Growth challenges, charisma, having a show, Oslo travels
Growth challenges, charisma, having a show, Oslo travels
Hey!
In this issue: growth challenges, against async-communications, thoughts on charisma and persuasion, having a show, Oslo travels.
Why you’re getting this: I'm Jakob Greenfeld and this is my personal newsletter. I send this every month or so to interesting people I’ve connected with and friends I want to keep in touch with. You can un-subscribe any time and I won't be mad. I won't even be notified!
Business
For a while, we’ve hit a plateau where our current tactics to acquire new clients and churn pretty much evened out.
Churn always sounds bad but in reality, it is unavoidable. A lot of the churn we’re seeing is outside of our control.
We’re doing well in the service-delivery department. Given enough time, we’re producing results for every client.
But we’re always working on improving things and making our service more sticky. One step in that direction is that we’re moving away from our initial async-first approach.
Async communication is extremely slow and not suited to building proper relationships.
We’re now doing proper well-structured onboarding and catchup calls. In 30 minutes we’re able to do what previously took us multiple days of back and forth. And after a proper face-to-face conversation, we’re actually 100% aligned which is impossible in my experience if you only communicate asynchronously.
We’re also doing daily standup calls with the whole team which help a lot in removing bottlenecks fast and fostering a proper team spirit.
We’ve also invested a lot of time and energy in improving our acquisition strategies. No stone is left unturned. We’re testing different messaging, different offers, and improving our landing page.
One small change I’m proud of is the feed of client wins we now have at the top of our landing page. It not just looks cool but produced results almost instantaneously. A founder recognized one of the names we have here, reached out to him, and asked “How’s your experience working with these guys?”.
Growth has started to pick up again but is still far from the point where we’d like it to be.
Writing
One of the biggest wastes of energy and money is not accepting that if they don't care, they don't care. Buying a bigger ad in a newsletter, sending more follow ups, using more creative copy, do not magically make people more interested in your offer.
Wrote a bit about charisma and why it really just boils down to congruency. Also wrote about why charismatic writing is congruent writing.
A little realization I recently had is that non-fiction books are awesome if you ignore all the tactical stuff and focus on frames and heuristics.
Naturally then also shared a few of my recent frame shifts and heuristics:
Pod
After re-reading Russell Brunson’s Traffic Secrets I’ve decided to make my podcast a priority again.
Recently recorded great conversations with fellow agency owners Grant Hushek and Andy Walker.
Running a podcast is such a simple hack to talk to more interesting people.
Most people say no when you ask “Can I pick your brain?”, while almost anyone says yes when you ask “Want to come chat on my podcast?”.
Most importantly it’s not a huge time commitment. I spend 10 minutes per week inviting people, 1-2 hours in total recording, and another 30 minutes editing + uploading.
Travel
I spent a week at an insane wellness hotel in Norway called The Well.
I’ve been to a lot of great wellness hotels but this one is really on another level.
No electronic devices are allowed in most of the hotel so it was perfect for a little digital detox.
Another plus is that it’s not too hard to get to since it’s just a 40-minute bus ride away from Oslo city center.
Oslo is an okay city but Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Aarhus are much nicer Scandinavian cities. Tad too many drug addicts for my taste.
Talk soon,
Jakob