Birthday Re/Inflections

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Table of Contents

• I Turned 58 Yesterday

• Inflection Point - AI

• Inflection Point - Politics

• Inflection Point - Creativity

• Have You Tried Copper?

• I Really Do Want to Buy You Coffee

I Turned 58 Yesterday

I know, it’s unbelievable that someone who is SO IMMATURE is this old.

As I watch my children tackle early adulthood, I am amazed at their optimism, pragmatism and self-awareness. They know who they are and who they are not.

Like so many of my generation, I spent so much time trying to reverse engineer how to be myself while fulfilling what others expected. I didn’t really succeed in that endeavor until I was in my 30s. Getting diagnosed with ADHD & realizing that entrepreneurship was the only path I could sustain allowed me to find a freedom and a confidence that I never had anywhere else.

I wish that you find that confidence and freedom in your journey, too. I appreciate your attention (I know that is your most valuable currency) and I look forward to continuing to earn it

As a new benefit - I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee - refer a fistful of subscribers and I’ll send you a Starbucks or Dunkin gift card.

That’s enough reflection for today…let’s get to the inflections…

Inflection Point - AI

Obviously, the biggest inflection point is AI.

It kinda continues to fuck up the agency space in both good and bad ways. It makes a bunch of stuff easier - weirdly good images, weird short videos, & writing that is good if you aren’t good a writing.

In lots of ways, AI has raised the floor for “good”.

It’s never been easier to write a landing page, or make a simple web app, or dig through data in a spreadsheet. The world of agentic AI is emerging - OpenAI just shot across the bow of everyone who has an agentic platform. And for those of you who use the ChatGPT client on Mac just got a nifty little record button, so ChatGPT can start to kill Fathom & Fireflies and all those other meeting recorders.

For agencies, this means that clients are going to expect more intelligence and speed in data analysis, creative & content. That will push agencies to move at the speed of their clients - most agencies move faster than their clients already, but know that they expectations are rising.

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Inflection Point - Politics

OK - y’all should know now that I am not fan of anything that takes supports away from those that need support the most, or things that diminish kids ability to learn and thrive, or things that make diversity, equity or inclusion a subversive act.

I just want everyone to be happy and generous - anything less seems like a waste of time and energy.

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and he asked me a question about something I wrote a long time ago on Facebook about what I considered to be the irrevocable rift between conservative and progressive ideologies in the US. He asked me how I was feeling today…

Oh, to go back to the halcyon days when George Bush seemed like an archconservative evildoer. At this point, I do not see a way to close the rift between MAGA and everyone else.

We’ve lost the ability to have a civil discourse about truly important things & we’ve signaled enough uncertainty in our economic & world leadership that I believe it will take decades to recover.

I am not blaming any politician - just politics. We’ve lost our shared identity as Americans - and I think that will keep us in a prolonged funk financially, emotionally and positionally.

This will impact the world of agencies negatively, IMHO. (Discussed more in Agency Inner Circle #75)

Inflection Point - Creativity

This inflection point makes me really happy. I had a conversation today with a long-time client who is making a hard, but needed change. Like many REALLY great agencies, the last few years have been an exercise in 2 steps forward and 2 steps back.

Great business comes in, but doesn’t stay because of client economic issues, or mergers and acquisitions changing the landscape, or sometimes just a change in direction for the client. I can’t think of a client that they lost because they messed up.

They are diversifying their offer - not by adding more channels or a creative arm or anything like that - they’ve made a powerful choice to unearth what makes them a great agency (data) and are spinning off a consultancy that can provide deep data insights and trend analysis to CMOs.

This is creative because they finally realized that while they’ve been getting paid for execution, that isn’t their certain value. Their data analysis has always been at their core, and since they were a “performance marketing agency” their data access and their ability to look at all channels has typically been stunted. With this creative breakout, they can do what they do best, and ALSO offer execution services when it makes sense.

I listed to a podcast the other day - it was the Conversion Engineering podcast - and Ross O'Lochlainn interviewed Taki Moore. Ross is a creativity and writing coach who loves swearing as much as I do. (I’ve never worked with him, but I really like his stuff). And if you don’t know who Taki Moore, he is a coach who coaches coaches…and he is pretty brilliant.

Taki is wildly successful. My guess is that he makes gazillions. Through the pandemic and beyond, his business scaled - and like a good systems thinker, he took away constraints. He took things off of his plate. He outsourced. He delegated away.

And he lost his love for his business. In his words “It wasn’t a 10 on the Taki Proud-o-meter”. So this guy, who has a business that is screaming along, decides to get more involved because he needed the creative outlet. He craved the expression that his work gave him.

Like my agency owner above, he decided to dig into the thing that made him great in the 1st place. For some people, it’s data, for others, it’s writing. But connecting with the thing that feeds your creativity and your sense of purpose will help you build true success.

Have You Tried Copper?

I’ve used all kinds of CRMs.

I am a big Hubspot fan, but TBH, the pricing gets in the way a bit. I’ve tried Zoho One (good value, but clunky) & Folk (liked it, but not enough to toss away Hubspot).

Two weeks ago, the good folks at Copper asked if I’d give Copper a try (they’ve given me a free subscription, fyi - so this is a promoted post, I guess?). Let me share a few things with you:

1. Easy to set up: Built on top of Google Workspace - set up is minimal.

2. Sales management: Intuitive, and it has automations that work well when a deal changes stages or whatever…not as advanced as Hubspot, but it doesn’t need to be.

3. Workflows & automations: One thing I really, really like is the ability to easily make an individual workflow or sequence…one of the things that is great about a CRM is that you can set up an email series and drop contacts into it. You can do that with Copper too. But since Copper is so lightweight, it’s actually really easy to set up a custom sequence for 1 person. Most of my marketing automation really is to one person at a time…Copper makes it easier to write a custom workflow or sequence that is 1 person wide…I really like that.

Give it a shot - they have a generous trial and setup is a snap (and its way cheaper than Hubspot or Pipedrive or even Zoho One)

I Really Do Want to Buy You Coffee

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