What I Think Actually Gets Someone’s Attention
Hi all 👋
Growth is the one thing every business has in common, no matter the industry. So this week I want to dig into a piece of it that I think gets skipped over.
Most people running a business can't really tell you how they land new clients, unless growth is literally their job. I get that part; growth isn't their day job, so the fuzziness makes sense. So maybe a more useful question to ask is: what actually makes you respond when a stranger cold emails or cold calls you? That one should be easier; it's not about their business, it's about them.
Ask most people that, and the answer's close to unanimous. They don't. They are inundated by outreach and simply don't respond. So the real question that we need to answer, for the success and growth of all our businesses, is: If cold doesn't work, how do we scale?
Think about the concept of old school is new school. Refocus on relationships; look into things like dropping into someone's office unexpectedly with a coffee (remember when we used to do this?), maintaining in-person connections, sending physical packages in the mail... Whatever earns someone's attention has to land before the pitch does.
Attention's only step one, though. From there, you still need action, you still need information, you still need value, or none of it turns into anything.
Here's what I want to try instead of guessing on my own: hit reply and tell me the last thing that actually got you to respond to someone you didn't already know.
If enough of you weigh in, I'll pull the real patterns into a future issue; we'd probably all get there faster learning from each other than guessing alone.
What's Happening in AI
This one's worth taking seriously; it's primary Fed data.
I read the New York Fed's latest survey of regional businesses. AI use jumped to 61% of service firms and 51% of manufacturers this year, up from 25% and 16% two years ago.
The part that actually caught me, though, was that despite the surge, layoffs tied to AI stayed rare. 4% of service firms, zero manufacturers. Retraining is the dominant response by a wide margin.
So the fear driving a lot of boardroom hesitation right now, that AI adoption automatically means headcount cuts, mostly isn't matching what's actually happening. But I'd push back just as hard on the opposite claim, that AI never touches headcount at all. That's not true either.
The AI and jobs conversation keeps getting stuck between two exaggerated poles, mass displacement on one side, pure augmentation on the other. From what I'm seeing, the honest answer is neither. It's task-specific. Some tasks get eliminated, most get reshaped, and treating it as one universal outcome in either direction is how a leader ends up misjudging their own workforce plan.
This Week's Case Study
Hiring volume exposes broken processes faster than almost anything else in a business. One client had two onboarding categories, and every new starter meant HR reading through both sets of documents by hand, pulling out the details, and keying them into the system one at a time. Retype the same detail enough times and eventually a number gets flipped. Hiring was picking up faster than the paperwork could keep pace.
We built an automated workflow around the two categories they already had: new starter details come in, a document-understanding tool reads the actual paperwork, pulls what matters, and enters it directly.
- Onboarding runs about 65% faster per new hire
- Roughly half an hour less reading and retyping for every person who walks through the door
- Same headcount, same process, a lot less manual entry
→ Read the full case study.
A Useful Resource
One question I get quite often is: "How do I know if a process is actually worth automating?"
That's why we built the Administrative Tax Calculator. It shows you how much you're paying premium salaries to do low-value work, chasing updates, manual entry, bridging gaps between systems. Before you hire another person, see how much you're already losing to broken processes.
That's it for this week.
— Robbie
Get the latest tech news in your inbox
Hi all 👋
Growth is the one thing every business has in common, no matter the industry. So this week I want to dig into a piece of it that I think gets skipped over.
Most people running a business can't really tell you how they land new clients, unless growth is literally their job. I get that part; growth isn't their day job, so the fuzziness makes sense. So maybe a more useful question to ask is: what actually makes you respond when a stranger cold emails or cold calls you? That one should be easier; it's not about their business, it's about them.
Ask most people that, and the answer's close to unanimous. They don't. They are inundated by outreach and simply don't respond. So the real question that we need to answer, for the success and growth of all our businesses, is: If cold doesn't work, how do we scale?
Think about the concept of old school is new school. Refocus on relationships; look into things like dropping into someone's office unexpectedly with a coffee (remember when we used to do this?), maintaining in-person connections, sending physical packages in the mail... Whatever earns someone's attention has to land before the pitch does.
Attention's only step one, though. From there, you still need action, you still need information, you still need value, or none of it turns into anything.
Here's what I want to try instead of guessing on my own: hit reply and tell me the last thing that actually got you to respond to someone you didn't already know.
If enough of you weigh in, I'll pull the real patterns into a future issue; we'd probably all get there faster learning from each other than guessing alone.
What's Happening in AI
This one's worth taking seriously; it's primary Fed data.
I read the New York Fed's latest survey of regional businesses. AI use jumped to 61% of service firms and 51% of manufacturers this year, up from 25% and 16% two years ago.
The part that actually caught me, though, was that despite the surge, layoffs tied to AI stayed rare. 4% of service firms, zero manufacturers. Retraining is the dominant response by a wide margin.
So the fear driving a lot of boardroom hesitation right now, that AI adoption automatically means headcount cuts, mostly isn't matching what's actually happening. But I'd push back just as hard on the opposite claim, that AI never touches headcount at all. That's not true either.
The AI and jobs conversation keeps getting stuck between two exaggerated poles, mass displacement on one side, pure augmentation on the other. From what I'm seeing, the honest answer is neither. It's task-specific. Some tasks get eliminated, most get reshaped, and treating it as one universal outcome in either direction is how a leader ends up misjudging their own workforce plan.
This Week's Case Study
Hiring volume exposes broken processes faster than almost anything else in a business. One client had two onboarding categories, and every new starter meant HR reading through both sets of documents by hand, pulling out the details, and keying them into the system one at a time. Retype the same detail enough times and eventually a number gets flipped. Hiring was picking up faster than the paperwork could keep pace.
We built an automated workflow around the two categories they already had: new starter details come in, a document-understanding tool reads the actual paperwork, pulls what matters, and enters it directly.
- Onboarding runs about 65% faster per new hire
- Roughly half an hour less reading and retyping for every person who walks through the door
- Same headcount, same process, a lot less manual entry
→ Read the full case study.
A Useful Resource
One question I get quite often is: "How do I know if a process is actually worth automating?"
That's why we built the Administrative Tax Calculator. It shows you how much you're paying premium salaries to do low-value work, chasing updates, manual entry, bridging gaps between systems. Before you hire another person, see how much you're already losing to broken processes.
That's it for this week.
— Robbie
