Sean Johnson 🔥

How to grow ANY boutique professional services firm: This is the framework we use at Madison to help our clients grow. It's gone through several iterations, and I'm sure will continue to evolve over time: ✅ Get VERY clear on your Point of View. Who you serve, what you believe to be true about your domain, why you are unique, and how you approach your work. Put a stake in the ground and decide who you do (and don't) serve. Make sure every team member knows it cold. ✅ When possible, codify your thinking into frameworks that are easy to understand and create differentiation. ✅ Translate that Point of View clearly into your primary channels. Your website, LinkedIn page, etc. should help people understand immediately who you are and how you might be able to help them. ✅ Create a menu of solutions tailored specifically for who you serve (bonus points if they descend from your framework). Ideally they map to various stages of the client's work. Ideally you have some stuff that starts early and strategic, helping you earn the right to assist with implementation. Ideally some of them are recurring. ✅ For each, state clearly what problem it solves, when that problem tends to arise, how they currently try to solve it, and what solving it would mean for their business. Make sure every team member knows it cold. ✅ Become gratuitously helpful. Give away your best insights, your best ideas. Challenge your marketing team to start thinking like a media company. Look at firms like McKinsey & Company or Bain & Company as models. You certainly can't do all of what they do. But what's your smaller version of that? ✅ Teach your team to give away their secrets as well. Imagine if your 5 (or 20, or 100) partners all were regularly sharing their best ideas on LinkedIn with the people they seek to serve. Imagine if each of them became Trusted Advisors who immediately come to mind when buying windows emerge. The key to being top of mind is being helpful and consistent. ✅ Provide gentle ways to deepen relationship. Webinars specifically focused on major pain points. Lunch and learns in office where you show them EXACTLY how to solve the problem. At each step overwhelm them with value. ✅ Teach your team to be disciplined around nurturing relationships. Help train them on how to be insanely helpful 1 month, 3 months, 12 months in. Make sure they don't wing it - show them how CRM can help them build amazing relationships at scale. ✅ Nail onboarding. Knock your client's socks off during the first 30 days. ✅ Teach your team to systematically ask for referrals, in respectful ways, ideally mapped to key client success or inflection points. ✅ Pursue strategic partnerships. Find complementary businesses that think the way you think. Create partner-specific sales enablement tools so they know what to say when. What did I leave out? (P.S. If you need any help with the above, DM me.)

Starlink on airplanes is fantastic.

@Edrocklon Believe it was Brand You 50.

@intentionally What was the book?

I've said before that my notes are my most prized professional possession. It often raises eyebrows. But here's why, and how you can use note taking to utterly transform your career: In college I read book by Tom Peters. Among other ideas, he suggested that creativity is simply taking two existing ideas and smashing them together in new ways. And that the implication of that was you need to increase the amount of inputs you have. I noticed early in my career a big part of what made the best consultants great was their "pattern recognition." Which was informed by two things - the engagements they had worked on, and the things they had read. They had built up a massive toolkit of frameworks and mental models and anecdotes they could employ whenever the situation required it. So I resolved to do the same. I became a reader and a note taker. I used a variety of tools over the years. First paper, then an app called Bear, then Readwise. Eventually tools like Roam Research and Reflect and Obsidian came out, all of which introduced "bi-directional linking" - the ability to create wiki-like pages out of thin air by putting brackets around words, giving you the ability to have index pages of everything you've ever read about a particular topic. It takes time, but eventually (1000 notes or so) you reach a critical mass. The ideas and connections start to become exponential. As long as you're good about reviewing your notes, you have a virtually inexhaustible supply of ideas and concepts available to you. You have a completely unique neural network of sorts. It's a tremendously valuable asset. Earlier in my career, I found this helped me be much more useful in meetings. I was able to see things others couldn't. I was effectively the resident expert on a variety of topics, despite my age. As I layered on professional experience on top of it and acquired my own set of war stories, it became an incredibly powerful connection. It also was instrumental in writing. As I said, its utility is maximized if you review it regularly. Without a good reason to review though it doesn't become a habit. I try to post 4-5 times per week. And I know my set of notes, built up over the last 15 years, is the best place to go whenever I'm stuck. When people ask how I'm able to be so prolific, this is a major part of the answer. And I've seen first hand the impact writing can have. I know for a fact it's helped others. And it's grown my business. It's gotten me clients and team members. It's led to speaking gigs all over the world. It played a major role in landing my Kellogg gig. None of that would have happened without the writing. And the writing wouldn't have happened (at least the way I do it) without my notes. I'll always tweak how I do it. Lately I've been experimenting with Karpathy's LLM-wiki, and exposing my notes to Claude to help me find novel connections more quickly. But I'll never stop. It's one of the most valuable things I do.

I’m all for progress and empathy and social action. But anyone who lives in the US who looks around and concludes “things have never been worse” hasn’t read very much history.

If the only reason you write (or design or code or do business or make music or whatever) is for money, then AI “taking your job” will feel existential. If you also do those things because they give you joy, it won’t matter. You’ll write anyway.

The Bryan Johnson stuff is nuts. People gloating over the fact that someone has a disease is pretty horrible. I'll never understand why the idea that someone wants to try and live as long as possible is so offensive to people.

@nylas I'm trying to get set up with Nylas (signed the agreement already) and I can't get ahold of my sales rep on next steps, and can't find a place to get technical support. Can anyone help?

I'm very curious what % of companies that claim to have a Company OS really do.

Taste (so far) is hard for AI to copy. (If you don't think that's true, you probably can't tell the difference, and this post is for you 😉). Which means it's valuable. How to acquire taste: 1) Decide it's a thing. Many people don't believe in taste. They think it's subjective. They're wrong. And they do themselves a disservice. It's hard to develop a thing that you don't believe exists. 2) Start by noticing what YOU like first. Try to explain why. Starting here helps you in three ways. First, you learn to pay attention. Second, you learn discernment. How to analyze why a thing is good or bad. Third, you learn to listen to your gut. Right now it's probably lying to you. You don't have taste yet (there's a difference between "I like that" and "that is good".) That's okay. 3) Become a student. Pick a domain you're interested in. Learn to ask. "Why is that good?" What is it about this painting, or this ad, or this web page, or this article, or this suit, or this bottle of wine, or this meal, that makes it great? Seek out folks who know and learn from them. There is a reason chefs say medium rare is better. There is a reason tailors say a suit with functioning buttons on the arms is better and that a fused lining is worse. There's a reason the best wines are often blends. There's a reason everyone considers Monet a master. Learn those reasons. That said, there's nuance here. Popular is not automatically the same as great. Sometimes popular just means popular. Part of the job is to learn to tell the difference. Cultivating taste in one domain often pays dividends in others. If you understand art, there's a good chance you'll grok interior design or fashion. Three things can be helpful here: - Take notes. I refer back to my notes constantly. They help remind me, and they help me find novel connections that can inform the next step. - Get as many reps as you can. More reps means more learning. - Look for ways to have a faster feedback loop. The tighter the feedback loop the faster you learn. Having a mentor is tremendously helpful here. 4) Develop your own sense of taste. Take all the things you've learned and begin to filter it through your gut. Both matter. Being a student teaches you the map. Learning to sense what your gut is telling you helps you build your own map. Too many people skip the student phase. They think they can take shortcuts. Unless you're legitimately a wunderkind, you can't. Most masters went through a LONG apprenticeship phase. Miles Davis said "it takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself." In the beginning your gut was unreliable. But now you know stuff. You can explain why a thing is good, regardless of whether you personally like it or not. 5) Become a creator. You don't have to do this. But folks with taste who never make anything are called critics. And they're often not much fun to hang around. They learned discernment, but not about what it takes to make something great. Be the latter.

My favorite show ever. Well done.

I asked GPT one of those viral questions a year ago. “Predict my future.” One of the things it said was “obviously your net worth is going to go way up.” I said “why is that obvious?” “Because you live in Chicago. The Great Lakes region will have massive inward migration due to climate change.”

Honestly maybe Chicago is it. Maybe we’re all idiots for avoiding this

And then there were five.

@KaiXCreator Yep. Early days. But have paying customers (several switching from major incumbents), no churn so far (although I’m sure that’ll happen soon), and a waitlist. Doing several demos a week.

I'm officially "reading about how golf courses are maintained so I can make my lawn look nicer" years old

This is stunningly good.

Reject this hogwash, America is electric right now. There’s opportunity everywhere if you’re willing to work, learn, risk trying things, and participate in life. The upside on optimism is uncapped. You live in the greatest period of innovation in history, fade the malthusians

Not to brag, but I’ve started using Opal to block social media 24/7. Today I only interrupted it 33 times.

I think about this joke at least once a month.

Information and wisdom are not the same thing.