Big Pops
If you’ve been watching closely, you may have noticed a change in Permanent Equity’s content strategy. While we’ve always been passionate about sharing thoughts and ideas with the world, there are lots of ways in which to do that and we have tried (and failed but also succeeded) nearly all of them.
If you go back to this time last year, our attempted cadence was generally a podcast or an essay per week that resulted in a semi-regular topically-driven email. While this was fine, the metrics told us that while we were engaging existing audience, we weren’t reaching much, if any, new audience. And, qualitatively, it felt like we were forcing things to fit the calendar, publishing even if we didn’t have anything compelling to say, but also not giving ourselves the time to really dive deep when we did.
So we all got in a room and asked what is a compelling, measurable, and achievable stretch goal for our content? What we came up with is that we wanted to publish content that would get us invited to speak somewhere. The reasoning was that if this happened it probably meant that we had reached new audience, produced something that had compelled someone to reach out to us in a meaningful way, and opened up a new avenue for opportunity.
That was why we made the decision to refocus energy and resources on one very in-depth piece.
But!
We also didn’t want the world to forget about us while we were diving deep.
When it comes to negotiating deals, we love the middle ground, but when it comes to risk management and strategic initiatives, we generally loathe it. That’s the barbell; the idea that there is no medium risk nor medium effort.
The way that manifested itself in our content strategy is that we stopped publishing kinda long podcasts and essays weekly and started doing something daily and punchy (that’s this) complemented by something infrequent and unpredictable, but remarkable (that was “Do Diligence,” the open sourcing of our diligence process that our CEO Brent called the best piece of content we’ve ever produced).
So now we’ve got a steady state with the potential for big pops, and that feels more right.
That has got me thinking about how we might apply this concept to our businesses. In other words, is there something that we could be doing that’s small, frequent, and relatively straightforward that would cover our costs, freeing up resources to do something big, but infrequent, that when it happened would drop straight to the bottom line? Or, if it’s a more volatile business that already trafficks in big pops, is there a service line we could start that would make the time in between pops less stressful?
Because it’s important to go big, but you also never want the world to forget you exist.
– By Tim Hanson
