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.)

@pittman021 Lots of gaps for sure - birth certificates are almost impossible. The most coverage came from census reports every 10 years, showed how families evolved, and then grave sites, and then church records. But I had nothing before now :)

@intentionally This is awesome and I wanted to let Claude loose on the hunt for broken chains in my family tree. But it seems lots of the information are behind closed doors: city clerks offices, hospital records. Curious how you overcame this.

Ashamed to say I knew almost nothing about my ancestry. That is, until 3am last night That’s when I closed my laptop, and had an Obsidian vault with an unbroken chain, on both sides, going to the mid 1800s on one side and the 1700s on the other. Marriage certificates, draft papers, gravestones, census records, photos, obituaries. Living in the future is pretty incredible.

@startupstella Was honestly shocked how much we have still.

@startupstella That’s what my wife said about Poland and Italy. We’re gonna try anyway

What struck me: Didn’t realize how many of them were drafted. Didn’t realize we had been in the US as long as we had. Don’t realize how many kids people had. Didn’t realize how many died young. Didn’t realize how much less common it was to leave the area where you were born.

How I did it:

The sign of a compelling vision is unforced desire. When you look at your 10 year vision, does it excite you? When you cast a vision for your team, do they leave the meeting more energized than before? If not, adjust them until they do.

A friend texted me, "how do you plan to make money if the robots take your job?" Some thoughts (I'm sure I'm wrong all over the place, feel free to check my logic): a) I think some folks will still make money in a corporate context. b) The rest of us (at least in the US) will probably transition into jobs related to services or experiences that robots either aren't as good at, or that people would rather deal with humans for. I don't want a robot to give me a massage. I think I'd prefer to watch humans play music, or perform in a play, or give me therapy, etc. Maybe not, but humans don't watch 2 robots play chess. I think there are parallels. c) It seems likely that such an economy would become increasingly local, and perhaps would contract. But I also think the robots will make the cost of most goods and services plummet. So your income might drop, but your buying power might not. d) In order for that to happen you need competition. If the folks who own the robots keep most of the gains (historically the pattern without intervention), prices don't necessarily fall as much as costs do, margins widen instead. Competition among AI-powered owners needs to be robust enough to pass savings to consumers. e) The messy part: It seems like stratification would increase like 1000x. There will be a small group of folks who make WAY more money than everyone else. So the floor will increase a ton, average standard of living will increase a ton, but people will be mad because the musks of the world are mega trillionaires, mining asteroids with their robots. f) It does seem like there would be a natural self-limiting function on said stratification in the sense that there isn't much point in having fleets of robots making products that nobody has enough money to purchase. The economy needs buyers, so the people with the robots would have a self-interested reason to make sure buyers exist. g) Caveat on the above (well, on all of it, as I'm not an economist). Things like land, housing, etc. I'm a lot less clear on. A great place in a desirable city might stay scarce (or even get more concentrated.)

I’m an AI optimist, for a counter-intuitive reason. I think there’s a good chance it will create the conditions for more people to lean into their true work in this world. I often talk about the framework Job/Vocation/Work/Life. Job is what I do for money. Vocation is what brings me joy. Work is the sum of lasting good I create in the world. Life is the person I’m becoming. It seems plausible that many jobs will change, almost beyond recognition, and that our relationship to money and status and prestige will change with it. But there’s a gift in that. I tend to think that if the robots do end up taking on many aspects of white collar jobs, what will remain will be vocation and work. I suspect we will be no less fulfilled - perhaps more so. And that those economies, while perhaps smaller, will be vibrant. When I was a kid, we had a young authors conference at school where we got to write and illustrate our own books. It was the highlight of my elementary education. When I got to high school I read Dave Barry books incessantly. Tried to imitate his style in papers, to the chagrin of my teachers. And when I graduated college I (very ironically) wrote a book about how to get a job. I think the seeds of my vocation and work were there from the beginning. I have been many things in my career. And I love my work now. I’m not rooting for it to end, and I’m going to do my best to build something beautiful and enduring. I’m also leaning hard into the tools. I’ve never been more engaged or productive professionally. It’s a challenge to put it away at night. It’s that fun. BUT. I’m also relatively at peace with the notion that I might get caught up in the AI wave eventually. Because I think it will mean I get to lean harder into vocation and work. When I was 6 I didn’t say I want to be a VC or CEO. I said a writer (and NBA player. Some dreams do die.) If the robots do come for me, I suspect I will still write, even more than I do now. And cook. And perhaps perform mediocre stand-up again. And coach and teach and guide people, as best I’m able. My job might change. But my vocation won’t. Neither will my work. And I think if all that does happen, society will figure it out. I think it will be sorta like Covid. Perhaps it won’t happen as quickly as we’d hope, and there will be messiness for sure. But I think we’ll figure it out. And when we do, many more people will remember the seeds of their own vocations. Will become teachers or dancers or musicians or firefighters or florists or poets or artists. Which doesn’t sound too bad to me.

I'd been using Clawdbot and hadn't updated it to openclaw because I was concerned all the changes we had made would be lost. That was a mistake. Finally bit the bullet and did the update. Had to fix a couple things, but MAN is it a lot better.

When I used to interact with powerful or well-known people in my former life, I sometimes would get nervous. What helped: I liked to imagine them at the dentist office. It's the great equalizer. "Yeah Mr. Musk, that's great about the rockets. You really need to floss though."

The idea that political self interest is somehow superior to economic self interest is, at a minimum, not supported by history very well.

Greek yogurt + sugar-free Jello pudding mix is surprisingly good.

Things that will matter (working theory): Short term: - Taste - Domain knowledge - Aggressive GTM - Adaptability - Hope Medium Term: - Austerity - Ownership - Access to capital - Good opsec - Health - Faith Long term: - Appearance - Relationships - Mental health - Love

I worked at a Bennigans in college. End of shift, you had to “marry the ketchups” - combine half filled ones. One dude never did it. I went on a rant about it to my roommate one night. After a long pause, he said, “dude, you need a bigger world.” Best advice I’ve ever heard.

The purpose of a life plan is NOT to execute the plan. It's to give you something to look forward to, and a sense of momentum. If something changes the plan, let it. A river that gets diverted continues to be a river.

I tend to think you're going to see building in public become a lot less common (made sense when you had a 12-18 month head start on the tech), and I think you're going to see team leans HARD into direct sales as the primary distribution channel.