STARTING LINE LinkedIn told me that a quick "newsjacking" post about amusement park ticket prices had reached more people than anything I have written in 40 years. Then I scrolled down and found out what it was worth. On the day Dolly Parton died, Hersheypark replied to a stranger's post praising Dollywood for keeping ticket prices low. The reply was about Hersheypark's own pricing. Wrong conversation, wrong afternoon, and the internet noticed within an hour. This is not rare. Neutrogena did...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
STARTING LINE One of our credit letters opened with “Dear Valued Customer.” The news in the second paragraph was that we were cutting her credit line. Nobody at MBNA wrote that letter to be cruel. Somebody wrote it years earlier, ran it past Legal, dropped it into the system, and moved on. Then the company built a brand promise on top of it and never revisited it. One of our “computer-generated” letters ended up in front of our CEO after one of his close friends called to complain. It’s an...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
A note about where this newsletter is headed, and a clean way out if it's not for you. Frictionless started as a grab bag. Leadership, writing, a few personal essays, some links. Whatever I was chewing on at the time. From here, it gets sharper. The new focus: Brand Garbage, and how to clear it. Most founders and executives write board letters, investor updates, and LinkedIn posts that sound like everybody else's. The words are fine. Nothing is technically wrong. But nothing differentiates...
3 months ago • 1 min read
TIPOFF The San Antonio Spurs led the Knicks by 29 points in Game 4 of the NBA playoffs. They lost. Three nights later, they lost again, and the series with it. Here's what actually happened, because it has very little to do with basketball. The Spurs had a story that only worked when the shots were falling. They hit 17 threes, built the lead, and looked unbeatable. Then the shooting cooled, and there was no second story. No backup plan. The lead was gone, and so were they. The Knicks had...
4 months ago • 5 min read
The bravest thing I'm doing lately: not trying to talk to everyone at once. When Aaron Strout walked away from a 14-year run as chief marketing officer at Real Chemistry in early 2025, he said the first six months on the other side were disorienting. Not depressed. Not regretful. Disoriented. He told me when I interviewed him for a profile that every day could theoretically be a weekend, and that turned out to be its own kind of problem. I’ve been thinking about that since the call. Not...
5 months ago • 1 min read
STARTING LINE Mistakes. I've made a few, as I've learned over the past month. I recently interviewed a founder for an article and had a list of questions for him. At one point, Scott referred to his fundraising as "professional begging." Did I stop running through my questions? Sadly, no. So I missed an opportunity for something special (more on that later). If you've been interviewed for a podcast, profiled in a trade publication, or recorded a sales call this quarter, you're sitting on...
5 months ago • 5 min read
Does Your Website Has Spinach in Its Teeth? A consulting firm hired me because its pipeline had dried up. Great reputation. Strong client work. Nobody calling. I looked at its website. Its “About Us” page still called them “a fast-growing startup.” They’d been in business for 15 years. The home page didn't tell me what they do, how it will make the reader's life better, and what the reader needs to do to get it (Donald Miller's Grunt Test). Their services page listed three different value...
10 months ago • 4 min read
If you're a recent grad who's been job searching for months—or a parent watching your graduate collect rejection emails—this message is for you. Maybe you're over 50 and getting passed over yourself. Maybe it's your kid who can't land that first role despite a stellar GPA. Or maybe (and this is the brutal reality for some families) it's both. You've sent out dozens, maybe hundreds, of applications. You've tweaked resumes. You've applied to jobs you're overqualified for and jobs that are...
11 months ago • 2 min read
I'm shamelessly stealing from Chris Orzechowski for this quick post (with a tip of the hat to Josh Spector for sharing this idea). I'll have a meatier post on conducting a quick review of your website and/or LinkedIn profile in the next few days, but I'd love to get feedback from each of you today. Imagine you could hire me to help you with your individual or corporate brand messaging for $0. What would you have me do for you? What problem would you want me to solve for you? How could I help...
12 months ago • 1 min read