Angus

Leading people & building culture is about how you enforce behaviour As we’ve continued to build the team, I’ve been able to put full trust in team members to run even our most important accounts & handle escalations. I now only deal with the toughest of problems & help make wider company improvements in areas that need it (We are averaging <3% monthly churn across 70+ clients) Rule 1: have a documented culture doc that explicitly explains expectations and what each of your values mean, with real scenarios Rule 2: reward the right behaviour. Praise individuals and give shoutouts to those who embody the culture in their work. Incentivise people based on alignment to culture with bonuses Rule 3: directly call out misaligned behaviour. If someone does something, even small, that doesn’t line up with your culture you address that problem with them directly. If it’s a wider team issue - you can write a memo or call it out in a team meeting If the culture is written the expectations are clear. Then encouraging the right behaviours and discouraging the wrong ones becomes easier

Has loom just become the worst software on the planet? It is so extremely slow at times - try pause or use the rewind feature and the whole thing just shits itself

Good article but also think some other things worth mentioning Good agencies are going to be forced to move up the value chain - so a large part of the cost of an agency previously might’ve been copywriting, now it’ll be on strategy. And you’ll need to be very good at strategy to make up for this without being squeezed on price Accountability + relationships are a big part of agency survival. Clients will want experts to manage channels so they can outsource the accountability of the outcome. And they’ll prefer to do this with people they like and trust. A good founder doesn’t want to even have to think about the platforms performance that week, but with some mid in-house employee armed with an AI agent, they will still have to be looking over their shoulder. There will always be a place for true experts and that has always been the same principle of hiring agencies over in house

>2x revenue exit Thoughts @Seanfrank ? Is this bullish?

Everyone saying that businesses that build AI are going to be millionaires etc etc You can have the best AI agent/system in the world but you still can’t get customers cuz Focus on that 🙏🏼

Did everyone just go and buy Mac Minis and waste 3 weeks tryna set shit up just for OpenAi to buy them and probably make it way easier? It seems there is arbitrage in just being patient with AI and not freaking out every time a new update launches

This is a dumb take Unfortunate situation that could happen to anyone For everyone taking the opportunity to pile on this brand you should hope nothing ever goes wrong in your business

@PaulNiklas8 Brisbane on the rise 💯

Spending time in Sydney and there’s an argument to be had that Melbourne has slipped to 3rd best city in Aus (behind Brisbane and Sydney). Pretty sad when once upon a time you could have made an argument that it was top 5 cities in the world. Ah well

Airtable down for anyone else?

Having to call to cancel something should be illegal Now they’ve just got me for life

Don't get me wrong - it can be extremely hard to purposely take your foot off the gas. But you do have a choice to make

The biggest crime in ecom is that Email/sms agencies over index how much their strategies influence customer retention AB testing a winback flow and sending an extra email a week is not making customers come back 99% of email/SMS agencies are just creative agencies and AI operators. There is nothing wrong with this, still a great service But - they don’t influence retention or LTV, yet that is how their external positioning in the market is driven I saw an agency saying that by emailing Q4 customers they can get them to come back up to 5 times Really ?? All your clients must be trillionaires For some reason it just boils my blood to see agencies over index their importance If you want to claim influence on repeat purchases/LTV you actually need to measure this and strategise for it outside of just what flow you’re going to AB testing this week

First time hosting an event yesterday 30x 8&9 figure brands in the room 2 of which do $200M+ Some of Aus’ best retailers and operators We’re building 🤝

In the last 2 years I’ve built a team of 30 that was able to pretty flawlessly produce over 1200 email campaigns in November One thing I’ve noticed we do differently is the way we track/manage our remote team When I interview people, they always tell me how their last workplace tracked their hours, micromanaged their work schedules The only thing we track is outputs We’re clear on what we expect and the results required to be successful in your role I don’t need to track hours or even worry when people work for that matter Because we have an elite culture where everyone knows exactly what is required Needing to granularly track / micromanage your team either means you can’t let go, or you don’t have the right people in the first place The only exception is if a high performer is getting caught up and you’re doing a time audit to identify a constraint

November 2025 has proven just how important SMS is. It's always been a great ROI channel. But I really think brands who did not use it wisely throughout November would have struggled. It was a huge driver for us over the month and very important for cut through on the busy days

Some data across about ~$65M of ecommerce revenue in November. Primarily Australian markets. Random sample of 50 brands. Not just clients we manage but all are stores we have access to.

Would love an ecom founders perspective on this scenario A couple of years ago (early on in my agency career) we churned a client (pretty mutually by the end) because their branding was just genuinely so dumb (try ignore my bias) It was a fashion brand for Men. People like myself were their target audience according to them They were extremely hell bent on their brand being "masculine, strong, fiery" Yet every single asset, graphic, photoshoot they did was the polar opposite of this (in my opinion, as well as every other young male in my company) This made for an interesting clash, as we'd create assets in line with the moodboards they would send us. They'd then turn around as say it's not masculine enough, yet the inspo and photoshoots they'd send us would be a man wearing makeup seductively eating vegetables This went on for a few months before it just got unbearable. As their target ICP I just couldn't for the life of me understand their branding or what they wanted to see Unsurprisingly the brand really struggled with new customer acquisition. Would love to hear the thoughts of ecom founders, do you take on the advice of people in your ICP (aka me) who are telling you that your brand is not appealing to their target audience, Or do you trust your gut, ignore the agency, and stick to your guns and hope you have a breakthrough?

This is just so insane and sparks so many questions. This is the account for ONE region of this $50m/year business. Nearly 0 email marketing. Signals 2 things A. You can still grow a successful business without emails, despite what some little klaviyo kid will tell you B. But this brand has huge retention problems and it's crazy that no one has thought to start with Klaviyo lol. Shows you that even the best operators sometimes don't have it all worked out.

Crazy how much worse gpt is when compared to claude I always thought this was just exaggeration but after cooking some long-form stuff in claude, the difference is immense

When we signed our first 9-figure brand, the audit was the scrappiest gdoc ever I filmed a 20 min loom just riffing on my notes and sent it to him on a Sunday arvo Would've been a ton of agencies sending the most polished pitch decks yet we landed the deal Lesson in there