GarthBox

Walk around the back of almost any business and you’ll find a door nobody photographs. No real sign. A dumpster, a buzzer that half works, a square of concrete stained by a decade of weather. This is the door everything you sell comes through before a customer ever lays eyes on it. The product. The talent. The cash. The suppliers who decide whether you get the good berries or the bruised ones.

The front door gets the money. Warm lighting, a greeter, a thousand tiny experiments on the word “Welcome.” The loading dock gets a padlock and a prayer. (My back door at Garth’s Brew Bar auto-locks which is it’s own sense of symbolism I’ve gotta unpack now…)

The quiet part is that you are already marketing to that loading dock. You just never wrote it down, so you’re doing it on instinct, which usually means doing it poorly.

Every business serves two audiences. There’s the one you sell to, and there’s the one you buy from, hire from, borrow from, or build on top of. Demand and supply. You can leave the second one out of the plan, but you cannot leave it out of reality. A restaurant with a dazzling dining room and a kitchen nobody wants to cook in is a restaurant with a countdown timer hanging over the host stand. A marketplace swimming in buyers with no sellers is a very expensive empty mall.

Plans love to treat supply as a procurement problem. Find it, sign it, move on. But supply has ears. The best chef in town hears how you treat your line cooks. The maker with a waitlist hears how you paid the last vendor. Capital hears everything. Treat your supply side like a vending machine and you get vending-machine supply: whatever’s cheapest, sitting closest to the glass.

So you’re in a tug-of-war. One rope, an audience on each end. Pull too hard for customers and you can squeeze suppliers until the quality you sold them on walks out the back. Pamper supply and forget to actually sell, and you’ve built a beautiful thing nobody buys. The move is not to win the rope. The move is to stop treating it like a fight and start treating both ends like guests you’re courting at the same dinner. (Being able to effectively do this when I worked at marketing for Schneider is what I attribute to Schneider’s ability to rise to an IPO.)

Here are a few others who figured this out, none of them the usual suspects.

Michelin. A tire company in 1900, back when there were fewer than 3,000 cars in all of France, decided the fastest way to sell more tires was to give people reasons to wear them out. So the Michelin brothers printed a free guide telling drivers where to eat and sleep across the country. The customer bought tires. The “supply” was the open road itself, and the restaurants worth driving toward. They grew demand by lavishing attention on the thing that created it. A century later the Michelin Guide is more famous than the tires, which is either the greatest marketing accident in history or the least accidental one.

A24. On paper they sell you a movie ticket. In practice the real recruiting happens at the loading dock, where a director decides who gets to hand out their strange little film. A24 built the brand on the filmmakers, not on itself, handing over creative control and trusting the work to find its people. The audience fell for the logo precisely because the filmmakers fell first. Court the supply of talent, and demand shows up already wearing your merch.

Gymshark. In 2012 it was a teenager sewing gym vests in his mum’s garage with no ad budget and no customers. So he mailed free clothing to fitness YouTubers sitting at 30, 40, 50 thousand subscribers, the ones the big brands ignored. Those creators weren’t customers. They were the supply of attention and credibility. He marketed to that side first, for the cost of shipping, and the customers arrived pre-convinced.

Faire. A wholesale marketplace pairing small makers with the boutiques that stock them. The smart part was noticing each side was terrified of a different thing. So Faire gave retailers net-60 terms and free returns so a shop owner could try a new product without betting the rent, and made listing free for makers, charging only when a genuinely new buyer turned up. One company, two completely different pitches, each aimed at a completely different fear.

Notice what none of them did. None of them split into two brands with two voices. They found the one true thing the business stood for and let it read differently depending on which door you walked through. That’s the whole craft. Positioning that’s strong enough to mean one thing to the person buying and another thing, just as true, to the person you’re buying from.

Which leaves you one piece of homework, and it’s smaller than it sounds. Name your second audience out loud. Not “procurement,” not “vendors.”

The actual humans whose yes you quietly depend on and currently take for granted. Maybe it’s the senior engineers you need to hire before you can promise customers anything real. Maybe it’s the indie suppliers who could sell to your competitor by Friday. Maybe it’s the creators, the landlords, the regulators, the bank. Write down who they are, what they’re afraid of, and what story would make them pick you. You’ll probably find you have a polished answer for the front door and close to nothing for the back…yet.

Stay Positive & How Do You Answer If Someone Asks “Mind If I Leave Through The Back?”

The first real recipe I ever tried to cook repeated three words that have followed me around for years. Season to taste.

To taste. As if I had one. As if somewhere in my mouth lived a calibrated little library of how this dish was supposed to land, and all I had to do was look it up. I stood over the pot holding a box of salt like a man holding a map of a country he has never visited, written in a language he cannot read. (Was it even the right kind of salt?!)

The person who wrote the words had made that dish four hundred times. Their tongue knew the destination. Mine had no idea. And in three breezy syllables they had handed me the single hardest decision in the whole recipe, the one bit of judgment that actually separates food from disappointment, and strolled off assuming I already had what it takes to make it.

That is the quietest failure there is, and you are doing it to someone today. (Maybe even to yourself…)

The onboarding screen that says “just connect your account.” The deck that says “align the team.” The senior marketer who tells the new hire to “make it pop” and walks away feeling generous. Every one of those is season to taste. Every one assumes the reference already lives in the other person’s head. And when the new person freezes at the stove, we decide they are slow, when all we really did was hand them a map in a language we forgot they could not read.

The move is simple and it is the entire job of a professional… Be the one who tells them what it is supposed to taste like.

A lot of advice for young marketers assumes you already know why any of it matters, so it skips straight to the clever part. This won’t.

The unglamorous truth that most experienced people glide right past is that the person who explains is worth more than the person who impresses. Explaining feels junior. Naming the obvious feels like admitting you are not in the club yet. So almost nobody does it. They are all too busy seasoning to taste and quietly assuming you can taste too.

Which is exactly why teaching stands out. Not as a tactic. As a near-vacancy.

Walk into a room full of people performing how much they know, and the one who stops to hand you the actual palate becomes unforgettable in about nine seconds, for the embarrassing reason that they were the only one who bothered.

You wanted to be different. This is the door. Difference is not a louder version of what everyone is already doing. It is doing the plain, useful, slightly tender thing they all decided was beneath them. And the beauty is that you get to… you’re not a book!

It is also the only honest way to build a team. You do not hand a new hire “season to taste” and then grade the salt. (Again, which kind of salt? Pink Himalayan? Blue Persian? Salt precisely picked out of beach sand?)

You stand at the stove and let them taste yours first. You give them the reference, the right salt, and then their own judgment has something to grow from. A team that has been taught the palate goes on to teach it to the customer. A customer who has learned what good actually tastes like will pay for it for the rest of their life. It runs in that order or it does not run at all.

Right now there is someone at the stove holding the salt, convinced that everyone else was simply born knowing how much. They weren’t. You weren’t. I stood there with the box in my hand and no idea, and the only thing that ever fixed it was somebody letting me taste theirs and saying, there, that is what we are aiming for.

Tell them. Say the part you assumed they already had. That is nearly the whole secret of being useful to another person.

Stay Positive & You May Even Find That Taste Is Actually A Feeling

We had a real arsenal ready. Personalized sales sequences. Webinars. A multi-touch drip campaign with the kind of segmentation that makes a marketer feel like a commander pushing little flags around a map. Months of build went into it.

Then, three days after launch, almost a third of the target customers had booked meetings. The webinar hadn’t aired. The clever sequences hadn’t fired. Most of the reps hadn’t even started.

What did the work was a plain notice inside the product. A small rectangle that appeared while people were already in there, doing their jobs. It read like a short news release. No spectacle. Just a knock on a door someone happened to be standing behind. The messaging of it wasn’t even that remarkable; it was a tease to a landing page that was.

Here is the part I keep turning over since it happened… We treat attention like something you go out and capture. You buy it, you chase it, you stage a show grand enough to pull people out of their day. But the cheapest attention in the world is the attention already in the room. The customer was inside the product. We only had to say something where they were standing, instead of mailing (emailing…) it to where we hoped they might be.

The fireworks were not wasted. They earned their keep later, for the folks who needed a second and third nudge. But the first thirty percent came from the least impressive channel we owned. The one nobody screenshots for the case study.

Stay Positive & Build The Show… Just Ring The Doorbell First

I was in a strategy session yesterday, getting cheerfully interrogated about positioning, when I heard myself tell a story I hadn’t reached for in years. A man named Johnny Earle opened two bakeries. No cupcakes. You walk in, the air is warm and smells like vanilla and sugar, you pull open an oven, and inside there are t-shirts. He calls them fakeries. People came in for cake. They left with a shirt and a story they could not stop telling at parties.

The safe read on this is “be quirky, be memorable.” You should ignore that read. It is the read that takes a strange, useful idea and flattens it into a fridge magnet.

The shirts did not sell because the shop was cute. They sold because of the half-second of vertigo between expecting cake and getting cotton. That little gap, that small honest betrayal of what you promised, is the actual product. The shirt is just the thing you carry the feeling out in.

The gap has a name nobody likes to say out loud in a pitch meeting. Tension.

We have spent a decade training the tension out of our work and calling it craft. Smooth onboarding. Frictionless checkout. A homepage so balanced it reads like a hostage statement. And it works, in the sense that nothing breaks and nobody complains.

It also fails, in the sense that nobody remembers you the next morning. Comfort is what people say they want. Friction is what they actually buy, because friction is the only thing that leaves a mark, and memory is just the catalog of marks.

I watched this play out in real numbers this year. The companies pulling away in crowded categories were not the ones with the cleanest value prop. They were the ones whose salespeople opened with some version of “here’s what I think you’re getting wrong,” and only then, once there was a little heat in the room, got around to what they sell.

A CMO I trust told me the thing she loves most in a meeting is being challenged, because at least then something is at stake. Everyone else was sending her case studies. She was deleting them on her walk from her office to the kitchen.

Here is the inconvenient part… Tension cannot be A/B tested into existence.

You can optimize a button color. You cannot optimize courage.

A test will always, given enough rounds, walk you toward the blandest option that nobody hated, because “nobody hated it” is exactly what an average is good at finding.

Tension requires a human being willing to leave a bruise on the page and defend it on Monday. It is a decision, not a result.

I know this because I got caught not doing it.

In that same session I admitted, out loud, that I did not recognize the headline on one of my own landing pages. We had wired up a slick little loop that kept rewriting the copy toward whatever read cleanest, and it did its job beautifully. Every pass sanded a hair more grip off the sentence. Correct, then polished, then smooth, then gone. I had automated a brand voice into a pleasant hum I could no longer pick out of a lineup. The machine was not malfunctioning. Smoothness is its native gravity. Anything left running long enough without a thumb on the scale drifts toward the absence of friction, because friction is the one thing it cannot generate and does not miss.

That is the quiet danger in all of this, and it has very little to do with robots.

The safest sentence in your marketing is usually the one doing the most damage, precisely because it is too agreeable to argue with. It survives every review. It offends no committee. It dies on contact with a real human’s attention and nobody attends the funeral.

We’d be better off building more sentences (ovens?) without the cake.

Stay Positive & “Smooth” Is Simply Slow Disappearance

A director of product marketing told me recently what actually fires her up at work. Not the launch, not the dashboard turning green, not the win itself.

Being challenged.

Somebody walking into the room and leaning on the way she thinks until it bends. She said we should always be challenging our way of thinking, and she said it the way a person names the one meal they’d eat for the rest of their life.

That stuck with me, because the entire business world is selling the opposite. Frictionless onboarding. Seamless handoffs. Zero resistance, zero drag, zero reason to feel anything.

We have built an economy around the removal of tension and then act surprised when so much of the work feels like wet cardboard.

Tension is not a problem to be solved. It is the thing that tells you you’re still alive in the work.

I sent a SaaS founder a point of view on his AI agents, and the part I knew would sting was about their names. Naming is tender ground. You name a thing and you’ve decided what it is, so telling someone the name is off is telling them they saw the thing wrong. I could have padded it. I sent the tension instead, because a point of view with the tension taken out is a greeting card. Pretty, agreeable… forgotten by lunch.

Tension shows up in a lot of costumes. The idea that might not work. The person who presses on how you think. The funny one stuck in a serious room, or the serious one stranded in a funny one. The gap between what we swear is possible and what we quietly do to make it feel possible.

They don’t all serve you the same.

The job is to look at the ones in front of you and pick the one worth the discomfort, the way you choose which hill you’re actually going to run up.

And when none of them show up, you build one.

My wife and I have planted fairies in our daughters’ fairy garden after they fell asleep. Out on the lawn near eleven, pressing little wings into the dirt so the morning would hold proof that something magic had come through in the night. The girls believe. We stage the belief. That isn’t a lie, it’s labor.

Tension works the same way.

If the friction you need won’t arrive on its own, you go out in the dark and you make it, on purpose, with your own hands, for the version of you that has to wake up and keep going.

The harder kind is the tension you didn’t stage. The challenge you never asked for, the POV that lands on you instead of coming from you. That one is more uncomfortable and almost always more useful, and the only real move is to let it in instead of smoothing it over.

Seamless feels like a compliment. Mostly it’s a warning.

Stay Positive & Pick Your Tension (Or Go Out On The Lawn And Plant One)

I got a tattoo yesterday, and somewhere around an hour and a half I realized I was being cared for by an expert, and that none of it was on purpose.

She took her time. She checked in. She geeked out about manga research and tracing she’d done that I never asked for and would never have known about. When a younger artist asked her for feedback, she gave him all of it. When a different one didn’t ask, she leaned over anyway. “Oh, bamboo? I can fuck with bamboo.” The guy lit up like she’d handed him something. She told me early, before I could even think to worry, that she sometimes forgets to knock the deposit off the final, so hold her to it. She pointed me to the water like someone who’d genuinely prefer I not faint on her table.

And the small one, the one that stuck. I passed her on the way to the bathroom and caught her checking her teeth in the mirror. “Gotta make sure I don’t have anything in there.”

None of that was a move. That’s the whole thing.

You cannot fake the signal layer. Care isn’t a posture you decide to assume at the start of a job. It’s a leak. It escapes you in a hundred small involuntary tells, and that leak is exactly why we trust it. The tells are the most honest data in the room because nobody chose to send them.

Brands know the tells are valuable, so they try to manufacture them. The “seamless experience.” The handwritten font that was never near a hand. The bot that chirps “happy to help!” with a little heart on the end. We clock the forgery before we can explain why, because manufactured care has a tell of its own, and the tell is that it’s pointed at us. Real care isn’t pointed anywhere.

It just seeps.

I felt it from the other chair last week. I built a mock pitch to a CISO and a CRO for a company that does not exist, and I had an embarrassing amount of fun inventing the thing. Researched the fake company like it owed me money. Burned a whole day (and my claude tokens) building prototypes so I’d have something live to show instead of something to describe. And the one that actually hurt: I recorded myself and listened back, which is its own quiet horror. They felt it on the call. Not because I told them I cared. Because it leaked out of me the same way it leaked out of my tattoo artist.

The exercise here is not a gentle one.

Take a piece of work, one you’re proud of or one you’re avoiding, and write out the signals.

Not the deliverable.

The tells.

The research nobody asked for. The third draft no one will ever see. The water you pointed to.

The count of signals you land on is the most accurate read you will ever get on how much you actually cared, and it does not negotiate. You can’t talk your way to a higher count. Your gut won’t let you.

Stay Positive & Did You Check Your Teeth Today?

Every list we make does two things to us at once.

It hands us a weight. Twelve things, and now we owe twelve things, and somewhere around item nine we’ve already started rehearsing the apology we’ll give ourselves tonight for the ones we didn’t touch. That’s the accountability talking. Its quieter cousin is guilt, and guilt shows up whether or not we earned it.

But the same list does something kinder in the same breath.

It tells us what matters. It puts the four real things near the top and lets the other eight sit there like furniture. The relief of that is hard to name. It’s the grace of not having to do all of it, handed to us by the very page that’s also trying to make us feel bad.

One object, two weather systems.

For a long time we think the guilt means we’re making the list wrong. Too ambitious. Bad at estimating our own day. So we try shorter lists, honest lists, lists we can actually finish. And we finish them and feel nothing, because a list you complete to the letter is a list that never asked you to choose. No tension = No bliss.

That changes the moment you watch a sales team work, of all things.

No good sales org builds a pipeline equal to its number. They build three or four times the number. If you need to close a million, you carry three or four million in deals you know will not all land. Nobody walks the floor at quarter’s end pointing at the deals that didn’t close and calling them failures. The extra pipeline isn’t debt. It’s the only way to know which deals deserve the phone call. You over-set the top so the bottom can sort itself.

A list is personal pipeline.

We write twelve because writing twelve is how we find the four. The eight we don’t get to aren’t a tab we owe. They’re the cost of knowing. We paid in ink for the privilege of prioritizing, and prioritizing only happens when there’s more on the page than there is in the day.

Which means the guilt has been reading the wrong document. Guilt treats the list like a contract, a thing we signed and then breached. It was never a contract. It’s a forecast. A forecast of a possible self on a generous day. You don’t breach a forecast. You compare against it, you learn the shape of your real capacity, and you forecast again tomorrow with slightly better data.

The trouble is we hand this grace to spreadsheets and almost never to ourselves. We let a sales team carry four times its quota and call it discipline. Then we carry a twelve-item Tuesday and call ourselves behind. Same math, different mercy.

If we’d coach a team to build a pipeline bigger than they can close, we should coach ourselves the same way, and then coach the people who work for us that way too, because an unfinished list is not a character flaw. It’s evidence we aimed.

Stay Positive & Aim Past The Number