where the honest answers tend to come out. I am comfortable disagreeing with the other people on the stage.
- Podcast or interview
- Remote or in person. Long form suits this material — most of it is stories with a point attached, and the point takes a few minutes to arrive.
- Workshop
- Half a day with a founding team, working on their business rather than on mine. Smaller rooms, fewer slides, more arguing.
Booking
Tell me the audience, the room and what you want them to do differently afterward. If I am not the right person for it I will say so, and will usually know someone who is.