5 keys to collaborate effectively with founders
When you imagine what life as a consultant is like, there’s a sense of glory that comes attached to it. A certain lifestyle where you pick your projects, and the feeling of getting a cold email asking to work specifically with you… it’s like Mastercard. Priceless.
Well, that’s precisely what happened when Amar got in touch late last year and asked if we could work together. He was launching an editorially-powered business, and needed help writing their inaugural deep dive on brand building. The result is now live!
The topic was meaty: brand building advice, but for the marketing majority. Not the big brands that everyone already reveres. But everyone else who also does impactful work but doesn’t have the cash or capacity to have friends in high media places, and therefore goes unnoticed by the rest of us.
The report is free and i encourage you to read it, but thought i’d share a few thoughts on what it was like to work together on a writing and editing capacity, directly with an ambitious founder.
Work with half the puzzle. Amar came to me with a vision of the marketing majority being underserved, the first topic, and a bunch of research notes he’d already done. But beyond that, it was all up for grabs, and plenty more to come. We couldn’t build the plane just yet, but we could decide broadly what it might look like on paper. I can imagine some folks might get precious about having all the pieces together before starting, but we couldn’t afford that. But as long as we had at least 20/30% of the pieces to begin with, we could start. So we did.
HIIT but for WoW. I don’t hate many things, but i can say with some certainty i probably hate the big reveal that agencies like to glorify with… well, everything. And although clients might not hate it, i’ve never met one that actually liked it. And when you work with a) a founder, b) of a startup, who c) was building as they went, you don’t have the luxury of a big reveal. You have, instead, the levity of frequent contact with each other, in sprint-like fashion, so that you can both be held accountable for the work you can control, and check in on the stuff to come. High Intensity Interval Training, but make it Ways of Working (hey, it might become a thing!).
The pride of craft beats the shame of critique. This is a personal note, and testament to Amar for always being extremely generous with the positive feedback and tactful with the negative one, but there is something liberating about working with someone whose main interest is getting to the best possible creative product (yes, a report is a creative product if you do it well – i mean, have you looked at this design beauty?). I always need to check with myself when my work gets critiqued, because it’s about the work, not about my worth. But the collaborative nature of this, plus the fact we couldn’t afford to dwell on negatives and needed to fit our agendas on 30-minute sprint sessions, meant what was more important was getting the craft right. It was never about Amar’s perspective versus mine, it was our shared perspective versus a block of stone which we were insisting could become a sculpture. And no, i did not just compare a report to Michaelangelo’s David. Or maybe just a bit.
Modular everything, baby. Frameworks and models get a bad rep. Sure, they don’t replace good thinking, but they’re pretty good places to keep checking where the thinking needs more work. With this project, we had a bunch of interviews and quotes and studies and links, but plenty more stuff to come and clear gaps. My brain always thinks in building blocks, so i took a page from Ryan Holiday’s supposed writing process and just wrote about what we had, and left very obvious placeholders (literally entire paragraphs that were just ‘insert case study which is like Liquid Death but not Liquid Death’) in the hope that the writing flow wouldn’t suffer. And, if i may say so myself, in the end it turned out ok, because we broadly had a mental model of the beats the report needed to hit, and then just needed to find the pieces that filled the gaps. I don’t think we talk about modularity in strategic narratives enough because we think it makes our jobs too ‘rationalise this’, but sometimes the role is to rationalise something you feel instinctively is probably right / not wrong. Hate the game!
Confidence not just knowledge. Because, effectively, i am in the service business, there’s a degree of sometimes thinking that the customer is always right in their challenges. And of course, someone with good judgement will often have a point. But that doesn’t mean you can’t justify your decisions, not by offering more knowledge, but by offering more confidence around the knowledge that’s already there. The difference between a founder and an employee or middle manager is that they ask questions to get to the truth, instead of just getting to something they wonder if their bosses might ask. In that case, the answer to “why have we done this?” is not “we can do more”, but rather “because of these reasons”. This feels like a basic point, but i wonder if sometimes when working with founders we think they think they always need to be right. In reality, they’re responding to what they see. Your justification isn’t about proving them wrong — it’s about making them say, ‘Ah, I get it now.’ This skill takes practice.
Anywho, i don’t know if this is useful, but being the second time i worked directly into a founder and at pace, it felt worth reflecting on lessons learned (build in public yo!). You should definitely read the full deep dive! If you love it, you can thank Amar. If you hate it, that’s on me. But i think you’ll definitely get value from it.
