Transcript
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The speaker explains why high-level strategy advice is worth six figures in a volatile business environment. He introduces the seven briefings that will challenge common assumptions and help businesses adapt.
Now, I have clients paying me six figures for strategy advice.And that's that's basically like over $100,000 for essentially me talking, which I will admit sounds like an insane amount of money.But, you know, there is a reason why people pay this, not just to me, but some others too.And the reason is this.The stakes in business right now, they are higher than they have ever been.You probably are feeling it yourself.I'm guessing the decisions that a company makes over the next 12 months with all this chaos and change raging around us.It could genuinely be the difference between hundreds of millions of dollars and a failure.Sometimes, you know, all it's going to take is like one insight, one realization, one counterintuitive decision that your competitors don't make and and that and that could be it, right?So, when you set it against stakes like that, it in a way it isn't really that crazy amount of money at all.
If anything, it's actually kind of more like insurance, I might say.Now, unfortunately, obviously, I can't give that kind of tailored advice to every one of you watching here right now.But what I can do is give you the macro advice that sits underneath it, the patterns that I'm seeing right now out there in the market, which every business is going to have to respond to.And the thing I really want you to understand, right, is that none of these patterns and trends I'm going to describe, none of them none of them are finished, right?They are all in the process of unfolding.In fact, many of them are barely started.But what they're all doing, I'm sorry to say, is they're all speeding up.And what you're going to see as we go through them is that if things that used to work for you have stopped working or are working a bit less well than they were before, it's got nothing really to
do with your performance.What has happened is that the ground has been changing underneath you.The rules have changed.Almost nobody is really thinking about this seriously.And yet at the same time, every single business is being affected by it whether they choose to think about it or not.So here's how this is going to work.I'm going to take you through basically the seven briefings that I'm giving to my clients right now.Each one we're going to start with something that you or most businesses basically believe which is now starting to kind of crack at the seams.I'm going to show you what's really going on and then I'm going to give you the move or the question or the thought experiment that I'm telling clients to make because of these changes.And if you listen to them, absorb them, and apply them to your own business, well, I'd like to think that you are going to be drastically ahead of the curve.
And you're going to want to stick around for the last one because it actually goes against something that I have been telling people for years.So, I am wrongfooting my own advice here, not just the generic stuff that everyone else believes.So sit back, relax, and let me tell you what I'm telling my most valued clients right now.
This section argues that it is easier than ever to start businesses, but much harder to grow them because supply is exploding faster than demand. The speaker reframes business value around scarcity and explains why companies should focus on becoming harder to replace.
Now, something you hear people say and that people really believe is that it has never been easier to start and grow a business.You all have heard that a thousand times.And the funny thing is is that it's well, it's half true, right?The start a business part is definitely true.The grow the business part though, that's the bit we need to think about because I don't think people have really thought through what this idea actually means.I'm going to like just show you simple like thought experiment.If you like get out your phone for a second and you think to yourself, how many apps do I have on it?Is it 50 or like 80 if you're a bit crazy or something?So yeah, that's the kind of thing that people maybe have.Now, I want you to think, how many new ones did you actually download this year?
And not ones that you were maybe forced to by like your bank or something like that.Was it more than two?Was it any?I'm I'm not sure that it would have been.Okay.So, we we we've all kind of got like a fairly static app environment on our phones for the most part.But what is happening on the other side of the screen?What is happening on the supply side?Well, I will tell you in the first half of this year, 2026, the number of new apps released on the app store doubled.Something like 560,000 new apps were launched in 6 months.And over the same period, what happened to downloads?Well, they actually did slightly go up in some ways, which is sort of surprising, but they went up by 2%.So, here we have this picture, and I don't think you need to be some sort of like master economist to see the problem here.
You have this picture where supply doubled, but demand basically didn't move.And once you understand this basic pattern of flat demand and increasing supply and you start looking for it, you're going to see it everywhere.In music, around 40,000 tracks a day were uploaded to the streaming platforms back in 2019.That's already uh quite a lot, I would say.But now it's around 150,000.And on Dieser, about 44% of those tracks are fully AI generated, which is kind of no surprise.When it comes to businesses in general, new business creation, Americans, they filed a record 5 67 million applications last year, which is more than 60% up on 2019.Now, you might you might look at some of these things like apps and music and just like filing for new businesses and you might think, well, okay, this is like cheap.This is just information.
Yes, I can see how it's easy for there to be a supply explosion here, but that doesn't really mean anything.But the supply explosion, you know, it exists everywhere, including in things like heavy manufacturing.Like one example that I like to give is cars, which you can't just throw up, you know, you can't vibe code a new car brand.But in China alone, there are now something like 129 different electric car brands, of which maybe like 10 or 11 are actually profitable.And in the second half of this year, a record 156 new models are going to be launching there.Like, but when I was growing up, there were probably what, like 10 or 11 car brands, period, globally.So you can start to see, you know, this pattern on what's going on here.So yes, it has indeed never been an easier time to start a business, but it's also never been easier for everybody else.
And that is the bit that people kind of they don't seem to think about.So this means that the second that a customer problem shows up anywhere, bam, 10 companies, they pop up to solve it.And this number is only going one way.Every few months, the tools get better and the tools get cheaper.And so next year, that's going to be 20 companies.and then the year after that 50 companies it is just going to spiral and accelerate.So this brings me on to what I have to tell my clients about this like making money is it's not very complicated.It really all comes down to one idea that everyone thinks they understand but we notice very quickly that they really don't.And that idea is supply and demand.If you manage to increase demand and decrease supply, you're going to earn a lot of money.
That's literally it.But unfortunately at the moment people are basically focusing on increasing supply and they wonder why it isn't working.The way that most businesses try to counter this of course is that they put a lot of energy into increasing the demand side by doing more marketing getting more leads trying to create more content just doing more more.And they don't really think about the supply side at all.But the problem is is that there's a limit to how much sometimes you can increase demand for something.Demand is actually fairly fixed for the most part.But with if the supply is outpacing the demand, it doesn't matter how good your ads are and how many like cold emails you send.That's not going to work.So what I want you to be doing is I want you to be thinking more carefully about the supply side, which is basically a way of asking how do we become something that there is less of, right?
How do we build something or evolve into something which is more and more scarce?Because it is the scarcity which is going to unpick this riddle.and most of the other briefings that I'm going to talk about here, they are going to help you to increase the scarcity of what you're selling.
The speaker shows how AI turns scarce capabilities into cheap, abundant ones, eroding value across content, software, and services. He uses examples from his own work and major companies to show why businesses must update their assumptions about what is still valuable.
Now, thinking about AI a little bit more, the people who are really sort of optimistic about AI, they will say things like, well, look, AI means that I can build anything now, and isn't that fantastic?And people are often talking about this like it's really good news.People still think that this is a positive thing for business.But what we have to keep top of mind instead is this simple but kind of very counterintuitive idea which is whatever becomes easy and cheap and abundant instantly loses value.It has its value eroded.Like to see why let's just think about something like water.Okay?Like water is more valuable than anything you will ever sell.There is no product in the world that's more valuable than water.Water literally keeps you alive but it also falls out of the sky.So, you can't really charge an awful lot of money for it.
You see, value, it doesn't come from the inherent quality of the thing.It comes from two other things.It comes from desiraability and it becomes from scarcity.And the moment that you take away scarcity, the value goes with it.Even if the thing is actually still very desirable.Now, this is exactly what AI has been doing for the past 3 years.It has been taking things that were scarce and has been making them abundant.Terrific, right?we think research, copywriting, analysis, design, software expertise, like all these things that we know that AI is very good at.Now, two or three years ago, this stuff was gold, right?And you could really you could really sell it for a lot of money.But now AI has turned it, broadly speaking, into lead.And as each new model is released, that list of things that it turns to lead, it gets longer because each one knocks something else off the scarce pile and into the abundant pile.
Now most people they understand this on paper.The problem is is that their their mental models.They haven't caught up.They are still walking around with this kind of imaginary price list in their head like it's still 2022.And this is how they are calibrating what they should be spending their time on, what they should be spending their money on, and what they think is going to help their business win.I know this because you know this has happened directly to me.So, like back in 2023, I was writing a lot of like long, thoughtful, reasonably highquality posts about strategy on LinkedIn.And they were basically a license to print money because not a lot of people could do it at the time.I got 130,000 followers and I genuinely thought that, you know, maybe at the time, well, my posts are my posts are really good.
But actually, they weren't really good.I mean, maybe they were good.It it doesn't matter if they were good.What mattered is that they were scarce.And the moment that everyone else could start producing something similarish in 30 seconds, like the value had completely vanished.So I realized pretty quickly this issue, but most other people out there, they are thinking, oh well, you know, now I can write content like Alex Smith or Dano or whoever else and so therefore I'm uh I'm goingto be able to have some of the success that they had.But of course, you can't because the value is gone.And content, of course, you know, it's just the tip of the iceberg.I see the same thing happening kind of everywhere right now, often on a much bigger scale.Like people are obviously using AI to build stuff gleeully that they think is going to make them a lot of money.
An app or a course or a content machine or a SAS tool that they knocked up over the weekend and they're delighted because you know the thing that they used to cost them 5 grand and take them monthsnow cost them nothing and takes like 20 minutes.In fact, the other day I myself, I built some sort of like content organization machine just to sort of house all of my IP, a piece of software, which is a better piece of software than anything I haveever paid for.And I can really see I can put myself in the headsp space of the people who do that and they think, "Wow, this is so good.I've got to go and sell this thing."But it took me 20 minutes to make, right?So I like I could give it away for free.I probably will give it away for for free to people on my newsletter.
But my god, like it it can't be sold.You can't sell anything which you can build in 20 minutes, right?So yes, these things, these capabilities, they can be very useful.They can like do a good job for you, but that does not the same thing as being commercially valuable.We have to be able to separate these ideas of like usefulness and commercial value.We always have to think like is this like like water and air very useful but low value or is this like actually something you know m like gold which has got sort of very little kind of intrinsic valuebut the value exists obviously because of the scarcity we want to be making useless gold not useful water right so obviously this is what we could see very clearly in those app store numbers that I was talking abouta minute ago new apps doubled while downloads went up 2% because obviously like the whole world decided amazing, wow, I can make so much money.
I can become a millionaire by building something which has lost all of its value.Obviously, this effect is like hammering all sorts of even big public companies like CHEG, you know, which was this homework help company where students paid $15 a month for textbook answers because there was no sort of like, youknow, free alternative that really did the job.But then CH GPT turned up and what happened?CHEG's revenue it fell 39% in a single year from 600 odd million to around like 377 million and the stock is now something like 99% off its peak elsewhere of course we know what's happened with software the SASapocalypse on 3rd of February I think it was like $285 billion wiped off those stocks in a single day because all the things those companies had sold got cheap and investors investors when there's a lot of money on
the line they are quite good at updating their mental models right the problem is is that the companies and the CEOs, they are less good at updating their mental models.
This chapter breaks down which forms of leverage are declining and which are rising, then warns that AI pushes businesses toward sameness. The speaker recommends using AI for closed problems, seeking diverse inputs, and deliberately deconverging your thinking.
So, the first job I'm going to give to my clients and to you is to try and update those assumptions.I want you to go through everything that you believe is valuable about your business, all the different forms of leverage, and I want you to ask the simple question of each one.Is it still true?Is this still valuable?Is this still scarce?And the easy way to do that is to sort everything into basically kind of two piles.This isn't exact science, but it's close enough.On the one side here, we can see forms of leverage that are going down that are becoming less valuable.And on the other side, we can see forms of leverage that are going up.Going down are things like product and service on its own.Your technology technology is going down.IP is often going down.Cost structure and expertise.
These are all getting easier for everyone.So, they're worth a little bit less every month.Albeit this is not sort of happening like at an even speed.On the other hand, what's going up are things like brand distribution, proprietary data, scarce physical assets.These are the things that are that were always hard and they're still hard or even things that are actually getting harder while everything else gets easy.So, you want to kind of like see which of these where is where is your uh attention placed?What do you think wins for you?And once you've sorted your business that way, there are then a couple of other questions you can answer.The first is broadly speaking, is our leverage growing or is it under threat?If your advantage sits under something that is getting easier, it's a bit like you're standing on a melting iceberg and you need to start thinking about how long has it got until you're in the water with the penguins.
The Yeah, penguins go in the water, don't they?The second question is how do we start building real leverage in one of the rising categories?And you don't need all of them.You know, one or two would be fine.You just need a genuine defensible edge in places where it is quite difficult to get it.And that's where the next three years of your money and your talent and your attention should really go.Now, before we move on, I'm just going to give you a quick one.I've turned every briefing in this video into a set of prompts that basically you can just jump straight into chapter GPT or into Claude and it can work through some of these same questions kind of like how Imight do if I was sitting with you.And given what I'm about to say about AI in the next briefing, I've built them so that AI interrogates you rather than just handing you the obvious average answer for free.
It ain't going to give you the answer, but it is going to think you get you thinking in the right direction.The link is in the description, so check that out.But before, let's get back to it.So, you know, when people are faced with some of these pressures that we've talked about, what do they do?Well, they think, well, let's do what the most successful companies are doing.Let's follow their best practice or even better, let's ask chat GBT what we should do.A new kind of default mechanism for many, I'm sure.And because of that, people don't necessarily like what I'm going to say to them in this one.So let's be just sort of start with a question like have you noticed that everyone out there online all the gurus seem to be giving out very similar business advice sell the outcome niche down irresistible offer build a
value stack find the pain point 15 years ago like nobody was saying this stuff these weren't really this wasn't really common parlons so why have we all converged on this like have we just suddenly like have we figuredit all out now have we magically cracked the code of business is that why all the business advice case has coalesed like this.Unfortunately, not unfortunately the truth is far more boring.Unfortunately, what happened was the algorithm.Now, this holy algorithm that dominates our lives, it decides what information reaches you.And it doesn't decide by asking whether something is true or useful or relevant.It decides by basically popularity.Imagine that there are pre like perfectly valid ways of doing something, but one of them happens to be snappier and easier to explain in a 30-cond clip.that one is going to win the algorithmic battle and the other two are going to get buried.
So what we now call best practice or the stuff that we're always seeing, we're always been given advice on is really the most engaging practice.And everyone has therefore been drinking from this same narrowing trough for a decade now.And that was even before AI.Now when we pour AI on top of that, and let's just think about what AI does.I mean, it's the same thing, right?It doesn't go looking for the best answer.It goes looking for the most likely answer.It's the only way it can really work.And the most likely answer is by definition the average.So this also has this converging effect.In fact, it's even worse because the AI was trained on the same algorithm filtered internet that you're seeing every day.So you're kind of getting a filter on top of a filter.And what's interesting is we're now getting a pretty good idea of how far this goes and what the effects of this are.
There was this really interesting study at Duke University recently where they tested 22 commercial AI models against more than 100 humans on the same set of creative problems.Now, individually, the AIs did really fine.Their answers were as good quality as the humans were.That's that that's great.But as a group, here's the thing.Their answers were far more similar to each other than the humans answers were.They weren't like thinking worse.It was just they were thinking less diverse.And when the researchers prompted the models to be more creative, it actually made barely any difference.And this is a huge issue because it isn't like quality of analysis that gives you leverage.What gives you leverage is difference.Sometimes it might even be worse analysis, but because it's different than what the the competition is doing, it still makes you different and gives you leverage.
So it's very very dangerous to increase quality but also increase convergence.So ultimately then it doesn't really matter, you know, what model you pick or even to some extent how you prompt it.like you and every one of your competitors are being pulled towards the same rough answers, the same strategies, the same websites, the same tone of voice, the same sentence structure, you know, the same business model.And it's only going to get worse before it gets better.As more and more of the internet is written by AI, as we know is happening, the next generation of models is going to get trained on that.So the pull towards this kind of single version of the truth, it only gets stronger.Like I said, advantage comes from difference.It does not come from quality.So if you engineer out as we are doing, the one thing that actually generates traction, don't complain when you struggle to find any.
There's a second kind of corrosive effect commercially that people also don't really want to hear, which is that for most companies, and this has been pretty well established now, AI isn't actually making them any more money.When MIT looked into this, they found that 95% of organizations, they saw no measurable return from their generative AI projects.A big part of this is just because most companies are using it to answer the question of how do we do everything a little a little bit worse but a hell of a lot cheaper, which of course isn'treally a revenue driving approach.But I think the bigger reason why this is happening is because basically like everyone is getting the same gains at the same time.So yes, you are gaining a lot of capabilities, but because all of your competitors have got them too, it isn't really giving you any leverage.
So what really is the implication of this for us?Well, the first thing that I might tell clients is that you want to use AI for closed problems, meaning things that basically have a right answer like summarize this thing, check this thing, build this model.But what you do not want to do is outsource open questions, which is ones about what path to take, ones where there isn't a single right answer.cuz you know not everything worth knowing has been written on the internet.The like we we forget that there's more information outside of the internet uncodified information including in our own heads than there is on the internet.So don't overestimate the wisdom and the amount of knowledge that AI has purely from a context perspective.And then even if it did have that because of this convergence effect, you still do not want to be giving it too much power over you when it comes to these open problems.
The second thing to do about this issue um more sort of personally is to deconverge your own knowledge.Now what do I mean by that?Well, look, if everybody's drinking from the same trough, whatever like Instagram happens to be serving them that day, you just want to go and drink from another trough.like read some books, you know, e old ones or weird off-center ones that that didn't go viral.Talk to actual experts, people who are kind of incentivized to get results rather than incentivized to get views, idiosyncratic people.But it's not that they're going to be like more rights than the stuff you're seeing online, but they're going to be different.And that difference is your advantage.That is just as valuable as knowing more things, knowing peculiar things or different things.I mean, you know, last Christmas I had a kind of a funny experience like this where I spent two hours with AI trying to crack some sort of like creative problem.
I was like getting mountains of output and but it was completely I I got nowhere.It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't really useful to me.But then in the car I was with my wife who doesn't really know anything about the particular thing I was talking about but I was chatting about it and she said something kind of random and can't click myfingers and boom, right?I had it.the answer that sort of came to me because I'd sort of put that randomizing effect into the problem solving process.
The speaker argues that attention is now the scarcest resource and that traditional marketing is losing effectiveness. He recommends unfair, tedious, and expensive marketing tactics that create friction and cannot be easily copied.
Now, another sort of uh truism belief that people like to take to the bank is having faith in good marketing when all else fails.If we find a way to rank on Google, we run the ads, we send the emails, we post the content, you know, that is going to get us leads and that's going to get us sales.But the big problem that we have now uh and what I have to tell clients is that nobody's listening anymore.Like you know you are talking often into the ether and the reason for this is pretty simple.Everything on the planet is sort of increasing in abundance right now except kind of one thing and that is attention.Attention in general if we can think of it as this sort of commodity as this asset.It is shrinking and every time a new tool is launched that makes content cheaper to produce and easier to distribute that shrinking accelerates.
Ultimately you know your customers they have the same 24 hours in the day as they had 10 years ago or a thousand years ago and they probably have a lot less patience as well.Every brand, every creator, every news alert, every AI generated video is all fighting for that same finite amount of attention.And you know it's a real war out there and it's bloody exhausting.Let me tell you from direct personal experience and you would love to opt out of it.I would love to opt out of it.But you can't opt out of it because if you can't steal attention from somewhere, if you can't steal this most valuable of commodities, then you're not going to earn any money.People cannot buy what they don't notice.This is pretty obvious.Once again, we can see evidence of this showing up in all sorts of numbers in direct and indirect ways.
Like in the first few months of this year, 68% of Google searches in the US ended without anyone clicking on anything.And bearing in mind, in theory, the whole reason that we search on Google is to find something to click on.But that actually clearly isn't true anymore.And indeed, when an AI overview sat at the top of those results, the click-through rate on whatever the number one result was, it would drop by 58%.So even if you're ranked first, right, even if you're ranked first, you can still become kind of invisible.So what do people think?They think, well, fine, no, no big deal.I'm just going to pay for attention instead.Except, of course, what is happening there?Meta's average price per ad went up 14% last quarter.And in the US and Canada, it went up 23% in one quarter.And we all know what's happening to email right now once this safe haven, but no longer.
The amount of just garbage I get every day and the amount of garbage that I'm sure that you get all enabled by all of these very, very productive, high leverage agents buzzing around out there.This is why there are now 392 billion emails being sent every day.So obviously there are a lot of people competing for this finite attention.But it's actually worse than that because what do people generally do when they're overwhelmed?Well, they don't filter things more carefully.They just retreat.They fall back to the things they know and the things they trust.They fall back to that one newspaper, those two online magazines, those three creators.they fall back to a tiny closed set of names and institutions they trust because it's just too wild out there.I mean, you can even probably think about yourself for a second like how many new kind of sources of information did you find this year that you you really started trusting.
So, this is why the attention actually contracts.It doesn't sort of stay static.It's because people get overwhelmed and they go back to what they know.So, we can't escape the logical conclusion of this.In such conditions of abundance, whatever is discoverable, whatever wins the attention war is going to win.And unfortunately, now just doing good marketing in the classical sense, it isn't going to do that because there's so much good marketing out there now that there is in effect no good marketing anymore.So really, what I just have to tell clients is is simple.If it isn't difficult, it isn't going to work.The moment that a marketing technique becomes easy to scale, it's going to stop working.Whereas the marketing techniques that are unfair and tedious and expensive, those are the ones where ROI is going to be found.When I say unfair, what I mean is using advantages that you have that nobody can copy.
Like there's a I'll give you a little quick list on the screen of like nine examples of this that you know you can think through.Like you've got fame, you got a verifiable track record and that's got to be like a really impressive track record.Got association with big names.Genuine insight, the type of which that can't be generated by an LLM.Costly signaling is really good.Obviously, real world relationships are priceless.Showmanship sometimes, maybe live demonstration, and just physical presence, doing things offline.If you can show three of these, if you can tick three of these boxes, you will probably have an effective way to gain attention because they're all difficult.And that is exactly the point.As for tedious marketing, well, that just means choosing the stuff that everybody else can't be bothered with.Original research, your own events, 50 speaking slots in a year, like getting on the plane, hitting the trail, handwritten letters, all this kind of thing.
In a world of no friction, the more that we can add friction, the more that we actually build a moat.Friction becomes the moat.The tedium is actually the point.And as for things being expensive, well, look, it's just looking at those things where the ROI just looks on the face of it kind of awful.You know, why do people buy huge advertising takeovers of Time Square or Oxford Circus Tube Station?It's because people know how much it costs and then people see that company and they think, damn, they must be super legit.Like, that is costly signaling.Like after 20 years of everyone being told how cheap and easy and quick marketing could be made, the people who choose not to go that route are really going to draw attention to themselves.Perhaps a little thought experiment you can run here is to simply say like if this piece of marketing that we're about to do, if it costs 10 times more, would we still do it?
Would we still be confident in its effectiveness?And if the answer is no, then probably, you know, you're just dealing in some form of slop and you need to think more tedious, more expensive, and more difficult.
This section warns that industries protected by mediocrity are now vulnerable to aggressive new entrants. The speaker urges businesses to think like frontier operators, aim for ambitious growth, and prepare for consolidation.
Now, so many people, they're not going to pay any attention to a video like this or any attention to strategy at all because they're thinking, well, look, we've got a great track record.We've been doing this for years.We know what we're doing.We are safe.And basically what this means is they are complacent.And because they know that for the last 15, 20 years everything's been fine, they think, well, it's probably going to be fine for the next 15 or 20 years.Well, look, I have a very strong message for these types of business, even though they won't be watching this, so I don't know why I waste my breath, but whatever.And the message is the age of complacency is over.Now, to understand what I mean by that, we have to start by admitting something kind of uncomfortable, which is that for most businesses, mediocrity has always been more than enough.
you could build a perfectly good business, sometimes a very, very big one, just by doing a decent job in an industry where most people were kind of not really trying that hard.You see, most industries, they're kind of like this.They run on an unspoken almost non-aggression pact between the founders within them.Each incumbent has their patch and it's a bit of a lifestyle business and everyone likes to go and play golf and everyone just kind of agrees not to rock the boat.It's sort of like chummy in these industries.It's like guys, come on.Look, we all agreed not to try too hard here, right?And I mean, I've seen so many industries like this, particularly the more sort of unsexy industries.Unfortunately, this pact is now breaking.Why?Well, we can ask a sort of very odd question to kind of like understand why this is.
Did you ever wonder why there is no like Uber of school photos or no Netflix of electricians or Airbnb of of IT recruitment?like why haven't all industries been kind of taken over by these super disruptive players?And the answer is nothing to do with anything special about those industries really.It's just that they are too tedious and too low ROI for very talented people to enter.The smartest and most aggressive entrepreneurs in business, they looked at them and they thought, well, I can't be bothered with that.There's much bigger awards to be had over here.So tedium for most industries was kind of the moat that protected them from more aggressive players.Now the problem with AI and easier building and distribution and all the rest of it is that that tedium has become cheap and much easier to overcome.And at the exact same moment, the opportunities in software are shrinking because the big AI companies are swallowing them all up.
So what happens to all of that aggressive talent that wanted to build a tech unicorn and now can't?Well, they're going to go looking for somewhere else to disrupt.And the obvious targets are the sleepy, underleveraged, complacent industries that have been coasting for decades may be like yours.Now, these people um these types of sharks, if you like, I call them frontier operators.They are extremely ambitious.They couldn't care less about work life balance.They have a winner take all mindset.They're on the cutting edge of tech and they have normally good enough taste and they're naturally strategic compared to the average, you know, CEO.And what these people are going to do, unfortunately, to all of these like cozy, chummy, slowmoving industries is they are just going to swarm them like locusts.We're already seeing some signs of what this looks like.Like in back in September last year, KKR they agreed to buy this garage door company, classic sleepy sleepy kind of industry called A1 garage door service for around $2 billion, which I can't quite believe.
This is garage doors we're talking about here.The founder, he started with a single van back in 2007, but he built one of the biggest garage door companies in America, mostly by running it at a level that the industry had never seen before.So he was a frontier operator by the standards of that industry.He was a shark.He didn't actually have to invent anything.He just had to show up and try much much harder than everyone else.And then that's only the first wave here.You know, as the tools improve, the cost of walking into these sleepy industries and taking over is going to keep on falling.So you could expect a lot more of these types of stories over the next few years.And so therefore, I want clients to really think about very uncomfortable question, which is if the main players in your industry have been the sameish for the last 10, 15 years, what does that mean?
It's not a reassuring sign, right?It probably feels reassuring, but it isn't.It It doesn't mean that you're so good or so special or the industry is so difficult.It just means that the ambitious people haven't thought you were attacking yet.And we need to think, is that situation going to hold?It's like you are playing high school basketball and you think that you don't have to play at Michael Jordan's level because like he's over there in the NBA and down here we're just playing high school ball.That would be overkill.I don't need to pay attention to things like strategy, stuff like that.But what are you going to do when Mike turns up in your high school gymnasium?You're going to be in trouble, right?When these people come along, they are going to start consolidating these industries.It like like in the A1 garage door example.
And we can see again this showing up in the numbers because we can see that the gap between the winners, i.e.the consolidators and everyone else, it keeps on widening.like McKenzie, they looked recently at the world's biggest companies and they found that the top 10% capture 80% of all the economic profit and this has actually got much much more skewed over the last 20 years because ofthe network effects enabled by technology.The middle 60% they make basically kind of nothing.So you know what are we going to do?What are we going to do to protect ourselves here?Well, the answer is very very simple.We have to become the frontier operator in our own space before somebody else comes and does it to us.And this all starts with ambition.I ask every leadership team the same question, which is what is the chance of you growing 3x in the next 18 months?
I don't I don't ask people, you know, is your strategy good or are you well set up for the future or any of this cuz everyone's just going to like talk themselves into a yes and they're going tolie to themselves instantly.But when we ask, are you on track to grow 3x?Like it's quite hard to sort of lie about that.And if the ch if the honest answer is that you know there really isn't a chance that you're going to do this the chances are almost zero then you can see that you are not being strategic enough youare not being aggressive enough you are not trying to create new value you are not trying to make a big move and therefore you are very vulnerable to someone who does come along and do that.The reason this question is so powerful is you is because you can't really triple a business just by working harder or doing better.
Like effort is only going to take you to the ceiling of your current business model.But anything above that is going to require the creation of a different business.And that's why big ambition forces strategy while a small amount just lets you get away with tinkering and just managing and just turning the handle and waiting for someone to come and screw you over.Another interesting question to ask perhaps is to just imagine like what would happen if like a team of like ravenous tech bros entered your industry tomorrow if indeed they already haven't.How would they go about things and what would that mean for you?Can you picture it?Can you imagine how they might beat you?It's worth giving some thought to that and then obviously you'll start to develop a little bit of a playbook for like hm maybe actually that's what we should do instead because ultimately in 2026 the only form of defense
is going to be attack.
The speaker explains that real strategy comes from violating the hidden rules that keep industries commoditized. He uses examples like the Savannah Bananas, Nintendo, and a design agency to show how removing assumptions can create defensible advantage.
Now another maxim that has well and truly run its course and had its time is this idea of trying to beat your competition by being better than them by being the best player in your industry by doing essentiallywhat everyone else is doing but just doing it to a higher level.And this is ultimately what most businesses are aiming for because it seems logical that this is the way to make your business win.But ultimately, this is now actually just a way to make your business into a commodity, particularly as people can copy and iterate faster than they ever could before.The real opportunities don't lie there.The real opportunities lie on the other side of the rules in the category that nobody ever questions.Now, here's what I mean by that.every single industry.It basically runs on a set of invisible rules like how you price, who the customer is, what the product has to include, which channel you sell through, all this stuff that is kind of the default template of the
category.No one really ever sort of decided on this stuff.It just sort of developed organically.They're just kind of there, all of these norms like wallpaper and everybody copies everyone else without even realizing they're doing it.And over time, it all just becomes like the water that the whole industry swims in.Now, the trouble is that in a crowded market, those shared rules are exactly what ultimately locks everyone into this commodified battle.And what makes everyone end up seeming the same as everyone else.If you follow the same rules as your competitors, you are going to get the same answers as your competitors.You're going to be asking the same question.You're going to end up in the same place.And you're never going to escape these packed out overs supplied markets by doing that.By doing what everyone else does, but a little bit better.
if that was even possible because the market right the market does not notice better.It's very unfair.Many better products have died because of this.The market doesn't notice better.It only notices power and it only notices difference.So when every market space on the map looks like it's taken, the new space can only be found on the other sides of rules that everyone are following, which makes them blind to that new opportunity.to show you what I mean.Like one of the my favorite examples of this that I often mention is the Savannah Bananas, the baseball team.Their category obviously is baseball.And if we think about what the normal rules of that category are and what people are trying to do, it's you know I mean it's a sport, right?It's literally got many many like actual written down rules.But the most important rule that baseball teams are all trying to follow is that they want to win ball games.
This is how they direct their energies and their attentions and their creativity.But what the bananas did is they asked the question, well, hold on a second.What happens if we don't try to win ball games?Does that actually give us an opportunity to do something which no other baseball team ever does because we've suddenly like we've we've removed that assumption and we've seen what might lie on the other side, what this might enable.And the answer to what this enabled basically was doing all sorts of crazy stuff on the pitch on the pitch on the field to make uh it into the best fan experience of any team in the whole land.And then what happened obviously even though their team was kind of crap at baseball, loads of people came to watch them and they built this really successful business cuz ultimately you know they're still in the business of selling
tickets.No one else had ever thought about doing something like this because nobody else had ever thought, well, hold on a second.What if we just don't try to win ball games?So, this is what I mean about how you remove an invisible rule and then you see something exciting lurking on the other side of it.Last year, apparently the bananas, they sold out more than 50 cities, including 81,000 people in a single college football stadium.This is like baseball.It's like not normal from what I understand about the sport.And this year's world tour has got 70 stops in major league stadiums and you have to enter a lottery to get a ticket.And there's and you know there's no proper baseball team could could ever copy them because it would mean obviously dismantling the thing that their whole business is is built on.
And that is strategy, right?That strategy when you make a move that your competitors are completely unable to copy.This is what this is all about.This is also what Nintendo did when I talk about the Switch when they basically made a console that was portable to dominate party gaming.But in order to do that, they had to sacrifice power.Something which Sony and Microsoft are never ever going to do with their consoles.And even on like much much smaller scales, we can see businesses being successful with this.Like a little client of mine, this company called Build Design Studio, a design agency in Birmingham, Alabama, they noticed that every single agency basically assumes that the agency and the creatives are the guardians of the brand and thatthey need to control the brand.And they thought, well, what actually if we make the client be in control of the brand and instead of selling amazing design and our taste, we actually sell capability.
We actually showme clients how to manage and run the brand for themselves.So they can be the creative guardians and basically the agency can get out of the way.Obviously something that's quite appealing to brands if you tell this to them.Because of this move, within a year their revenue doubled and their profit margin had gone up 10x.And this is just like a very very small company, but it's just using the same techniques as what is happening with the Nintendo Switch.So what I'm telling clients here basically is that you want to start by listing your industry's sacred cows, meaning everything that is so fixed that it's basically wallpaper.And at first it's actually going to be very hard to even notice what these things are.The pricing model, the channel, who the customer is, the features, all that kind of stuff.You then want to maybe look at the ones that you are worst at, where you already don't have an advantage because that's obviously where you got the least to lose.
And then you can ask the slightly psychopathic question of what if we were even worse at that thing?What if we just didn't do it at all?What when we remove that barrier, what can we see on the other side?Like what if a law firm didn't build by the hour?What if a consultancy refused to do workshops?What if your product was deliberately worse at the thing that everybody else competes on?Most of the answers at first glance that you come up with are going to be stupid, but one of them won't be all that stupid.Or maybe it will give you a clue to something else that you never thought of before.And when you see it, it's going to be so obvious that you'll feel embarrassed that you never noticed it or that indeed nobody ever noticed it.And that that is when you know that you were on to a defensible high leverage winner.
The final chapter argues that product matters less than before and that businesses should build from attention, trust, and distribution outward. He closes by summarizing the main lessons and urging viewers to act before these shifts accelerate further.
And this then brings me on to our last briefing here, which is this idea that product is super important that if you build a great product, it's going to sell itself.I get very very sick of companies who try to patch over a bad weak undifferentiated product with marketing.And I'd say you need to like build as much differentiation into the product as possible and that is where you're really going to win.Don't just put lipstick on a pig.Build something truly outstanding and the rest is going to follow.Well, I don't exactly think that's true anymore cuz I'm not sure how easy or possible it is now to build a uniquely outstanding product.Like think about all this stuff that we've talked through in this video.Like if anyone roughly speaking relative to their industry can build anything and iterate on it instantly and copy things very very quickly.
Then product differences, they don't really last, do they?Now there are some exceptions.There are products that get better with network effects the more people use them like Instagram.I can't just copy that.There are products that are bound up with some asset that nobody can replicate.Like if I want to make a hotel like the Ritz in London, like I can't get that piece of land.And there are obviously some products that maybe sell some kind of limited access like licensing this kind of thing.But most businesses this is not what they do.They don't have these kind of advantages.They have products which are ultimately quite difficult to defend.So I think that we are heading shockingly into almost a postroduct world where the better tools get and the faster everything becomes you know the quicker we are truly going to arrive there.
And I never ever thought that I would hear myself saying this but this is what I'm seeing out there.And if this is true, which I think it is, then this means that the order in which a business wins, where it has to place its priorities to win has flipped.And I would sort of like illustrate it like this.It starts with attention.Like we said before, that is the limited scarce commodity right now.Every customer has got a limited supply of it.And that attention is basically going to go one of two ways.It's either going to go towards things that attract them, which covers most discretionary buying, or it's going to go towards things which irritate them, which covers most non-discretionary buying, you know, things that they have to deal with.Think like, you know, a jacket that you want to buy maybe versus a boiler that has just broken.
That's discretionary, non-discretionary, that's attraction versus irritation.From there, the business has to hold that attention and then turn it into something.If it started as attraction, you have to turn it into desire through brand and story and content and association.If it started as irritation, you have to turn it into relief by being super relevant to the problem and being easy to get hold of and just like being kind of like, "Oh, thank God.Here's a way that I can solve this issue."And only then at the end of this chain does the product actually come in.And by that point, all the product really has to do is live up to the promise that you've made because the battle was already won further up in the customer's head.The how differentiated the product is at this point, it actually doesn't matter so much.This is a pattern that is emerging more and more with businesses.
And this is why every celebrity and influencer is launching a drinks brand or a skincare brand or a protein bar.This is why because they've already won the top of that flow.The algorithms are directing attention in their direction and people will then buy basically wherever that attention lands.Like nobody is buying new tonic like James Smith and Chris Williamson's drink for its science back claims.That's like that's that's ridiculous.They buy it because of who's behind it and because they were able to direct their attention that way.In these strategy clinics that I run for sort of paid members of the rare mind community.Um link below.Uh I see a very similar thing.Like last month we like tore through like the strategies of four completely different businesses.There was an AI sales tool, there was a men's wearellier, there was a book coach, there was a solo AI consultant.
We really couldn't escape the same lesson coming up every single time, which was that the value wasn't really in the product.The value was in the attention, the distributions, the relationship, and the trust.The value was in all of the stuff that has become much more difficult and which AI only makes worse, doesn't make better.So what would I tell clients because of this?I would say you might, not always, but often you might be well advised to build the business out from attention rather than building the business out from product.You want to be almost like a media business with a with a with a product bolted on rather than a product with media bolted on.You know most companies they're going to put their best people and their money and their energy into product and they are going to leave attention to some like junior marketing executive and an agency and you got to flip
that right give the product to an agency even I mean I'm being a bit facitious but you get my point cuz attention is now at the heart of the business and so that is where your talent and moneyand your focus should go now bear in mind this doesn't mean that the product stops mattering the product can't be crap it still has to deliver fully but it's not that hard to make a product like that nowso you need to stop pouring everything into making it 10% better when that 10% is just going to be copied by somebody anyway.Instead, you need to ask yourself, what is our claim on people's attention?Where is our attention leverage?And then where are we turning it to?There we have it.A marathon.But that is what I'm telling my clients right now among a couple of other things.
But those are some of the main beats.There are too many businesses.Abundance is destroying value.AI is making you average.Attention is collapsing.Complacency is ending.And every industry is full of invisible rules that need breaking.And the product is not unimportant, but let's just say it is less important than it was before.None of these things are slowing down.In the next couple of years, we are going to see all of these things accelerate.And this is going to radically reshape what a fit business looks like.And I want you to start thinking about how you can reshape your business like that.And if you look back over all these sort of moves I've given you, you'll notice that they all have one thing in common, which is like I said at the outset, you pull that supply lever.You were trying to lower the supply.
You're trying to build leverage in categories that are going up.You're trying to deconverge your thinking.You're trying to make marketing unfair and tedious and expensive.And you're trying to become the frontier operator in your own space by killing a sacred cow and building out from attention.All of this stuff is so hard and is still very, very, very unusual.And if you could just sort of overlay this onto most industries where these principles don't exist at all, you're going to see incredible results.This video is probably not going to get that many views.Most people are never going to hear this stuff or they're only going to hear it in 3 years time when it's all too late anyway.when they're copying like the new kind of like best practice that's being shown up by the ALGO.And even then the people who do hear this, they're not going to do anything about it because it's too hard.
And of course they they miss the fact that because it's hard and tedious, that is the whole reason that it will work.But for the remainder of you, that very very small percent who are still aggressive and who are still optimistic and who still think that 2027 can be your best year ever, this is the stuff to be thinking aboutright now.So, if you want to go deeper on all this stuff, I write about it every single week in my newsletter, my publication, The Rare Mind.The link is below.You can also get that if you get the prompts that I mentioned taking you through all of these exercises that will also give you the opportunity to subscribe.And of course, speaking of subscribing, don't forget to subscribe to the channel here so we can continue walking this road together.to see you next time.