What a '20s Flapper Girl Told Me About Business
It was gold...
I was at a costume party on Saturday night. I dressed up as sort of a cross between Burt Reynolds in Boogie nights; Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider; and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
I sang “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones during the Karaoke section, and then my son-in-law belted out “Hotel California.” Blew me away.
I met a young woman dressed as a Roaring ‘20s flapper girl.
Underneath her wig and Greta Garbo ‘20s fabulousness was a tech startup founder who imparted wisdom that shifted the whole world for me.
The first thing she told me was how she moved to Australia for seven years and launched a startup with money from the same investors who invested in Canva.
Then I started telling her about the Strike Marketing Institute, because she asked: “What do you do?”
I was star-struck. I mean, she was a startup founder with a famous investor. And she had a nice exit!
She couldn’t possibly be interested in what I had to tell her, right?
She was, and she was especially intrigued by the quarterly strike marketing cadence, the virtual summit machine in which a company would actually organize a full-blown summit every quarter.
She said, “You need to read David Sachs’ The Cadence.”
I thought it was a book and searched for it everywhere on Amazon, and then she clarified, “No, it’s just an article on Substack.”
That night, after the party, at about 2:00 a.m., I read the article from beginning to end, and it suddenly dawned on me.
The lightning strike concept is exactly the way every founder needs to organize their business, regardless of whether they’re going to design a new category or not (but I believe that every business needs to design their own category, more on that in another article).
The whole concept of The Cadence is very simple: Instead of just running your business on a daily routine - the daily grind, as I like to think about it - organize it around quarterly launches.
Every three months you build up to one big quarterly launch. The summit becomes the launch event.
Release a new product or new features, and then launch it as Steve Jobs did at his famous launch events.
Your whole company works towards that launch:
Your email marketing
Your social media marketing
Your sales outreach
Etc.
But what you don’t sell a product like a software-as-a-service or an agentic AI solution? What if you’re just a services company, like maybe you’re a fractional CMO or a CFO?
It doesn’t matter. Come up with some kind of new productized service or a new featureto your service.
Do this very quarter.
You avoid the daily grind, the content hamster wheel, the boredom of doing the same thing day in and day out.
You avoid posting on LinkedIn content every day to see what’s moving the needle.
Instead, always have something new you and your audience can look forward to, four times a year.
And in case you’re wondering if all you’re doing is talking about products and features, no..
You’re using the quarterly release as an excuse to invite guest speakers to provide tons of value to your audience.
You’re also generating pipeline…lots of pipeline!
Like what I did in December.
I’m just a one-person show, and I was able to get 416 people registered for my Strike Marketing Summit.
I plan to make this my go-to marketing and business operations approach.
And I seriously recommend you look into it. (Here’s that link to that article again).
So if you ever meet a flapper girl or karaoke singer, if you’l get some life-changing advice.
Are you signed up for the webinar tomorrow?
Tuesday, March 31st, 12 p.m. Central Time. I’m talking about why cold email is dead and how a more human-centric event-based approach is replacing it.
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/cold-dead
See you then!