I was listening to the My First Million Podcast earlier this week, and the guest was David Placek, the founder of Lexicon Branding.

If that name does not ring a bell, the names he has invented will - Swiffer, BlackBerry, Sonata, Lucid, Dasani, Febreze (and TONS more). The man has been in the naming business for over 40 years and has developed a framework that (I promise) has almost nothing to do with naming and almost everything to do with how agencies should approach positioning.

Here is what got me…David does not start a naming project by brainstorming names. Most people think that is the job. Get a bunch of smart people in a room, throw words at a whiteboard until something sticks.

Nope.

David starts by asking four questions.

(11:52 in the episode, if you want to go find it.)

That is it - four simple questions.

David notes that if you put a room full of executives together and ask them how they define winning, you will get completely different answers from every single person at the table. Which means the team has been executing against completely different definitions of success. Which means everything downstream like the naming, the positioning, the messaging, the pitch, the pricing, the true impact is already fucked before you start selling.

Most agency owners haven’t even answered question one (which is, IMHO, the easiest). Agencies default to things like, “we want to scale”, "I want a team that does the work without being told to do the work" or "we wanna be the go-to agency in {X} space." Those are not definitions of winning. Those are descriptions of the wallpaper in the room after you've already won.

Here is the rub - you can’t build sustainable positioning, messaging, or a sales approach on top of a vague definition of winning. It is like building a house without a foundation.

They all run their businesses on beehiiv. Newsletters, websites, digital products, and more. beehiiv is the only platform you need to take your content business to the next level.

🚨Limited time offer: Get 30% off your first 3 months on beehiiv. Just use code JOIN30 at checkout.

Start building for 30% off today.

Long-time readers will recognize what I am about to say, & for the newer folks, welcome. This is the 30-second version of one of my foundational frameworks.

That link takes you to a YouTube video that I recorded 5 years ago and it has informed everything that I want agencies to build upon. The idea is simple but the implications are enormous. As an agency owner, you have been trained to think about returns in terms of spend ROAS, ROI, blah, blah, blah. But those are lagging indicators. They tell you what happened after the decisions were made.

ROU is a leading indicator. In essence, the deeper your understanding of a customer, a market, or a situation, the better every decision you make downstream from that understanding will be. Understanding is the investment. Everything else, the pitch, the proposal, the campaign, the strategy, is the yield from that investment.

And here is where David Placek's framework and ROU collide deliciously.

You cannot answer any of these questions without doing the work of deep understanding first & the deeper your understanding at each level, the more precise and powerful your answer becomes.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Anniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

I talk a lot about frameworks. I try like hell to actually live them, too. So let me walk through Placek's four questions using my own business as the example.

For me, winning means having enough revenue to take care of the people I love, to donate meaningfully to the causes I care about, and to do work that genuinely helps agency owners avoid some of the walls I have smashed my head against over the past 30 years. That is it. Not famous. Not the biggest coaching practice in the world. Not on the cover of Forbes. (I mean, sure, I would take it, but it is not actually part of the definition.)

That definition of winning is specific enough to make decisions against. If an opportunity does not point toward that definition, I can say no. That is what a real definition gives you…the ability to say no

This one requires a little honest self-assessment. I have been doing this for a long time, 20+ years in the agency space and been a coach long enough that I have worked alongside nearly 350 agency clients. That is a database of patterns, failures, wins, pivots, and hard conversations that I genuinely do not think many people have.

I also have ADHD, which sounds like a liability and is actually one of my sharpest assets - really. It has made me a bit of a polymath. I can move across industries, disciplines, and problem types faster than most people, find the connective tissue between things that do not obviously connect, and generate solutions from an unusually wide aperture. Combined with that client data set, it is a genuinely unusual toolkit.

Those are my assets. Those are the things I have to win.

I need an audience that has bought into the idea that selling is not manipulation, that positioning is not a tagline exercise, and that deep understanding of their clients is more valuable than any tactical playbook. I need agency owners at inflection points… growing, transitioning, evolving…who are willing to do real work.

I need to say there is a better way to market, sell & manage agency services and teams, and it starts with understanding. Not with scripts or tactics or templates or whatever you might find in a Tai Lopez course. It all starts with understanding.

Which, conveniently, is what I have been saying for years. The difference now is I can see how all of it connects from David Placek's naming methodology to ROU to VVV (Vibes, Vision & Value) to how you run a discovery call.

It is the same idea at every level of resolution; understand first, then act.

If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I am a broken record about Vibes, Vision, and Values (VVV) as the framework for how agencies should build positioning and run their sales process. (See Agency Inner Circle 89 & Agency Inner Circle 94 to get the concepts & this is what a VVV deliverable looks like.)

VVV is the answer to "what do you need to say?"

But VVV only works if you have done the upstream work. If you have not defined winning, you don’t know what you are building. If you don’t understand the market, your prospects and the talents of your team, your vision will be generic. If you will work with anyone who will pay you, your values will be performative.

Placek's four questions are the input. VVV is the output. ROU is the fuel that powers the whole thing.

Attention is the hardest thing to buy. And everyone else is bidding too.

When people are scrolling, skipping, swiping, and split-screening their way through the day, finding uninterrupted moments where your audience is truly paying attention is the priority.

That’s where Performance TV stands out.

Check out the data from 600+ marketers on the most effective channels to capture audience attention in 2026.

Download Report

I am going to give you the shortest, most un-sexy homework in the history of this newsletter.

Sit down somewhere quiet. Answer these four questions about your agency. Actually write the answers down. Do not type them into a doc, but write them by hand if you can, because it slows you down enough to think.

If you can answer those four questions with specificity and honesty, you have a positioning strategy. You have the core of your pitch. You have the bones of your VVV.

And you have, whether you know it or not, a serious Return on Understanding.

That is the work. It is not complicated. It is just not easy.

Our sponsorships are ads (obviously - duh). But some of the companies or services linked in our content may pay us a minimal commission if you buy something from them. Potential payment is never a factor in what we link to, and we have direct experience with every company or service where you can buy something that we mention in our content.