GarthBox

Some mornings before my day job starts, I’m under a table at Garth’s Brew Bar, prying loose gum somebody left in long-term parking. Then the bathrooms. Then the floors. Then whatever patch of wall took a hit and needs paint.

By the time the doors open, I’m gone.

Every so often somebody tells me, “I rarely see you at the bar.” It lands like a small accusation. Where have you been. Don’t you care about this place.

The reflex is to start explaining, and showing up more wouldn’t help. If they saw me behind the taps every night, a quieter question would arrive and sit heavier. Is everything okay over there? An owner who never leaves looks like a bar that can’t afford anyone else.

It feels like a lose-lose. It’s a scoreboard read upside down.

“I rarely see you” means the night went fine without me. Somebody holding a Cicerone Beer Server Certificate poured your beer the right way, remembered what you mentioned last time, and maybe used it to slide something extra your way. My absence is just their work, done well enough to disappear.

Customers judge the health of a business by whatever proxy is lying around… the owner’s face, the parking lot, how often there’s a discount.

You rarely get to pick the proxy. You can hand them a better one.

The answer I want to give points straight at the people behind the bar. “You’ve been seeing this place at its best. That’s them.” (You’ll still catch me at the collab releases and the anniversary party. Those nights give me a reason to be there, and I’d hate to miss them.)

A bar that only works when you can see the owner isn’t a business. It’s a job with a liquor license.

They’re right, though. They rarely see me. I’m under the tables, and the bar is in better hands than mine.

Stay Positive & We’ll All Take Credit For Cleanest Bathrooms In Madison

Two goals into a Wild game and the whole building starts leaning. Linemates quit shooting and start feeding him. Up in the cheap seats, a few thousand hats get loosened at the brim.

The hat trick has gravity. It also mostly doesn’t happen. (I’d have sworn two goals almost always turns into three. In the season Gretzky scored 87, he had two or more in 24 games and found the third in 10 of them. The hats stayed on more nights than they came off.)

Watch the shifts instead of the scoreboard. The guy sitting on two has also threaded a couple of clean passes through traffic and finished a hit that changed who wanted to go into the corner next. Each one greases the next. Two good passes and the third leaves his stick before he’s thought about it.

Hockey is one of the few sports that writes some of this down. A goal can carry two assists, so the scoresheet credits the pass before the pass. Basketball liked the idea enough to steal the name. Over there, that pass is a hockey assist.

A good coach lives in that second assist.

They catch you on the way to the bench and name the small thing. That pass to the weak side. Do it again. The scoreboard announces the goals on its own. Nobody announces the shift that made them possible.

Marketing runs on hat tricks. The launch, the campaign that pops.

The game gets decided somewhere quieter: a brief that finally made sense, a subject line that landed, a rep who used your one-pager without being asked twice. None of those get hats. They’re gone by Thursday…

If the person above you isn’t calling those out, sign a free agent coach. My AI is already set up to challenge my thinking before it answers me. The same tool can be told to catch the passes, daily instead of at the Friday readout, and it sits in more of your threads than any boss could.

Make it stingy, though. A coach who cheers every shift is just a fan with a whistle. Ask it for the one specific thing you did today that makes tomorrow easier, and make it tell you why.

Then take the harder shift yourself. Somebody on your team made a pass this week that never hit the scoresheet. You can still be the official scorer.

Stay Positive & Keep Your Hat On, Celebrate The Pass Before The Pass

My daughters have been drawing us a lot of bookmarks lately. They’re great bookmarks. I’d put them up against anything hanging by a checkout lane.

Now picture a grocery store that takes them as payment. You slide one across the counter, the cashier tucks it into the drawer between the twenties like it has always lived there, and you walk out with eggs and a baguette.

I’d never shop there again. Not because of the art… the art is excellent. Because I’d start wondering what else that register is willing to accept. The bookmark doesn’t lose an ounce of value at that counter. The store does.

Every option you put in front of a customer is evidence about your judgment. Teams spend months making the new thing good. The customer spends a few seconds deciding what it says about you, and the quality of the thing barely gets a vote.

Even people who already own crypto, the ones who need the least convincing, say they’d rather spend it through a company they already trust. A currency invented to make the middleman unnecessary, and its biggest fans keep asking for one. Trust doesn’t transfer to a new thing. It gets lent to it, by whoever’s name is over the door.

Nobody has tried to pay in crypto at Garth’s Brew Bar yet. If I could flip it on tomorrow, I would, and we’d make a real fuss over the first person to use it. (The beertenders would get a story out of it. They’d earn it.) That first round won’t run on the coin. It’ll run on whoever is pouring, explaining something strange with a straight face.

Whatever trust a new option spends, it spends theirs first.

Stay Positive & I’m Still Not Taking Bookmarks As Payment, But We Will Give Them Out To Those We See Reading A Book At The Bar

A thirty-minute conversation on Thursday’s calendar has already eaten Monday. It’s chewing through Tuesday now with its mouth open, one eye on Wednesday.

And you’re tired. Shoulders-up-around-your-ears tired, from work that hasn’t happened yet.

From an effort standpoint, a tough conversation is one of the easiest things you’ll do all week. You sit down. You say the sentence. The whole thing fits inside a cup of coffee… and somehow the weight of it has been riding shotgun since Sunday.

The tired is honest, though. You have been working. You’ve had that conversation nine or ten times already, in the shower, at red lights, at the kitchen table after the kids are down. Every run is against a stand-in who is meaner than the real person, remembers every mistake you’ve made, and never once lets you finish a sentence. Each rerun costs a full emotional rep. You’re worn out from a job you keep doing in the wrong room.

Dread doesn’t scale with the size of the work. It scales with the size of the gap.

So when you catch it, skip the pep talk and shrink the gap. Pull the conversation closer, same day if the other person can take it, because the stand-in bills by the hour. If you lead anybody, watch your openers. “Can we talk Friday?” sent on a Monday hands someone four days of reruns with no script. Put the actual subject in the first message. Hard news with a label on it weighs less than a blank.

The other move is to hand someone half of it before you walk in. Before some meetings I’ll Slack a teammate one line: can you please challenge my thinking on this call? The pushback was probably coming anyway. Now it’s invited, we both show up ready, and it’s hard to take personally something you asked for in writing. The stand-in only has one move, the ambush. Ask for the ambush and he’s out of material.

Buyers carry the same weight. Plenty of deals die in the gap between “this is better” and the switching conversation with the CFO, rehearsed in a parked car for a quarter until the renewal date decides for them. Write the first two lines of that conversation for them.

The real person is usually kinder than the one you’ve been arguing with since Sunday. That one was you, doing an impression.

Stay Positive & This Applies To Any Meaningful Work, Not Just Conversations

Spent or invested.

I or we.

Have to or get to.

Morning or good morning.

She did X or we’re working on X.

We may not always notice the choice of words in the moment, but receivers feel it. And feelings compound.

From my experience to date, it takes about 10-15 word choices… that is, improved language around the poor word choices we use the most… to notice a meaningful shift in our world.

It’s easier than ever to record yourself and give it to AI and ask where you can lean more into positive word choices that resonate.

Stay Positive & Crutch Words Have Nothing On These Crippling Ones

We rearranged the girls’ playroom and they walked back into it like tourists. Same toys. Same walls. Nothing new came through the front door (I would like it on the record that I bought nothing). We just moved things around, and the whole mood of the room tipped, and toys that had been sitting there like furniture were suddenly the most important objects in the house.

Kids don’t play with the best toy. They play with the one in front of them.

The toy at the back of the shelf was never boring. It was behind something.

That is the entire job of positioning, and the job is sitting right there in the word. Where a thing sits decides whether anyone picks it up. When a campaign goes stale, the reflex is to buy more inventory: a new channel, a new offer with a new font. Usually the inventory is fine. The arrangement fell asleep.

At a marketing offsite, we ran a worst idea ever challenge. A whole group pitching the most terrible things they could think of, on purpose, out loud. It is very easy to look at that and see a room full of salaried adults manufacturing garbage, since every idea in it was designed to die there.

Except a truly terrible idea is hard to write without knowing exactly what the customer can’t stand. A great bad idea is a precise map of somebody’s fear, drawn upside down. In a normal brainstorm everybody is guarding their name, so the ugly true thing about the customer stays politely in their pocket. Ask for the worst and people hand it over gladly…

Then we flipped them. Same knowledge, turned over. One of them is on its way to becoming a real campaign.

The worst ideas came out of the same heads as the polite ones. Nothing new came into that room either. Everything the campaign needed was already at the table.

It was just facing the wall.

Stay Positive & Disruption Can Be A Positive Occurrence

Twenty-four beers, twenty-four days, and a bouncer at the door who never lets the same brewery in twice.

That’s the GBB advent calendar. This was its fifth year, and it sold out. We didn’t invent the idea, either. Beer advent calendars turn up everywhere once November hits, which is exactly why ours works. A countdown made of beer needs no tutorial. Somebody else paid to teach that lesson years ago, and a shelf full of other boxes keeps teaching it for free. So our one rule (no repeat breweries) does a lot of talking, but only to someone who has worked through a few of the others.

In an empty market you don’t have a position. You have an address.

Different is a comparison, and a comparison needs weight on the other side of the scale. A crowded market hands you that weight at no charge. It hands you the noise too, which is better than it sounds, because a full room is already arguing out loud about what it wishes somebody would do. (Best place in the world to eavesdrop, too. I do it in my own bar, no logo shirt, whenever I can.)

The trap is raising the bar the crowd is already staring at. Everyone in a busy category watches the same scoreboard, so one more tap or one more feature vanishes into the din. The crowd agrees on what counts. It also agrees, without ever saying so, on what doesn’t. That second list is where the bar is lying on the floor, waiting for somebody to pick it up and hang it higher.

In a beer town the obvious scoreboard is the tap list. The hands doing the pouring never make it onto the board, which is why every beertender behind our bar is Cicerone certified. A tap list can be copied by Friday. A team has to be built.

So when somebody calls a market too crowded, listen to what they actually said. The buyer is already educated. The bar is already posted where everyone can read it. And a dozen competitors have spent real money building the contrast you get to stand next to.

You can’t stand out in an empty room. You can only stand.

Stay Positive & Crowded Market? Great!