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Actionable Business Insights and Marketing Solutions

Actionable Business Insights and Marketing Solutions

1 Solution Saturdays

02Oct

The Client We Told Not to Hire Us Yet

A prospective client once came to us with a specific request: they wanted their rankings up fast, and they already had a plan for how to get there. A previous agency had shown them a list of tactics, link buys, heavy keyword stuffing, a network of thin content pages designed purely to game search results, and promised it would work within weeks. It probably would have. That's the uncomfortable truth about a lot of SEO shortcuts. They're not fake, exactly. They...

By 1 Solution Saturdays, ai marketing, Blog, , , 0 Comments
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02Oct

The Nine Words We Almost Shipped

A few months back, someone on our team used an AI tool to draft a piece of client-facing content. The draft came back fast, clean, well-organized. Genuinely good work for the time it took. Buried in the middle of it was a single sentence, nine words, that implied a guaranteed outcome our client had no business guaranteeing. Nobody had done anything wrong, exactly. The AI tool wasn't malicious. It was doing what it does: producing confident, fluent language, without any actual stake...

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09May

The Cost of Avoiding the Hard Conversation

There is a specific type of debt that doesn't show up on a balance sheet, but it bankrupts teams all the time. It is the debt of avoided conversations. I see it constantly in businesses. A team member is consistently underperforming, but the manager doesn't want to "ruin the culture" by addressing it directly. A client is expanding the scope of work without paying more, but the account lead doesn't want to risk the relationship by pushing back. So, they...

By 1 Solution Saturdays, Content Marketing, Expio Values0 Comments
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20Apr

You’re Probably Thinking About 80/20 Wrong

I'm rereading Richard Koch's The 80/20 Principle again. I have no idea how many times I've read it, but in the age of AI and the speed of life these days it seems more relevant than ever. And every time I come back to it, I find something I missed, forgot, and have failed to implement in some way. If you're not familiar with the book, the core idea is this: roughly 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts....

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13Apr

The Bookshelf Moment Nobody Taught You About in Business School

I was on a video call with a prospective client - two healthcare executives navigating some real complexity in their organization, and somewhere in the first few minutes, one of the guy's eyes drifted off screen. Then a slight smile. "Is that Andy Frisella's book on your shelf?" It was. Right next to a few others that wouldn't mean much to most people, but meant everything to the right ones. What happened next wasn't a mere sales conversation, but a recognition. We...

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30Mar

Learning to Scale a Business Beyond Yourself

I have run profitable businesses for years. I am just now learning how to actually scale one. The difference between building a business around yourself and building one that grows beyond you requires a different kind of work. For most of my business career, I have been an owner-operator. I have a solid, profitable core business and a few others where I have partial ownership. I'm proud of them. They pay well and provide a good degree of freedom. But they were also...

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24Mar

The Data Delusion: Why We Lie to Ourselves and How to Stop

Let me tell you a story. It was the early 2000s, and I was hustling, running a leadership program at USC. I knew Warren Bennis from his books. He was the guy the popular leadership authors I read quoted, the "Dean of Leadership Gurus," and honestly, meeting him felt like trying to get an audience with a rock star. But I had an idea, and sometimes, you just gotta go for it. Turns out, one of my students was also in...

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16Mar

The Best Work You’ll Ever Do Is the Work Nobody Notices

On New Year's Eve, 1999, a man (who you've probably never heard of) named John Koskinen boarded a plane from Washington, D.C. to New York City. He brought a handful of reporters with him, but here's the crazy detail: He timed the flight to cross midnight at 30,000 feet. This was the man President Clinton had appointed as the country's Y2K "czar" — the person responsible for making sure that when the calendar flipped to January 1, 2000, the world's computer systems...

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09Mar

The Silent Killer of Great Teams: Fake Harmony

This a simple observation but important reminder on healthy team dynamics in business and personal life: Teams or couples that never argue aren't highly functional. They're disconnected. Let that sit for a second... The leadership team where everyone nods and agrees in the meeting, only to complain in the parking lot? Not functional. The project group that rushes to consensus just to get the call over with? Not functional. The family business or marriage where nobody brings up the elephant in the room because "we...

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02Mar

Dealing with High Conflict People

There's a simple observation that changed how I see most difficult interactions in business and in my personal life: People who are truly at peace don't: pick fights, create drama, whine and complain, or excessively worry about what others think of them. Let that sink in for a second... That colleague who keeps stirring up conflict in meetings? Not at peace. The family member who turns every holiday into a referendum on your life choices? Not at peace. The person on your team...

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