Thank you. We will be in touch shortly.
Oops! Something went wrong - please email andrew@singlthread.co.uk
Neither is your business. Which is why almost none of the advice you read this week is going to fit it.
That should be obvious. It is also the bit almost no advice you read this week is taking into account.
There has never been more confident, articulate, well-edited certainty on the internet about what your business should do next. Five steps to fix your funnel. Three things every founder gets wrong about hiring. The seven words that doubled my conversion rate. The framework I used to grow from zero to seven figures. The carousel of nine principles. The hot take on why everyone else's hot take is wrong. Most of it is real, in the sense that it worked for someone, somewhere, once. Some of it is genuinely thoughtful. A lot of it is just confidence dressed up.
The problem is not the volume. The problem is what the volume implies - that there is, somewhere, a generic right answer for your business that someone else has already worked out, and your job is to find the post that contains it. There is no such post. There never will be. Your business is not a generic version of the writer's business. It is yours. Built by you. Running on the operating instinct you, specifically, have built up over the years you, specifically, have lived. Carrying the scars you, specifically, have collected.
Ten thousand founders could read the same article about positioning this morning and walk away with ten thousand different actions to take. Most of those actions would be slightly wrong. Not because the article was bad. Because the article was generic and the founder is not.
takes
That seems obvious when I write it down. It is not obvious when you are scrolling at half-past nine on a Sunday evening, wondering why everyone else seems to have figured something out you have not.
The reason no playbook has fixed your business is not that you have not found the right playbook. It is that you are not a playbook. There is no formula that fits all founders, because no founder is generic. What you are missing is not advice. It is perspective. And almost nobody on the internet is in the business of giving you perspective - most of them are in the business of selling you their formula.
Okay. Longer version.
Most of the advice in front of you right now is being written by people who do not know your business exists. They do not know the reason you started. They do not know the customer you are quietly thinking about as you read this. They do not know the hire that did not work last year, the partner who left, the invoice that has not been paid, the line in your last pitch that you secretly do not believe.
They cannot. Because you are unique. Every founder I have ever sat with - fifty-plus sessions over the last three years, sixteen restaurant openings before that has arrived in the room with a different anchor. A different story of how they got here. A different reason for starting. A different scar. A different lived definition of who their customer is. A different operating instinct, built up over different rooms, in different cities, under different pressures.
That uniqueness is not decorative. It is the actual shape of the problem. A piece of advice is generic by design. A founder is specific by definition. The two never quite line up. They cannot.
I went for a long walk over the weekend, partly because I needed to and partly because I have been trying to work out, again, how to describe what I do for a living. Three years of strategy sessions, three years of writing about brand work, and I still hear myself reach for a slightly different sentence every time someone at a dinner asks. None of them quite work. So I came back from the walk and I changed my LinkedIn banner. The newline on it is "point of view specialist." I made the title up. As far as I can tell, nobody else uses it. Which felt about right, because the act of making it up was the thing this letter has been trying to land.
The word I kept circling back to was perspective. The thing missing from nearly every business problem I am asked to look at is not advice. It is perspective. And the structural issue with perspective is that the founder cannot see their own business from outside themselves, because they are inside themselves. Of course they cannot. That is not a personal failure. It is a structural condition that comes with running the thing.
Perspective is not a viewpoint. Perspective is the act of seeing the same thing from somewhere you have never stood before.
The reason it is so hard to do alone is that you are the same person standing in the same place all day. Your perspective on your business is, almost by definition, the perspective you already have. You can read another article. You can take another course. You can absorb another framework. None of those move you out of your own head.
What moves you out of your own head is a person - or, at a push, a tool that takes the things you already know and arranges them into a picture you have not seen before. Not new information. New angle.
Sixteen restaurant openings taught me that the operator who can do this on their own is rare. I am not one of them. Most of the founders I have worked with are not either. The rest of us need someone in the room.
This is the bit I want to be honest about, because three years and fifty-plus sessions in, I still cannot reliably do it on my own business. SingleThread itself has had its perspective fixed by other people more times than I want to admit. I sat with a former mentor in February who, in twenty minutes, asked me three questions I should have been asking myself for the last six months. None of the questions contained advice. All of them contained an angle. The answers were already in me. He just stood me where I could see them.
That is what perspective does. It does not give you new content. It rearranges the content you already have into the picture that was always there.
I cannot make this point without a kitchen example. Years ago, I was opening a place in Accra, the kitchen was over budget, the menu was not laning in tastings, and I was working sixteen-hour days trying to fix all of it at once. Somebody walked in - I genuinely cannot remember now whether it was a financier, a mentor or a friend who happened to drop by sat with me in the empty dining room, and asked one question.
If you were just consulting on this - no skin in the game, no payroll to make, no one waiting on a deck what would you tell yourself to do?
I had been the operator for so long I had forgotten to be the consultant. The answer to the question was obvious within about two minutes. The kitchen was not the problem. The kitchen could be patched. The thing the customer was going to remember was the menu and the front-of-house culture, and I was burning days on the wrong part of the building.
That single sentence of perspective changed how I worked for the next six weeks. I have thought about the question almost every week since. It is the question I now ask founders in the first hour of a session. It is also easily, the most useful question I have ever stolen.
You can use it on your own business right now. It will not work as well as having someone sat opposite you. But it will work better than the next thread you read.
I have not been very practical in these letters lately, and looking back, the original ones were full of practical bits before I drifted into thinking out loud. So here are three exercises you can run on yourself this week. They are designed to give you a slice of what a session with someone like me would give you. Not the whole thing. A slice.
One. The Accra question.
G the sit somewhere quiet, closethe laptop, and answer this on paper, not in a doc. If you were a consultant being paid to look at your business — no payroll, no investors, no skin in the game — what three things would you tell the founder to stop doing, and what one thing would you tell them to start? Most founders are uncomfortable answering this honestly. The discomfort is the diagnostic. If you feel it, you are working on the right question.
Two. The description test.
not work. Find someone who does notwork in your industry, does not know your business, and does not owe you anything. A neighbour. An old friend. Your mother. Describe what you do for a living in as few sentences as you can. Then ask them to describe back what they think your business is. Note where they land. Note especially the words they use that are not the words you used. The gap between your description and theirs is the gap your customer is also navigating, every time they encounter you.
Three. The homepage stranger test.
homepage inOpen your homepage in an incognito window. Read it as if you have never heard of you. Read it the way you read a competitor's homepage when a friend forwards it to you. Then write down, in one sentence, what you think this business does and who it is for.If your sentence is not the sentence you would want a stranger to write, thegap is the cost of poor visibility, paid daily by people who never bother messaging you to tell you they were confused.
None of these is revolutionary. They do not need to be. Perspective rarely is. Perspective is what you already know, looked at from a place you do not normally stand.
I am not going to pretend I am writing this letter without a commercial interest. I make my living doing the thing I have just described -sitting opposite founders, asking the questions that move them out of their own heads, helping them rearrange what they already know into the picture that was always there. Sometimes that takes a session. Sometimes it takes a weekend. Sometimes it takes a year.
The commercial mechanic, in two sentences. There is now a sixty-minute video-guided sprint called The Foundation that runs the same method on your own business at your own desk for £295, and it is about to open for early access. The Brand Visibility Diagnosis - which sits in front of it is the free version, ten minutes, no pitch, and you walk away with a clearer view of your own positioning, whether or not you ever speak to me again.
The reason I am telling you that here, plainly, instead of dressing it up, is that it would be slightly dishonest to write a letter about the cost of generic advice and then end it with a generic CTA. So I am ending it the only way that feels true. The work I do is to help founders see their own business clearly. I cannot do it for free at scale. The smallest free version of it is the diagnostic, and the rest of it costs money.
If a stranger sat opposite you tomorrow morning and asked you the Accra question - if you were consulting on your own business right now, what three things would you stop doing, and what one thing would you start? Could you answer it cleanly?
If yes, you are doing better than most of the founders I sit with. Send the answer to a friend who will push back on it. The accountability of someone hearing you say it out loud will do more for the business this quarter than the next six articles you read.
If no, that is where the work is. And the work is not on LinkedIn.
See you next week, probably with something a bit shorter.
Cheers,
Marcus
P.S. To answer the question I have been asked twice this fortnight - yes, the newsletter is staying, and yes, it is going fortnightly for the next quarter at least. I had been trying to wind it down. The read rates and the new subscribers every issue have made it embarrassing to argue with the data. So if you forwarded this to someone who might enjoy it, thank you. To the new arrivals - welcome, this is what you signed up for.
P.P.S. The Brand Visibility Diagnosis link, plainly: https://brandvisibility.scoreapp.com/.The Foundation early access list: Join the waitlist. The two are connected — the Diagnosis is the free version of thequestion The Foundation answers in full.