Here are today’s highlights:
In our Dashboard podcast, Julian Scadden explains how Nexstar Network turns tradespeople into business people.
We’ve missed two monthly job reports, but it looks as if small businesses have stopped hiring.
Consumer sentiment, meanwhile, is nearing the lowest level ever recorded.
And yet, TikTok Shop, which debuted in the U.S. in September 2023, is already as big as eBay, which has been around for more than 30 years.
SELLING THE BUSINESS
John Warrillow questions whether owners really need a personal brand: “It seems younger founders now accept as dogma that they need one. I think that’s a mistake for several reasons: To build a personal brand online, you have to marinate in a fake world where everyone drives a Range Rover and has six-pack abs. Even successful people feel inferior to the charlatans pushing everything from supplements to life coaching. There’s a negative correlation between happiness and time spent online. Why choose a marketing strategy that is guaranteed to make you sad?”
“Even if you look at the toxic sludge online and say, ‘Screw it, I still want to be famous,’ most people grossly underestimate how hard it is and the personal cost. Algorithms reward conflict, which demands ever-hotter takes. You’re always ‘on’ – ready to respond to a comment or react to an event. Soon, you’ve traded your privacy just to feed the machine.”
“Even if you succeed at building a personal brand, all those followers make your business less valuable. At Value Builder, we’ve done the math. We’ve analyzed 80,000 companies and the data is unequivocal: the more your company depends on your personal brand – we call them Hub & Spoke owners – the less an acquirer will pay.”
“I try to eat my own dog food on this one. I’m not perfect, but I no longer use Twitter/X, avoid Facebook, and have never had an Instagram account. I’ve never used TikTok. I still host a podcast, but I don’t carve it into 60-second clips for Shorts/Reels or TikTok – people who get their information there aren’t our audience.” READ MORE
