I’m oversharing my company’s financials

Have you heard of “build in public”? It’s absolutely terrifying and likely unwise - I’m doing it anyway.

A few weeks ago on LinkedIn I promised to “build in public,” not really knowing what that meant.

My post got a ton of likes and enthusiastic comments. People LOVED the idea.

A couple days and a google search later I realized “building in public” has to include the bad stuff too. And yes, the money.

It has to be real.

You have to understand. We agency owners don’t talk about our failures publicly. We never want to show weakness to our clients - especially to prospects that may be going through our sales process currently.

And when we do talk about money, it’s usually BS intended to make ourselves look good. I’ve certainly been guilty of this.

So building in public is terrifying to me.

But I VERY PUBLICLY committed to do it.

So I do this today with one caveat.

If at any time you think less of me because I shared too much, I take it all back.

Okay, let’s get this over with.

Gold Front Revenue Update

BACKGROUND
2nd Half booked revenue: $552k
2H unbooked capacity: $648k

Unbooked capacity = if I don’t close and book that much work in 2H, Gold Front loses money.

Current pipeline:

Discovery Stage: $868,168
Proposal Stage: $120,000
Contract Stage: $409,100

New deals added this week: $18k
Lost deals this week: None

THE GOOD
For about 6 weeks we’ve had over $1m in pipeline but no new deals closed.

That didn’t change this week.

However. I received a verbal yes on 3 great projects this week - worth $409,100.

That’s almost 2/3 of our unbooked capacity for the rest of 2024.

No contracts are signed yet, so things could change.

THE BAD
Two retainer clients (at $46k revenue/month) cancelled and will be rolling off at the end of August.

This is extremely valuable revenue to us as recurring revenue creates much-needed stability in the business.

The bright side is that retainer clients are less profitable - so if I can fill that unused capacity with project work from September forward, we’ll make more money.

THE UGLY
I came into the beginning of this year with some (lucky) sales wins and a goal of hitting $3.2m in revenue for the year. Still not at our peak of $3.9m in 2022, but decent.

We’ll be lucky if we hit $2.5m this year.

The reason? I failed at marketing.

Last year and Q1 of this year, I wasted a bunch of time creating intricate systems for content marketing (and driving my team crazy.)

I never came through on the execution - I was not posting or publishing enough.

I said I was “busy.”

But I was afraid of rejection.

When I did post, my stuff didn’t resonate with customers and failed to drive interest in Gold Front.

And while it’s good that my “founder brand” content feels like it’s working now, I kick myself for waiting as long as I did.

Note to self: be like The Bear and just let it rip.

Okay! This was a scary update for me to write.

I hope me being up here on this high wire brings some value to your weekend.

Our category is working (but how do you know)?

The creation of a category is the creation of an idea in the mind of your customer. There are two HUGE downsides to this:

1. You don’t control what happens in their mind.

2. You can’t really know what’s happening in their mind.

So why do it at all?

Because the mind is where people actually make buying decisions. It is the main event. Your maximum point of leverage.

Still that leaves we category creators with a big problem. How do we know if our category is working?

Or any positioning for that matter?

You know when customers tell you. Not once, but over and over.

Case in point. One of our CMOs, Steffanie, posted about a recent rebrand we did for her company, Apex, on LinkedIn. Notice the highlighted sentence at the end.

Choosing not just a branding agency (OLD CATEGORY), but a #category design studio (NEW CATEGORY), let my company into development a unique #POV that has repositioned us for future #growth.

That sentence is almost verbatim from our strategy. That’s gold!

Hearing customers actually say the words is the only way you know it’s working.

Then again one quote - as wonderful as Steffanie’s post is - means very little in terms of getting the category to tip in the minds of a large population of customers.

It could easily be an anomaly.

Fortunately for me, I hear more and more feedback from prospects and customers that echo this sentiment. Not everyone gets it - a guy told me this week it was basically a gimmick - but enough do.

If you don’t get feedback like this, something isn’t working.

Either it’s the strategy itself, the marketing or your product. Or all three.

Or maybe you just need to give it time.

You never really know, and that’s part of the fun of category design. When you’re doing it right, it’s more intuition than hard science.

Like everything in life that’s worth doing.

Hey so - I’m here in Santa Barbara, for a little summer trip, and now I hear Ray and Eve splashing in the pool.

That’s my cue to hit publish.

I’ll see you next week!