A manifesto.
What I believe about building B2B companies, after twenty years of doing it.
Most B2B growth problems look like product problems, or people problems, or market problems. But they are almost always visibility problems. And they show up in one of three ways.
The first is product visibility. Buyers cannot buy what they cannot see. If your positioning is fuzzy, your offer is commercially illegible, or your website was built by someone who never understood your business – the best buyers in your market will find someone simpler. Not better. Simpler.
The second is people visibility. Teams cannot grow what they cannot see. If managers do not know what their own people can actually do, they hire outside for skills already sitting three desks away. The inventory of capability is invisible, and so it gets wasted.
The third is commercial visibility. Founders cannot scale what they cannot see. If you cannot tell which partners are working, which customer profiles are converting, and which campaigns are compounding – you make decisions on whichever signal is loudest, not whichever signal is most accurate. You double down on noise. You quietly defund the things that were about to work.
I have done every one of these. So have most founders I respect.
The reason the visibility problem is so hard to solve is that it does not feel like a visibility problem when you are inside it. It feels like a product problem. Or a talent problem. Or a market problem. So founders fix the wrong layer. They rebuild products that did not need rebuilding. They hire headcount they did not need. They give up on markets they did not need to give up on.
Most of the wasted years in my own career came from fixing the wrong layer.
"Grit without visibility is the most expensive thing a founder can have."
I also believe this: Grit without visibility is the most expensive thing a founder can have. You can run very fast, for very long, in the wrong direction, on genuine conviction. I have done it more than once. Grit is real. But grit plus visibility is how companies actually compound. One without the other is wasted.
I have done this more than once. Grit is real. But grit plus visibility is how companies actually compound. One without the other is wasted.
Visibility is fixable. It is not a capital problem. It is not a luck problem. It is a clarity problem. And clarity can be built – it just has to be pursued with rigour.
This is what I have built the rest of my work around.
Up Strategy Lab exists to make B2B companies and their products visible. MuchSkills exists to make people and their skills visible inside organisations. Two companies. The same problem. The same belief.
If it sounds like the problem you are trying to solve – everything else on this site is an application of it.
The Visibility Edge is where I think out loud about all of this. Sent when there is something worth your time. +7,000 doers already read it.
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