GarthBox

I used to be the person who got the call on Friday afternoons.

The thing was broken, the customer was upset, the team was stuck, and I had a track record of walking in, asking the right two questions, and putting it back together by Monday. It was satisfying work. It also paid in adrenaline, which is the worst currency a career can run on. Best I save that for my motorcycle track days.

There was a stretch where I started noticing the same shapes inside different fires. Not the exact same fire. The exact same wiring underneath. Same misalignment between what marketing thought sales needed and what sales actually used. Same gap between what customers were saying on calls and what product was hearing two layers later. Same five percent of the work carrying ninety percent of the weight.

That is when you stop being a firefighter and start being an electrician who fixes the wiring.

This is the move most career writing skips over. The shift from solving problems to designing problems out of existence. Heroes solve. Systems builders quietly remove the conditions that made the hero necessary. Both are real work. They actually need another. Just the other night I was telling my Garth’s Brew Bar team how appreciative I was for them doing so much around the bar so I can focus my attention on systems work.

Here’s the thing that hurts me every time I talk to my team…

The system, once it is running, makes your contribution almost invisible. Nobody throws a parade for the customer escalation that did not happen. Nobody writes a thank-you note for the rep who did not get the question because the answer was already in the deck. Reorgs come and erase your fingerprints. New hires inherit the system and assume it grew there like a tree. You watch your best work disappear into the air, which is exactly what good systems are supposed to do.

That is the bargain. The bow goes to someone else. Sometimes nobody. Often the company itself. You get the quiet pride of knowing the gears are still turning.

A real one for me. The clearest piece of system work I have ever done was building a closed loop across the company with AI in the middle of it. The SRDC document feeds the collateral. The collateral arms the reps. The conversations the reps are having flow back as signal. That signal becomes the next product enhancement, the next page of the deck, the next sentence on the website. Information stops dying in one team’s inbox and starts irrigating the whole organization. No single piece of it would have been impressive on its own. The point was that none of it had to be impressive, because it kept working when nobody was watching. And it worked without me touching it.

That is what scaled product marketing actually is, when it is good. Not better launches. A better nervous system.

A caveat the loud people skip. Not everybody needs to be a systems builder. A team without people who can work inside the system is a team with a beautiful useless machine and no operators. You do not earn the right to redesign the system until you have spent enough time inside one to know exactly where it pinches the hands of the people using it. The leaders I trust the most have done the small work for long enough that their proposed systems carry the shape of real hands. Shit, I’d argue that in the current state of the tech industry, especially, a leader has to do a bit of the work. (Ask to see Todd Olson’s GitHub pull requests calendar from 2014 to today. His present engagement is symbolic of the industry at large. Hands must be on and in. At least in enough to make better systems decisions.)

If you are early in a career, work inside the systems. Notice where they pinch you. Make a list. That list is the seed of the work that will eventually carry your name without carrying your name. And, come on, you certainly remember a teacher or boss you couldn’t stand and you vow’d to “never be like them.” Do that with the work systems, not just the people. It’s a win-win because your work gets better, and you do, too.

If you are further along, the test is simpler. The next time you feel the urge to grab the fire extinguisher, sit on your hands for two breaths and ask whether you would rather be the person who put out this fire or the person who built the floor that did not catch.

Systems work is mostly an act of respect. Respect for the people inside the system, who deserve a workday that does not require heroics. Respect for the customer, who deserves consistency more than they deserve charm. Respect for the team you will leave behind, who should not have to rebuild the gears from memory.

That is the reward. You become part of something that is bigger than you and quieter than you and slightly more patient than you. The fire stops being yours. The floor underneath everybody is yours.

Stay Positive & Build For The Ones Who’ll Inherit It

A wing joint outside Cleveland answers its phone with a voice agent now.

Not a chain. Not a franchise. A two-location family place that’s been there since the Browns last gave anyone hope.

The owner’s son built it on a Tuesday.

He didn’t hire a developer. He didn’t buy a SaaS subscription. He prompted an AI model, glued it to a phone number, and shipped a thing that takes orders, knows the specials, and bumps the weird calls over to mom.

Fourteen dollars to stand up.

Pennies a call to run.

(I’ve stood behind enough bars on a Friday night to know exactly what “the phone is ringing again” does to a service team trying to keep the line moving. This is the kind of move that quietly buys a kitchen its sanity back. It’s also why we don’t have a phone at Garth’s Brew Bar, but thanks to AI, I might change that.)

Somewhere, a SaaS seller pitching restaurant phone automation is sweating.

And somewhere else, a buyer who has sat through seventeen build vs buy meetings is starting to wonder why the framework feels like an antique.

Both of them are right.

Build vs buy was a question for a world where building meant hiring five engineers for a year.

That world is gone.

Build now means a weekend. A kid. A credit card. A Saturday morning before the lunch rush.

The math changed. The framework didn’t.

The deck is from the whiteboard era and the meeting is still being held.

The real menu has four verbs.

There’s build, which still exists. But the word now means two completely different things stuffed inside one syllable. The hobbyist version is somebody’s brother-in-law on a weekend. The enterprise version is a team and a year. Lumping them together hides the decision instead of helping you make it.

There’s buy, which today almost always means rent. You aren’t acquiring software. You’re paying monthly for access to a product that can change, get acquired, raise prices, or quietly pivot off your use case six months from now.

Calling it buying makes it feel more permanent than it is.

There’s partner, the missing verb. You don’t buy a relationship with a local AI shop or a consultancy that already knows your industry. You partner with them.

Different transaction. Different risk profile. Different upside.

Most build vs buy conversations skip this verb entirely because it doesn’t fit on a 2×2.

And there’s ignore, the most underrated verb in business. Not every problem is your problem this quarter. Sometimes the right call is to wait twelve months and see whether the thing is even real. (Take a meaningful look at how many cowork sessions you’ve started but never finished… I’m guilty, too.)

A lot of bad builds and worse buys come from companies that should have done nothing and called it a strategy.

Now consider the repair shop owner who wants to auto-text her customers when their truck is fixed.

She isn’t picking between build and buy.

She’s picking between renting a thirty-nine-dollar-a-month tool, owning a small thing her brother-in-law built that lives on her own systems, partnering with a guy in town who already does this for ten other shops, or ignoring it for now and just answering the phone herself.

Four real choices.

Four risk profiles.

Four very different stories about what kind of business she’s running.

If you’re the SaaS seller in this story, your old deck is broken.

Telling her “building is risky” used to mean something when building required a CTO. Now it means asking her brother-in-law to spend a Saturday.

The risk argument moved. Your pitch needs to move with it.

Stop selling against build.

Sell against abandon. Sell what happens when the brother-in-law moves to Phoenix. Sell why renting from you is actually the most flexible call, not the most permanent.

Sell partnership, not procurement.

If you’re the buyer in this story, stop asking your team build versus buy.

Ask which verb fits the moment.

Build a tiny piece. Rent the boring middle. Partner on the hard part. Ignore the parts you don’t need yet.

One more little riff…The build vs buy debate persists because it lets people avoid harder questions.

Do I trust my team to do this well?

Am I willing to be responsible for this when it breaks at two in the morning?

What business am I actually in?

Those are the questions under the questions.

Build vs buy is the costume they wear when they don’t want to be seen.

Stay Positive & Pick Your Verb

A guy three stools down asked the bartender what was good. He listened to the whole rundown. House lager, a stout the brewer was proud of, a sour they only had for two more weeks. He nodded the whole time, looked engaged, then ordered a Coors Banquet.

The question got smart. The order didn’t.

That’s been the year, hasn’t it. Everyone I work with has developed a new reflex. They open a draft and ask “could this be better?” They look at a deck and ask “is this the strongest version?” They forward an email to a friend or to a model and ask “what am I missing?” The reflex is real, and on its face it is an improvement. We used to ship the first thing that wasn’t embarrassing. Now we run it through one more loop.

The trouble is the loop.

Asking is cheap. Answering is expensive. The tools we’re using will happily expand, condense, polish, restructure, tighten, soften, sharpen, anything you want, in any direction, on demand.

Every one of those moves feels like progress because it cost effort. None of them are actually better. They’re just different.

The deck gets longer or shorter. The email gets warmer or cooler. The post gets more clever or more sincere. And then we ship it, and the work we produced this year looks almost exactly like the work we produced last year, except we feel more thoughtful while making it.

The question moved. The output didn’t.

There’s a marketing version of this, and it should bother you. When the reflex “could this be better?” gets applied to a campaign, what usually shows up is twelve variants of the same hollow premise. A subject line test on an offer no one wants. A landing page rewrite for a category that’s dying. A new tagline for positioning that was wrong before the model touched it. It appears that the tool will not, ever, tell you the foundation is rotten. It will help you decorate that foundation in seventeen different finishes and let you pick your favorite.

A smarter question deserves a harder answer. The harder answer is almost always “this needs to be rethought, not rewritten.” But rethinking is slow and lonely and looks, from across the room, like not working.

Rewriting is fast and feels like motion and produces a fresh artifact you can show a colleague by 4pm.

So we rewrite. Over and over. And we tell ourselves the inflection point has happened because we changed how we ask, even though we have not yet changed how we work.

I have done this. I did it twice this month. I asked the model to help me sharpen a positioning doc that needed to be scrapped and started over. I knew, by the second pass, that I was decorating a wall that should have been demolished. I kept going because the decoration was easier than the demolition. By the end I had a beautifully worded version of an idea that was never going to land. That isn’t the model’s failure. That’s mine. The model gave me exactly what I asked for. I asked a smart question and accepted a polished answer instead of a real one.

The reflex to ask “could this be better?” is a gift. Right now we need to stop wasting it.

The Coors Banquet isn’t the problem. Ordering it after the bartender’s whole speech is.

Stay Positive & Demolish The Thing You’ve Been Decorating

I performed energy at a feature launch once. The release was an enhancement at best. The product underneath was on its last breath, and everyone in the meeting room knew it, including me. So I cranked up my own voice. I leaned in harder. I delivered the talk track like the thing was bigger than it was, because somebody had to fill the room with something, and I thought volume might pass for momentum.

It didn’t. People can smell manufactured momentum the same way they can smell a steak that’s been microwaved.

A few weeks later, I sat at a bar and watched a beertender work the rail.

He was not chipper, not bubbly, not asking anyone how their day was in the tone of a children’s television host. He was also not phoning it in. He was just there. When a guy three stools down said something quiet about his week being long, he heard it. When a woman ordered a sour, he nodded and made it without making a moment out of it. When someone asked what was new on tap, he answered the question. Not the question he wished they had asked. The actual one.

He listened. He didn’t perform listening, which is the part that has been bothering me ever since.

There is a kind of engagement that is real. It looks like attention. It sounds like attention. It is, in fact, attention. And there is a kind of engagement that is theater, and the theater version has won most of the territory in modern business because we measure smiles, response times, exclamation points, and the energy in the room, and we mistake those signals for the thing they are supposed to be signaling.

Most service training pushes people toward the theater. Most hiring pushes them there too. We interview for warmth, eye contact, the firm handshake, the prepared question about the company. We are choosing, mostly, for people who can perform being interested. We rarely interview for whether they can actually be interested.

When you hire performers, you get a team that knows how to project energy when there is none. They are very good at the launch where the product is just an enhancement. They are very good at the all-hands where the quarter was rough. They are very good at the customer call where the renewal is shaky. They look great. They sound great. And they cost you the one thing real engagement gives you, which is the ability to notice that something is wrong before it gets loud.

The performer fills the room. The present person hears it before it gets loud.

If you want a team that can catch a product before it dies, you need fewer people who can sell foam and more people who can pull a clean pint. They are quieter in the interview. They will not look like the obvious hire. They will not high-five your CEO at the offsite. They will be the ones who notice that the customer is hesitating, that the engineer is exhausted, that the launch is thinner than the deck claims.

I think about him sometimes. Not because he was extraordinary in a way that you would write a LinkedIn post about. The opposite. Because he was completely ordinary in the rarest possible way. He was doing his job, with all of his attention turned on, and no part of it turned outward as a show.

The product I was cranking energy for did die, by the way. Not because of the launch. The launch was a symptom. We had been performing for it for a long time before we admitted it was sick.

Stay Positive & Pull A Clean Pint

You’re sitting in the Zoom waiting room. The candidate is ten minutes late. Then fifteen. Then twenty.

Your phone is the only thing in the room with anything to say, and it’s not saying it.

The story your brain wants to write is short and tidy. They’re flaky. They don’t respect your time. They got a better offer and didn’t have the decency to cancel. You can already feel the email you might send, the friend you might vent to, the small hardening that happens inside you when you decide a stranger has wronged you.

But you don’t actually know.

Maybe their kid just threw up on the carpet. Maybe their phone fell between the car seat and their hands are too big to grab it. Maybe their mother called from a hospital. Maybe they typed the meeting into their calendar for tomorrow, not today, and right now they’re at a coffee shop feeling responsible and prepared and entirely wrong.

You don’t know which movie is playing on the other end. You only know the part of yours where the chair is empty.

The same thing happens when a piece of content goes out and nothing happens. No comments. No shares. The little dashboard sits there like a houseplant nobody waters. The temptation is to blame the audience. They didn’t get it. They’re not paying attention. They were too busy looking at someone’s vacation photos.

That posture is comfortable because it puts you at the center of every story. The audience either showed up for you or failed you. The candidate either honored you or wronged you. The customer either bought or rejected. You become the sun. Everyone else is a planet that either orbited correctly or didn’t.

Here is the quietly true thing about marketing, leadership, and most of human life: you are not the sun.

Most of the time you are a small thing happening on the edge of someone else’s enormous day. Their kid is sick. Their dog is old. Their grief is a year old this week. Their mortgage just went up. They got your email but they were standing in line at the pharmacy. They wanted to respond but felt embarrassed about how long they had taken to respond.

The discipline is to hold the silence loosely. To leave it unexplained until it explains itself. To do the next useful thing instead of the next angry thing.

The leaders who burn out fastest are the ones who insist on filling in the blanks. They write the story before the facts arrive, and then they spend the rest of the week defending that story when the facts contradict it.

The leaders who last hold the blank space open. They send the follow-up. They check on the teammate. They re-read the email with a kinder eye. They wait.

Once you know the truth, you act on the truth. Simple as that.

If the candidate ghosted you on purpose, fine, you act accordingly. If the campaign actually missed the mark, you fix the campaign. But you don’t get to act on the story you invented at minute fifteen of the waiting room. That story is almost always a worse version of what actually happened, because it’s a story written by your most insecure self with no editor in the room.

There’s a small grace in this, and it runs both ways.

Somewhere out there, someone is sitting in their own waiting room wondering why you didn’t reply to their email. They don’t know what’s happening on your end either.

Stay Positive & Admittedly, I Still Catch Myself Writing The Worst Version First Sometimes, Too

Nobody wakes up craving “more efficiency.”

Nobody rolls out of bed, kisses the dog on the forehead, pours coffee into the sacred bean chalice, and whispers, “Today, I hope someone improves my workflow by 14 percent.”

People say they want better.

They say they want easier.

They say they want more time, more money, more control, more visibility.

Fine. Those are the acceptable words. The words allowed into conference rooms wearing slacks and a hoodie with an evil bunny icon stitched on the sleeve.

But underneath them are the real beasts.

Status.

Relief.

Confidence.

Safety.

Pride.

Belonging.

The feeling of walking into a meeting with the answer before the question has finished putting on its pants. (You’ve never said those words but they resonate, don’t they?)

That is what people are actually buying.

“More time” is rarely about time. It is about not being the parent answering Slack messages during dinner while a child explains, in heartbreaking detail, why the moon is following the car.

“More money” is rarely about money. It is about permission. Permission to hire the person. Permission to say yes. Permission to stop making every decision feel like choosing which limb to sell to the spreadsheet goblin. And permission? That’s just a blend of agency and the feeling of fulfillment that actually helps us sleep at night better than a melatonin pill.

“Easier” is rarely about laziness. It is about dignity. It is about not needing seven tabs, three spreadsheets, a hallway conversation, and a blood oath to answer one simple question. With those removed, it doesn’t actually make our life easier, it makes it harder because we’re finally free to tackle the problems that are worth us waking up late at night to jot an idea down.

“Better” is the cardboard mask.

The human desire underneath is the face.

This is where mediocre marketing gets stuck. It points at the feature and shouts, “Look, it saves time!”

Congratulations. So does skipping lunch.

Great marketing keeps digging.

What does saved time become?

A calmer team.

A leader who looks prepared.

A customer who feels remembered.

A finance person who does not have to play archaeological detective in the ruins of bad data.

A sales rep who finally stops guessing and starts knowing.

A CEO who can tell the board, “We see what is happening, and we know what to do next.”

That is not efficiency.

That is authority.

That is status.

That is oxygen in a room that used to smell like burnt toner and quiet panic.

As for customers? Customers do not just want the thing.

They want the version of themselves the thing makes possible.

Sharper.

Calmer.

Trusted.

Promoted.

Less embarrassed.

More necessary.

Able to leave work on time without feeling like a criminal fleeing the scene.

This riff is important because it drives home this point: build the product that makes life better, easier, sharper, richer, calmer, and less like wrestling a printer in a thunderstorm.

But do not stop there.

Ask what that improvement gives them emotionally.

Ask what fear it removes.

Ask what story it lets them tell about themselves.

That is where the sale lives.

Not in the feature.

Not in the benefit.

In the little private human victory hiding underneath both.

Stay Positive & Willing To Discover It?

It is possible your first product is exactly what customers were secretly wishing for while brushing their teeth and staring into the little porcelain oracle above their sink.

Possible.

Also possible a goose walks into a board meeting with a better Q3 plan.

The first version is usually not the answer. It is the question wearing shoes. It walks into the market, trips over a chair, spills coffee on the prospect, and comes back with priceless information.

They did not want that.

Good.

Now you know.

Failure is not the opposite of progress. Failure is the crude lantern that shows you where the path is not. Every flop is a customer whispering, “Not this. Not quite. Try over there.” And if you are paying attention, if your ego is not wearing a crown made of wet cardboard, that whisper becomes strategy.

The hard part is not iteration. The hard part is emotional sobriety.

Ship something. See what happens. Do not faint when the market shrugs. Do not build a cathedral around your first idea just because it took six months and three executive offsites to name it. Customers do not care how beautiful the internal deck was. They care if the thing makes their life better, easier, sharper, richer, calmer, or less like wrestling a printer in a thunderstorm. (What this exactly means deserves it’s own blog post, perhaps tomorrow…)

This is where leadership matters.

A great leader/CEO says, “Here is where we are going. Here is why it matters. And yes, we are going to learn along the way.”

Because there will be shifts.

Not maybe.

Always.

Something will not work. A customer segment will surprise you. A feature you loved will sit untouched like a decorative zucchini that you let grow too much and no longer has any nutrients. A small request from one frustrated customer may turn out to be the doorway to a bigger market.

That tension is not a bug in the business. It is the business.

You are trying to be more useful to the customers who already trusted you, while becoming more relevant to the customers who have not noticed you yet. That is a delicate circus act. One foot on loyalty, one foot on discovery, juggling flaming assumptions while the market changes the music. No wonder marketers are needed more than ever!

The only sane way through is real customer curiosity.

Not fake curiosity. Not survey theater. Not the kind where you ask questions only to confirm your own cleverness.

Real curiosity.

The kind that listens. The kind that gets excited by being wrong because wrong is finally specific. The kind that says, “Wonderful, we found another wall. Now where is the door? Maybe here instead?”

Ship. Learn. Pivot. Even when it works, pivot toward what could work better.

That is how new projects grow legs.

That is how companies stay alive.

That is how you turn failure from a funeral into fuel.

Stay Positive &