Here’s an uncomfortable truth I’ve been saying to clients for years, usually right before they hire me: if the best thing you can say about your business is that you do good work, you’ve already lost.
Not because the work doesn’t matter. It does. But “good work” is the table stakes, not the differentiator. It’s a global market out there. Somebody will always do it better. Somebody will always do it cheaper. And somebody will always be desperate enough to do it for free. The moment you compete on your services – on the deliverable, the execution, the thing anyone with a laptop and a subscription can now produce – you’ve signed up to be a commodity. You’ve self-commoditized.
And here’s the part that should keep you up at night: most businesses do this to themselves. Voluntarily. Enthusiastically. They build their entire pitch around being faster, sharper, more affordable versions of everyone else – and then act surprised when the only lever a prospect pulls is price.
The execution is not the value
I talk to a lot of brilliant strategists and creatives. The ones thriving right now – even in a brutal market – almost never lead with what they make. They lead with how they think.
One designer I spoke with put it perfectly. The folks struggling, he said, see themselves as a cog in the machine. The folks winning are trying to build the machine itself. Same skills. Same tools. Completely different business. One is waiting for the leads they’ve relied on for decades to magically reappear. The other is out there, hitting the pavement, watching what works, and pivoting fast when it doesn’t.
That’s the whole game. The execution – the landing page, the funnel, the deck, the campaign – is the most commoditized thing in the entire transaction. AI does it now. A certified platform admin does it now. A legion of order-takers trained on the same five tactics does it now, identically, across every company in your category.
What can’t be commoditized is the gray matter. The strategy. The thinking. The planning. The ability to tell a client what they need instead of taking an order for what they want. That’s where the value lives, and it’s the one thing nobody can knock off.
The order-taker trap
Want to know why so many agencies are failing right now? They became order-takers. The client asked for HubSpot, so they sold HubSpot. The client asked for lead gen, so they ran lead gen. Even when there was nothing underneath it to make lead gen actually work. Nobody told the client the truth, because the whole model was built on resale and conversions, not on solving the actual problem.
I lived a version of this. I had a client recently who kept insisting on lead gen. Kept insisting. And I finally said: you don’t have anything to make it work. You hired me because you tried all the tactics and they failed. So stop telling me to do the tactic. Let’s build the thing the tactic needs. He came around eventually, but the instinct to reach for the tool before the strategy is everywhere. It’s the default setting of an entire industry.
The tools and tactics change every eighteen months. The psychology of why a human resonates with a brand has not changed in 200,000 years. Guess which one is worth building a business on.
So what do you actually do?
You get specific about what you give a shit about – and what your customers give a shit about. That’s not a soft question. It’s the most strategically important one you can ask, because the answer is the only thing that separates you from the commodity pile.
You stop selling the deliverable and start selling the judgment. You make it about what’s best for the customer and the brand’s future, not about the artifact you’re handing over this week. And you get comfortable being an easy “no” for the wrong people, so you can be an obvious “yes” for the right ones.
Because here’s the thing nobody competing on price wants to admit: the strategy, the thinking, the planning – that’s the business. Everything else is just execution. And execution alone will always, always be a race to the bottom.
Don’t enter the race. Change the game.
