Hey there,

Hope your year is off to a great start. I'm visiting my hometown, Long Beach, California, and reflecting on the first two weeks of the year and what's to come for the business this year.

At least 30% of the storefronts I drive by are closed. Small family-owned Cambodian grocery stores I grew up shopping at, coffee shops I used to work from, places of which I have fond memories.

It’s all a reminder of how challenging business can be--often due to factors out of our control. In this case, a lot of it was due to the pandemic. Ultimately, businesses can be extremely fragile if they aren’t managed properly.

While Omniscient is off to a strong start this year and we’re hopeful (we're already on track to exceed last year's revenue), we aren’t blindly optimistic.

We’re all evolving to adapt to what we believe is needed to survive and, more importantly, thrive in 2023.

1. On my mind: New year, new leadership style.

I wrote a memo to the team about what to expect this year and it focused on three things:

1. We’re going to take care of the team.
2. 2023 is going to be tough. We’re all going to have to work harder and smarter.
3. It’s going to be a rare, perhaps once-in-a-career opportunity, to have a huge company impact.

I’d say that, before jumping into the business full-time, my co-founders and I were relatively chill. We were getting clients, we had a separate full-time job to pay the bills, and we were paying our employees well.

Once we jumped in full-time, we amped it up.

We moved faster in sales conversations. We got more aggressive investing in marketing. We set the bar higher for the team including ourselves.

We expect 2023 to be a tough year for businesses across the board, particularly in tech and small businesses. That's why that level of intensity is going to be sustained and even increase this year.

We've set ourselves up to go aggressive with a strong cash balance, opening up a line of credit, and ruthlessly cutting expenses. This will help us be capital efficient and avoid layoffs.

While we’re going to ask a lot of the team, we’re also going to do our best to make sure they’re taken care of.

We (the co-founders) also have to step up as leaders and as business owners to make sure the business not only survives but grows year-over-year.

We're making strategic bets to position ourselves to win the market.

There are two key things we're doing:

1. Ruthless prioritization of revenue-generating and revenue-retaining projects.
2. Teaching each team member to build leverage in their roles through ruthless delegation.

I'll go more into how we're doing this in the next newsletter.

My co-founders and I are all learning as we go and I deeply empathize with all the first-time managers I’ve had throughout my career. It’s not something you learn from reading a book or listening to a lecture.

We’re constantly learning and evolving our leadership style depending on the situation and the person we’re speaking to.

For us, that means continuing to develop our introspectiveness and thoughtfulness, putting ourselves in the shoes of each team member, understanding what’s important to them, what excites them, what communication style they prefer, and what they need from us - even if they don’t tell us explicitly.

I’m really enjoying this journey of learning and building with the team.

2. Created

Things I’ve produced:

• Blog post: How to automate the content production process​
• Blog post: The best B2B newsletters​
• Blog post: Building authority through content curation​
• Podcast: An attempt at ghostwriting thought leadership content​

I have podcast interviews coming up with the following people. What should I ask them?

• ​David Mausolf - Co-founder at Apex Growth, previously VP of Marketing at Disney and Head of Acquisition at Lyft. Questions about growth and user acquisition?
• ​Patrick Despres-Gallagher - CEO and co-founder of Stage, he was the second PM at Loom. Questions about product-led growth and monetization?
• ​Sarah Kiefer - CMO at Pitch, previously Global Director of Enterprise Marketing of Spotify Advertising. Questions about effective presentations and communication and building remote teams?

3. Consumed

Things I’m enjoying:

📚 Reading: Multipliers and A Promised Land​

🎧 Listening: Lofi fruits music​

👀 Watching: The Woman King. Apparently the movie isn’t the most historically accurate, but it’s an amazing story.

Cheers,
David

P.S. Find out what I'm up to on my blog and reading list and connect with me on Twitter.

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​​About me: David Ly Khim is a founder of Omniscient Digital, a content marketing and SEO agency helping B2B software companies grow.