One of my clients said to me this week, "Oh my God, Tim, I don't know if I can do this stuff anymore, if this is what I have to do in order to grow." He was speaking about the frankly treacherous world of cold email. For a long time, it worked for his agency, and now it doesn't.

He didn’t want to think about sender reputation, deliverability, warmed-up inboxes, and more. He had a system that worked, and it slowly diminished in efficacy over time, and he didn't feel like he had the time or headspace to keep up with the changes in that channel or to jump out and learn a new channel.

Another client was having a hard time keeping organic traffic for all of their clients because AI overviews in search have made the obvious effectiveness of SEO seem like it was a channel in decline. This client wasn't really sure that they understood AEO or GEO well enough to effectively sell it to their clients, so he was finding himself in these discussions that he felt were increasingly awkward. And he did not want to abrogate the trust his clients had put in him by bringing in a partner or a white-label company to help because he didn't know that his team could effectively guide the strategy.

This is something that is pretty regular. Your clients feel this way when there's an algorithmic change, a new channel, or an adjustment that they need to make. they are often thinking, "Holy shit, I don't have time for this. I can barely handle the stuff that's on my plate already."

But as my cold email sender found out, if you don't make changes, you end up with diminishing returns. When the market moves on and you stay still, inevitably, literally and figuratively, I suppose, you are left behind.

It isn't intransigence or laziness that leads to standing still while things are moving around you. It’s fear.

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I know - you aren’t afraid of anything - you are a self-actualized entrepreneurial growth MACHINE! But, if you are an agency owner, you’ve probably seen this up close and personal… Results aren't great for a client, so your account manager doesn't engage with the client in the same way because they are terrified, or they are defensive. The client smells blood in the water, and six weeks later, the client has churned.

And it's not just the account manager's fear of confrontation or fear of losing a client that caused them to act differently. They likely seized up because of a fear of you put into them… either purposely or not.

The more you are feeling stuck as a business owner and as a leader, the more fear creeps into your day, and your interactions. (God knows that I’ve been there plenty…)

We tend to think about ourselves as imaginative problem solvers who can make adjustments on the fly and create growth and opportunity where no one else can see it.

This is 100% true. (And I applaud you heartily for that skill.)

But there are times where you run out of familiar territory. You find yourself standing in undiscovered country, and you have no idea what to do. That feeling is devastating - after all, you are a creator, an inventor, an optimizer, a leader, a coach, maybe even a parent. You are supposed to know what the fuck you are doing.

Here's the straight skinny…almost nobody knows what the fuck they are doing. Everybody is learning and changing and trying to match known patterns to new events.

That’s the hard part, isn’t it?

Most of the things that you deal with on a day-to-day basis as an agency owner or leader, they are things that you've seen before in some fashion or another. You know how to deal with most sales objections and how to coach an employee that's having a hard time…that sort of stuff is in your wheelhouse.

But when you stumble in to something new - like a world changing technology tied together with global economic malaise and political uneasiness in every corner - you can’t match too many patterns, because you’ve never seen this configuration before.

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My SEO client who is worrying about AEO is moving kind of slowly, because he wants to be sure that he knows enough about this new technology to be as effective in implementing it as he has been for SEO.

He is waiting for certainty.

Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, an amazingly expensive 2nd wedding, and Blue Origin fame has said that if you wait until you are 90% certain that you have all the information needed to make a decision, you are moving too slowly. You should make the decision with about 70%.

I think this is a good rule. But, he shared that in an Amazon earnings letter in 2017…so I think that we probably ought to update that rule to accommodate the pace of change today. Unbelievably, the pace of change feels dramatically faster than it felt in 2017.

I now have a slightly different take on Bezos’ rule that will make it easier to move faster and more effectively. But before I give you my version of the rule, you have to understand these things:

As I’ve talked about frequently, I have ADHD. Consequently, my to-do list and should-have-done list are very long. It gets to be overwhelming, and sometimes it is so big that I can't do anything with it. It no longer fits in my brain, so I become paralyzed.

Many years ago, I had this brilliant idea (inspired by The Eisenhower Matrix - discussed in AIC#180) that I would take the oldest 50% of my to-do list and delete it. All of those tasks would evaporate and remain forever undone.

I did it & I FELT FREE!

That freedom was short-lived, though. Because my to-do list started growing again… But even as the list grew again, very few of the items that evaporated came back.

I made, as my wife suggested at the time, what could have been a totally stupid & irresponsible decision. But I was stuck & overwhelmed. I recognized that pattern and I needed to break out of it.

Like my cold e-mail fatigued client, I was too exhausted to even consider working through the list. So, I did something radical & tossed it away. It felt good to make that heavy list evaporate.

But what was even more important was that I had information about what was needed and unneeded. I made some mistakes. A few things did bite me in the butt - I forgot to pay a $15 parking ticket that turned into $150 by the time it was paid, and a couple of no-show fees to doctor & dentist appointments that I was supposed to change.

But I gained information by choosing to NOT stay stuck. I learned that I put too much shit on my to-do list. I learned that many of the things that I assigned to myself weren’t that important with the passage of time. I learned that the City of Somerville, MA does NOT fuck around with parking tickets.

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Appointments & parking tickets need a different queue than other things. Almost all of my “must respond to” emails and calls I handled without crossing them off my to do list. Many of the things that I promised to deliver to folks became bigger in my head as time moved on and I frequently delivered something better than what was expected, but not on time, which diminished the impact.

My to do list caused me enormous fear and I became paralyzed because I didn’t think I would ever be able to work through it. Making a decision & taking some kind of action is the solution to being stuck.

Did I make the best decision by tossing away my to-do list?

No. It cost me at least $250 & that sucks.

But the decision, even an imperfect one, was the key to getting the new information that I needed so that I could understand in which direction I was headed compared to where I wanted to be.

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There's some decision that you have not made. It might be deciding to have an uncomfortable conversation with a client, or it might be firing a once-valued team member, or it could be the decision to learn how to manage cold-email, change your marketing mix, or hire someone to take it over for you…whatever.

The decision that you’ve identified as unmade isn’t going to change. If you leave it right where it is, it will be in stasis. If you make a decision and change the environment, the shape of that issue is going to change.

All you need to do is evaluate if the new shape is positive or negative. If the new shape is positive, you’ve just learned, directionally, what you need to do to successfully defeat the problem. If the shape change is negative, you just learned that the decision you made was directionally wrong. That gives you better information to make your next decision.

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