How To 30x Your Results With The Same Effort

Imagine this: You’ve built a successful consulting practice, but now you’re trapped in the endless cycle of competing on expertise alone. So here’s the uncomfortable truth – being right isn’t enough anymore. Today’s guest on the podcast, Alex Smith, pioneered a radically different approach to strategy that helped him build an 85,000 person strong following and transformed his business. What he reveals will challenge everything you believe about standing out in a crowded marketplace. The best part, it’s not about working harder, it’s about thinking differently. 

In this episode, you’re going to learn why being different matters more than being right, how to create a business without competitors – yes, it is actually possible – and the counterintuitive approach to strategy that actually works for smaller firms. That’s right, strategy is not only for bigger firms. I think you’re going to enjoy this one. Dig in.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Alex Smith is a strategist, writer, and advisor to CEOs/founders who founded Basic Arts in 2016 to help brands stand out and deliver real value. The best-selling author of No Bullsh*t Strategy, Alex focuses on strategic clarity and escaping competition, empowering businesses to understand and articulate their unique value, achieving strategic advantage through differentiation. He also publishes “The Hidden Path” newsletter, a treasured publication offering its readers uncommon strategic insights.

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Hey, Alex, welcome.

Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

Yes. So I thought we’d start off- You have a very strong presence on LinkedIn. I think that’s probably how I found out about you and the work that you do. You have about 80,000 or 85,000 or more followers. Your posts typically get very high engagement. And I’m wondering what role does LinkedIn play in terms of your business and your lead generation in terms of it being, you know, a top or important channel for you?

01:23 – How LinkedIn Became a Business Growth Machine

Well, it kind of became everything really, I suppose. It’s by far my biggest top of funnel area. And you know, there’s a transition that you go through where I was a consultant doing no form of like meaningful marketing at all. And then you start to think to yourself, “Oh, well, you know, I don’t get leads come, but they come in a very random way, a way that you don’t really control. And it can be a bit feast or famine.” I’m sure a lot of people know what that’s like. And so you think, “Oh, well, you know, of course, if I want to get more leads, then I have to sort of publicize myself somehow.” So what’s the most logical place to do that is LinkedIn. So then you become a consultant who posts on LinkedIn or whatever social media channel and just doing that at a kind of low level but in a decent quality way is very worthwhile, purely from the point of view of just like generating a bit of profile and leads as a consultant. 

So then that’s the next stage. But then, so I was doing it for maybe six months on a sort of low level basis, you know, like 1500 followers, you know, you might get like 30 likes on a post kind of thing. And that kind of game was well worthwhile compared to not doing it. So that was like feeding nicely into the consultancy model. But then obviously then, now when it’s grown much, much bigger, the whole really, it’s so dominant that actually the nature of my job changes. I don’t really see myself as being a consultant anymore. I suppose that, like, although it sounds much more wanky, I guess I’m a content creator. The main focus of my business is, frankly, not servicing clients. The main focus of my business is generating content and media stuff which then you try to monetize into different areas. Obviously, I’m still doing consultancy work and that’s still probably the predominant earner for me. But yeah, you get to a point where it becomes like a sledgehammer to crack a nut as a consultant, like, to fill your consultancy ticket, you don’t need a hundred thousand followers. Just having a solid LinkedIn game would do that job. And yeah, so now I’ve pushed through that and so I’m just changing the whole business, really.

I’ve got two questions for you on that. I mean, the first is you mentioned you went from just getting started to having 1500 followers. And even that was worth your time, as you said, but today you’re at 80,000 followers, or, you know, or well beyond that. When you look back to having 1500 followers to now 85,000 followers, what made the difference? If you kind of think, well, like, was there a chapter, a page that you turned, something that you specifically did, a decision that you made, a shift that you feel really took your game to that next level, or got you in front of a lot more people, got you recognized, got a lot more engagement, just worked overall better?

03:57 – The Viral Post That Changed Everything

Well, there was. Unfortunately, the bleak truth – bleak from the point of view of people listening to this, not bleak for me – is I had one post that went viral. Like, one post got me about 25,000 followers. And let’s be real, that’s just winning the lottery. You can’t legislate for that. You can’t just bank on that. And I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t been for that one post. I think if I done everything else the same, but without that one post, I guess I still obviously would have done okay, but maybe now I’d be on like 20,000, something like that. So it would have been less so.

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05:31 – Followers vs. Revenue: What Really Matters?

So you mentioned that the one post was what added 25,000 followers for you, took you viral. I think an important, maybe, distinction or point for us to make is that your followers don’t necessarily equal your revenue. Right? It’s not the determination of success. It could be a vanity metric. However, it does put you in front of a lot more people and thereby increase your chances of generating more leads or reaching potential clients. And I guess that, you know, you mentioned that it was almost like gambling. People couldn’t necessarily recreate it. But I think what’s interesting about what you said, and this is my assumption, so correct me if I’m wrong, in order for you to reach that viral post, you were posting very consistently. It’s not like you just one day wrote and then, boom, you know, hit the lottery. You were probably going at it for a long time consistently. And by doing that, you know, you got “lucky,” but the luck happened because you were consistently putting in the work.

06:23 – The Role of Consistency in Growing an Audience

There’s a lot of important points within that. So to answer your last question first, I was posting five days a week for about six months before I got there. And I was thinking about it very consciously. I was looking at the analytics, I was looking at what worked, what didn’t work, blah, blah. So I was pushing forward in that way. So you’ve got to have that constant improvement game. I see a lot of people who post a lot, but they aren’t doing it in a sort of intentional way where they’re sort of like changing and adapting and learning as they go. You know, you see all those like viral sort of images where it’s those sort of graphs of like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, boom. And the moral of the story is, you know, keep going, be consistent. I actually think that’s not a great message because it sort of implies that if you just keep on doing crap all the time, eventually it’ll boom. No, you could do crap forever. You can do crap forever and never boom. So you have to be constantly iterating all of that time. 

It’s also worth pointing out that not every profession lends itself well to this game and is highly monetizable. Because one of the advantages that I have in the field that I have is that the subject I write about is of reasonably high interest to my customers. So my customers are like founder CEOs and they’re quite interested in the stuff that I’m writing about because it’s quite sort of relatable to them and it’s the sort of stuff they’re thinking about. Now if, let’s say, I had a cybersecurity company and I was also selling to founder CEOs, the founder CEO doesn’t give a shit about reading content about cybersecurity. They might have to buy it from time to time, but they’re never going to read it. The only people who want to read that are other cybersecurity people. So a lot of people with big followings online, their followings are followings among their peers, not among their customers. So you can only play this game if your customers are interested in the thing you’re selling. And most products are not interesting to the customers. They’re things that they have to buy from time to time for whatever reason, but they don’t want to bloody read about it on their lunch break. So that’s a big advantage that I had. 

Now, it isn’t to say that like if your audience is made up of your peers, and a lot of my audience is obviously my peers as well, it’s like a mixture between sort of founders and peers, that’s still very worthwhile doing. But it would change your business model because then maybe eventually you’re going to monetize through courses to your peers, that kind of thing, you know, so like the game changer. So you’ve got to really understand how those dynamics apply in your industry. And I see a lot of people out there who like, using that cybersecurity analogy, they think, “I’m going to do all this great content about here are five things you need to think about when analyzing your cybersecurity, or something.” And no one’s going to read that because you don’t care about cybersecurity until you’re forced to care about it if you are a founder, CEO. Obviously if you’re in that niche, it would be different. So I had structural advantages going into the game.

09:06 – How to Create High-Value Content That Stands Out

My next question on that would be really about your process. You mentioned you’re putting on content five days a week. I think from what I’ve seen, you’re pretty consistent every day or so with a post. They’re not fluff. There’s thought behind them. That’s why they resonate and clearly have built the kind of audience that you have today. What is your process? How do you go about thinking through and essentially creating high value content? Because a lot of people who are joining us right now, consultants and consulting business founders, they have deep expertise, there’s a lot that they could talk about, but often they struggle to put up anything beyond, you know, just a bunch of fluff or general information that really anyone could say and it’s not high value and therefore they don’t really build a great following. So what advice would you have or what could you offer in terms of your process and what you suggest that others might think through?

Firstly, you’ve got to have a point of view. Most people don’t have a point of view. People can’t do content, they can’t write because they actually don’t think anything interesting. You can be an amazing practitioner in your industry, but if you just think all the same things as everyone else, you’re not going to be able to generate good content. Now, I think a good rule of thumb is could you write– If I said to you, “Whatever your field is, I need you to write me 20 opinions that you have on this field off the top of your head. Go.” Literally just do-I mean, I could probably give you 100 in my field, that’s a test. Like, if you can do that, then you’re ready to go because you’ve actually got ideas, points of view percolating, and you can then just start plowing them out and organizing them and doing the content. If you can’t do that, that’s the first hurdle that you’ve got to get over. The first hurdle you’ve got to get over is you’ve got to understand what you think, you’ve got to understand your voice, you’ve got to understand your point of view. You need to have a contrarian stance on your category. It’s the only way that you end up having something to say. Probably see that my baby has crawled into the room. This is an absolute first, but she’s being quite well behaved, so it’s okay. But you might be able to hear some baby in the background.

All good.

So I think that’s the main problem that people have. And if you’re getting more sophisticated about it, obviously you, this is actually where you get into the realms of like strategy – strategy for business, strategy for a person. What is your sort of shtick in this particular industry? So like, you know, my shtick in strategy is basically to kind of make it sort of like super accessible and direct and simple. There’s more to it than that, but that’s basically the gist. So that means I have something to push against. So I can push against the opposite of that. I can push against jargon, complexity, all the sort of like heavyweight academic type stuff that’s represented in that market. So then I’ve got something worth reading. I don’t have to be right, I just have to be different. And most people, if they really analyze themselves, they’ll find that they don’t have any opinions which are different from the opinions of everyone else in their industry.

11:52 – The Power of Having a Contrarian Point of View

I think that’s really interesting what you just mentioned, because most consultants have the belief that they need to be right and they’re not focused enough on being different.

Such a good point. So true. You cannot, you cannot take the point of view that you’re right, you are not right. Rightness is completely based not only on the point of view that you’re coming from or the context that you’re in, it’s also based on your values as well. There is like my “ideological enemies” in the strategy space. They’re not really enemies. But you know, the sort of people who I’m pushing against, they are just as right, more right than I am. But it’s horses for courses. I’m trying to speak to maybe like a 32-year-old founder of a business with $10 million turnover. I’m not trying to speak to the CSO of Halliburton. It’s a completely different game. And yes, this sort of commitment to there being one version of the truth is that fundamentally, as you put very well, is the enemy of difference. Because if you’re so obsessed with being right, you’re going to triangulate yourself down basically the path most followed. The truth is, is that the status quo in any industry is always right. That’s why it’s become the status quo. It’s become the status quo because it’s reliable and it’s a safe path to walk. So you have to- difference first, everything else second if you want to play that game.

To go back in time a little bit, I know you were a trainee at L’Oreal, massive global brand. You worked in a marketing agency for I think six or so years before you started your company Basic Arts. Your world now is strategy. What would you say to them strategy really is? And what role does strategy play for them? And I’ll add one more thing which I know you talk about in your book, and I certainly see this as well, is this that people use the word strategy and strategic very lightly. They include it in almost everything that they do. How do you respond to that? I guess the big one for our listeners is what is strategy and how should somebody think about strategy if they’re running a smaller business?

13:54 – What Strategy Really Means for Small Businesses

Think about it like this. You could 30x, 50x your results with exactly the same amount of effort, exactly the same amount of money spent. Maybe less effort, maybe less money spent. The only difference being that you’ve made choice B instead of choice A. Clearly the decisions that you make are going to yield different results and some of those results are going to be exponentially bigger than other ones. Clearly we want to be able to learn how to make a choice, how to take a direction with our business that is going to yield 30x higher results than the other direction with the same amount of effort. So that is what strategy is fundamentally. It is like how do you make decisions with leverage that are going to give you these massive returns on your efforts? Clearly this is like a super important thing and there is a body of theory about how you do that. And that body of theory is sort of well codified in academia, in the huge consultancy firms, you know, in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies. But the way that it’s been codified, as you sort of intimated, has not trickled down to not only small businesses, but even medium sized businesses. Even a $ 500 million turnover business is probably doing no meaningful strategic thinking whatsoever. Because this stuff, it just doesn’t have purchase out there, but it’s equally relevant for every single business on the planet. 

What I try to do, my whole mission, if you like, is to bring these concepts in an accessible way to the other 99.999% of businesses that aren’t the Fortune 500 companies with their armies of MBAs sitting around the boardroom table. People need to know these precepts and they just don’t. Not only do they not know them, the vast majority of founders and CEOs are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing strategically. So rather than taking the 30x decision, they’re taking the 0x decision. And they think that that’s the clever decision because on the face of it, it looks like the sensible thing to do, but they’re actually taking the 0x decision. They’re tying their results in a sort of one on one relationship with their effort. That’s kind of like what the purpose of strategy is and why it’s sort of important. 

The question is sort of, what is strategy? It’s an interesting one because I think that one of the issues that people have is that they can’t grab it, they can’t picture it as a thing. So that’s why it’s so nebulous. So everything I just said there, it sounds like, “Okay, well, yes, we make these amazing decisions, but how do we do that?” So one of the things that I try and do is boil strategy down to being almost like a kind of thing. And to answer what that is, you first have to answer the question of what is a business? Because you need to know what is a business, every business, at its heart, if you’re going to explain what a good strategy for it is. And the answer to that question is that every business is nothing more than a system designed to produce value. Every business on the whole planet, no matter how big or small or whatever, it’s just a system that you put together to spit out value to the customer, to the market, and then you exchange that for value in return in the form of money. Now, when we understand this, we can also understand very naturally that how do you grow a business? You give more value. There’s a- you can draw a linear relationship between the value you give and the value you collect. The biggest, richest companies in the world are the ones that found the way to generate the most amount of value. We know from this then that the essence of good strategy is very, very simply figuring out a way to maximize the value that you put out in the world. Because if you do that, you’re going to maximize the value you collect and everything’s going to be easy. 

I like to kind of trim it down to this one sort of existential question, which is the entire game, which is: how can we give people something that they want, but that they can’t get from anywhere else? And both parts of that equation are equally important. How can we give people something they want that they can’t get from anywhere else? When you think about it, it’s extremely easy to do one half of that equation. And every single business out there is doing one half of that equation. But almost none of them are doing both halves of the equation. Most businesses are probably giving people something they want. As in, like, we know that people want to buy socks, and so we’re selling socks, therefore we take that part of the equation. But, oh, too bad, you can get socks from loads of places. So we actually aren’t really bringing new, meaningful value to the market. We’re just diluting what’s already there. That’s the situation that most businesses are in. Or occasionally you get businesses who are doing the reverse problem. Like, we are offering something nobody else offers. We are selling vegan dog food. We’re totally unique. And I’m like, well, that’s cool, but no one really wants vegan dog food. So you failed on the other side of this spectrum. But as you can imagine, if you can come up with a concept that is something people really want, but you’re the only game in town to get it, then that business is going to make money automatically and running that business is going to be an absolute piece of piss. So what you’re trying to do with your strategic thinking is create a form of value, form a unique value that ticks those two boxes. And if you do that, you win.

19:02 – Why Good Strategy Can Feel Like a Scary Decision

Let me ask you, is strategy meant to be scary? What I mean by that, I’ll add, I guess, a bit more context of where my question is coming from. What I’m hearing you say is, so you have to identify what people want. I think it’s pretty clear to most people, but creating something that they can’t get anywhere else sounds like it means that you can’t offer, or most likely you’re not going to offer a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Essentially, you need to subtract instead of add. You need to really narrow in. And for most consultants, most people in professional services, that’s scary because in your mind, you’re thinking, well, what about everyone else that can help here? You’re shrinking the pond or the surface area as opposed to increasing it. And we’re brought up to think that increasing in addition is what creates growth. But I’m hearing you say that most likely what you need to do is you need to subtract. You need to take away the majority of the potential opportunity to find the one thing that makes you unique. And so that’s what I mean is that that’s a scary decision for most people. And so, is a good strategy inherently about making a scary decision?

You’re ahead of me here. That really is the nub of it. Right? So we’ve established what you’re trying to create with the strategy. The strategic question of answering, how can we give people something they want that they can’t get anywhere else? So then you move on to, oh, well, how do we actually come up with that? How do we find that needle in a haystack? Because that’s extraordinarily difficult. And where you are so spot on with what you say is that most people, they start to think of it in additive terms. So they start to think we’ll give this extra feature and that and we’ll just give more, more, more, more, more, better, better, better than what our competitors are getting. Well, maybe they think we’re going to talk to our customers, we’re going to find out what they want and we’re going to give it to them. Blah, blah, blah, additive, additive, additive. Because we’re sort of in late stage capitalism kind of thing. And basically all the obvious surface level problems and all the different categories have been solved. You’re not going to find that answer. You’re not going to find this way of giving new value with that additive approach. You’re only going to find it exactly as you said, with a sort of a subtracting approach or the way that I would put it is probably more a contrarian approach or sacrificial approach. What it always involves is picking something which your competitors value, which they would never give up, which they would never ever question. And you say, well, what would it look like if we were to actually go against that or not do that? This is the same as what, remember I was talking about the point of view that you need to have with the LinkedIn game. It’s the same dynamics, but that’s for a person. And now we’re talking about the same dynamics for a business. But again, if you’re going to generate new value, by definition you have to, in some sense, attack the precepts of the old value. So if you look at any great strategic case study where a business has found a way to generate this incredible new value, you can always see when you unpack it is that they have undermined a convention of the category that they’re playing in. 

The all time, great, most perfect strategic case study, which everyone always talks about because it’s just so pure and simple is Southwest Airlines when they created the low cost airlines category. How did they do that? They didn’t do that with the additive mindset of saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if we did really cheap flights? Wouldn’t people like that?” That wasn’t possible because this industry is operating on razor thin margins. They’re already selling tickets as cheap as they can be. So you can’t just come up with that idea and then do it. It’s not physically possible. What made it possible is that they did the unthinkable: they binned off the most lucrative customers in that industry, which is business travelers. When you remove everything that matters to business travelers, suddenly new opportunities open up. So really the only way that you are ever going to find this needle in a haystack, this way of generating genuine new value the customer has never seen before, is you have to give something up. You have to give something over to your competitors and say, “You know what? If you’re a business traveler, please see my friends over here at American. They’ll take care of you. Because that’s not the game that we’re playing.” And I want to also really, really stress because this is something that quite annoys me. This is not what I would call niching down. You hear a lot of stuff about, oh, you’ve got to niche down, niche down, niche down, until you’re in that tiny little space. And people think that’s how you get unique. This game that we’re talking about does not necessarily mean that you are creating something with a smaller market potential than the thing that you’re sacrificing. Low cost airline travel now is a bigger market than business airline travel. I don’t know that for a fact actually, but I imagine it probably is.

23:30 – Creating a Business Without Competitors: Myth or Reality?

There’s a lot of low cost carriers though, to your point, all around the world that have certainly grown to be quite sizable.

So, yeah, so don’t think about it in terms of like, “Oh, I’m an agency or I’m a consultant, so I’m going to do exactly what Alex says by only doing consultancy services for female dentists. I’m the only person doing that. Therefore, what a great strategy that is.” I mean, that might work, but you’re just boxing yourself in. You’ve got to think about it more. Not in terms of like, you know, just like addressing a tiny little market. That’s a bad approach because you’re going to just end up with no market. You’ve got to think about it more in terms of like, the thing that you’re pushing against is other forms of value. So every form of value has got a flip side form of value. Right? So, like, the flip side of budget value offering is a premium value offering. This is sort of like yin and yang going on here. This is not a good example, but you get my point. This flip side of like, speed might be like customization or something like that. These are the sort of metrics you should be playing with. You’re becoming more specific, but you are not niching down. You are not becoming more small.

You have a message. You say making companies without competitors. That’s kind of your message to the market of what you do. I’m wondering, you know, is this really about creating or having a strategy that kind of puts you into your own category so there are no competitors? And I’m wondering, like, is there really a case where there’s somebody that doesn’t have any competition and is that a good thing? I’m wondering if we can maybe apply this to an example that either you worked on or that you’ve seen in the professional services space so that people can really relate to it. Or if there isn’t one that jumps out to you, we could create one. And thinking about, let’s say, a consultant who has expertise in doing salesforce implementations, like, you know, where would they potentially take that to look for opportunities to create a strategy, to create distinction, to, you know, build a business where there is no competition for them?

25:25 – The Starbucks Approach to Differentiation

Absolutely. The goal is to create a company without competitors. I think that competition is a perversion, actually, of business. It’s not a natural force. I think in a hypothetical perfect market, which is completely hypothetical, it would never happen, obviously, because people copy each other and fight over each other’s stuff. In a hypothetical perfect market, you would just have, I always say, like, imagine if the only car brands in the world were Ferrari, Jeep, and Skoda. These are the only three brands in the world. That market would be basically perfectly apportioned between those brands. None of them would have to spend a penny on marketing because basically, like, depending on what the customer is looking for, they would just automatically fait accompli, go to that brand. That’s the kind of dynamic that we’re trying to create as much as is physically possible. And I think that are there any brands out there who kind of on a literal level have no competitors? Probably not. Maybe a couple. Probably not. But the way that you judge whether a business has competitors, the way that I think about it, is do customers do a comparative analysis when they’re buying? That’s kind of like the real judgment. So, like, does the iPhone have competitors? Well, of course, you could say, logically, it’s got loads of competitors, okay. But people who buy iPhones, when they come time to buy a new phone, do they think, “O, maybe I should check out an HTC this time?” No, they don’t. The market is very neatly cloven between iPhone customers over here and customers of all of the other phone brands in a big mosh pit over here. So in that context, the iPhone has got no competitors. So you can achieve this in any industry when you become just that automatic choice. Even if logically people can get the thing that you’re selling elsewhere, a defensible version of it, because it’s very, very hard to avoid that happening, you still have this cut, you own the territory of that thing. Another Ikea, you can get furniture like Ikea’s furniture from thousands of other brands. They no longer have any, I think, structural advantage in their space. But at the end of the day, if you’re in the market for that kind of thing, you’re just going to default to Ikea and you’re not even going to think about it. 

So in the professional services space, I don’t know, I mean, it’s quite hard to think of real world examples, but I just use myself as an example. So in the seven, eight years I’ve been doing business, I can think of myself having been in a competitive situation for a job maybe twice and I lost both times. If someone had come to me with a mindset of that, like, “I’m looking for somebody who does this. Here’s one guy who does it, here’s another guy who does it.” I’m probably not going to win that fight because like, again, I’m trying to offer a unique point of view in this market. I’m not necessarily offering the kind of most robust possible point of view. If you’re looking for kind of like the mid market, like all round options for what I’m doing. So like, is there anyone else out there?

The way that I think about what I do is I sort of think about what I do as being the Starbucks of strategy. Starbucks, they came along and they took the trappings of real Italian coffee, which you could already get if you were into that, but it was a small category and they basically sort of watered it down and made it accessible to the masses and then boom, it became huge. And Italian coffee snobs would tell you that Starbucks is shit coffee. But what Starbucks did do, which was a service, is that they raised the floor of coffee to everyone in the world. So Starbucks might only be a 6 out of 10 coffee. But before Starbucks, people were having 2 out of 10 coffees. So in that respect, Starbucks has done so much more for the coffee world than the most fine, artisanal Italian roaster has. So I see my role as being similar in strategy, in that, like, if you want to get like the heavy, full, fat corporate version, it’s there, and that’s totally fine. But what I want to do is give the just enough version for the much broader group of founders and sort of get them to that 6 out of 10 level when before they were operating on a sort of a 1 out of 10 basis. So to do this, in some senses, you could say that I have to kind of dumb down some stuff that maybe a purist would say I shouldn’t be dumbing down, or maybe I have to skirt over subtleties that I shouldn’t be skirting over. But I do this consciously because if you start putting in all the bloody caveats and all the detail behind this stuff, then you lose the point, you lose the audience, and people are just going to do nothing. And I’d rather that they got the big stuff right, screw the details, than they didn’t do anything because there was just too much crap and nonsense and jargon being thrown at them. 

What I’m trying to say here, to answer your question, is that you add all of this stuff up and do I have loads of other places you can buy strategy? Yes. Do I have competitors? Yes. But is there anyone else out there who’s doing what I’m doing? Not that I’m aware of. No. And also then, because brand is a very important part of defending your strategic position, even if there are other people out there who you could technically say they’re doing it, the person who’s doing it the kind of loudest and hardest and first, maybe possibly first mover thing, they get to kind of like sort of claim that space. So I would say that in my business, I would say that I do not have competitors in the sense that I am proposing businesses don’t have competitors.

30:43 – Why Branding and Design Matter More Than You Think

So there’s lots of people out there that, like, from what I’ve seen and know, many of these people who- they’re known as, you know, strategists and people that help large organizations with their strategy and they’re going to roll out big studies and, you know, provide very comprehensive reports. But the way that they talk about strategy and the way they write their books about strategy is very different from what you do. I think it’s a good way to explain it. You know, the Starbucks example, you’re making strategy accessible, you’re making strategy easier to understand. You’re making strategy exciting for the smaller companies. You’re not targeting Fortune 500 global organizations, but you’re also doing it in a way where it’s a bit more fun. There’s a lot of differentiation because it’s not the textbook kind of drier stuff that people typically think about strategy. And so I think that’s a really good example of how you’ve done that in your business and how others can think about doing it in their business. 

And it goes back to what you said at the beginning, figure what people want. So in your case, founders want to understand strategy, they want an advantage, they want that leverage in terms of growth. Then you’re delivering it in a way that is different from how people typically would try and access strategic thinking or guidance on strategy, which tends to be drier, more corporate, you know, more of the MBA larger consulting firm approach to it, and you don’t do that. Plus, with the way that you brand it, if anyone checks out your post or is familiar with them on LinkedIn, it’s also visually quite appealing. You thought through your typography? 

No.

No?

Yeah. That’s such an underrated hack as well, I think. I know this is a very unstrategic thing to say, but I often think that, like, you can do quite a lot if you simply spend three times more money on visual branding than any of your competitors do. If you’re a soft drink or something like that, then that’s not going to work because you’re already in the elite level of sort of like visual branding. So, you know, they’re already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most companies, particularly B2B companies, the aesthetics and their whole taste of their business is just dog shit. And if you just go to an incredible design studio and you just throw money at the thing, I think that’s going to put you ahead. It’ll make you default the premium option in your category before you’ve even done any clever thinking at all. So this, to me, is a really underrated hack.

It’s interesting. Yeah. I thought you were going to disagree with what I was saying about my observation of what you’ve done in your business. But in fact, you’re even raising to a level beyond what I was likely getting to. So it’s interesting that you view it as– I mean, clearly, I’m not surprised because it’s very clear to me that you’re thoughtful about your branding, your design, the typography, all that sort of stuff. So I think that’s a great one. 

So, Alex, we’re coming up on the clock here and we’ve literally just started to not even scratch the surface. There’s so much more that we could talk about. We might have to look at doing a round two here when we can go a little bit deeper when things aren’t so hectic on both of our schedules here and we’ll try and find another time. But before we wrap up, I first of all want to just thank you for coming on and sharing a bit of your thoughts. You have a great book on the topic of strategy, which I highly recommend people check out. But where’s the place they should go to to learn more about you and your work until we maybe have you back and do a round two?

33:42 – Contacting Alex and The Strategy Shortcut System

LinkedIn is the first obvious thing. I’m Alex M H Smith on there, because obviously if you search Alex Smith, that’s an ungoogleable name. That’s why I have to be pretentious and say Alex M H Smith. And my newsletter is where I’m doing the sort of, the more kind of like inside track stuff which you can find on my website basicarts.org/newsletter. It’s all pretty easy to get there through LinkedIn and everything else. And I’m actually, next week, I don’t know when this is going out. Next week, I’m launching my product, the Strategy Shortcut System, which in the interests of, you know, trying to democratize these ideas, like, I don’t want to just be like going consulting company to company. I want to plug this stuff into every company on the planet if I can do it. That sort of like very direct, very straightforward tool to develop strategy for your business. That’s coming out next week. So, you know, if you go through my website, through the newsletter, whatever, depending on what time you’re accessing this, you’ll find it. And so you know a lot of people, there are a lot of consultants who are on the waiting list for that because obviously, like, people are sort of interested in kind of like taking some of these ideas and just applying them to their clients. So it’s all very kind of pick up and play stuff. So that might be of interest.

Good stuff. All right, well, Alex, again, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks a lot. That was a lot of fun. I wish we could have gone longer.

Yeah.

Important Links:

Alex Smith

Basic Arts

The Hidden Path Newsletter

The Strategy Shortcut System

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