How to Decide Which Growth Work Deserves to Be Done
For B2B marketing leaders and CMOs, and founders deciding which growth work is actually worth funding.
About Laura Patterson
Laura Patterson is the co-founder and president of VisionEdge Marketing, the Austin growth strategy firm she launched in 1999 and has run for more than twenty-five years, working with over 300 organizations. She is the author of four books on marketing measurement, among them Marketing Metrics in Action and Measure What Matters, and holds a patent for Accelance, a platform linking strategy to execution and metrics. Her career began in technology at Motorola in semiconductors and microcontrollers, ahead of nearly thirty years in sales and marketing.
Laura Patterson is co-founder and President of VisionEdge Marketing, which she started in Austin in 1999 and has run for twenty-seven years across more than 300 B2B engagements, writing and speaking under her own name at LauraPatterson.co. Her conclusion from that vantage point cuts against most of the last decade of management advice: companies do not have an execution problem, they have a strategic clarity and alignment problem. The consequence for anyone using AI is immediate. AI executes faster and automates more, so without clarity it simply produces the wrong things faster, and a company that lacks alignment will find AI amplifying the absence rather than filling it. Her test for it is a wall of Post-it notes, one per activity underway, each one placed under the strategy it supports, and the orphans are the random acts. She borrows the rose bush from Necessary Endings for the harder half, that the discipline is pruning what is alive and even beautiful because it is drawing energy from where the company should be spending it. That is the throughline 79 Development keeps coming back to. Being intentional about what deserves to be done is what makes the account of your work coherent enough to be understood. Authority is earned by doing work worth talking about, and an honest, legible account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- "Companies don’t have an execution problem. They have a strategic clarity and alignment problem." This reverses where most of the industry has pointed for a decade, and she says it after 300-plus engagements rather than as a provocation. Her evidence is what she sees inside those companies: enormous effort, enormous activity, rapid decisions all day, and a large share of it disconnected from anything that matters to a customer. Her sequencing is the part people skip. If you do not create customer value you cannot create business value, so activity that touches neither is not merely inefficient, it is spending the company’s finite energy on nothing.
- AI does not solve clarity, it amplifies whatever you already have. She is precise about this. AI lets you execute faster and automate more, and everyone is doing it, so the output is a lot of the wrong things faster. "If you don’t have good clarity, it will just amplify that you don’t have good clarity. You can amplify it once you have it." Her test for whether you have it is deliberately low tech: write every activity currently underway on a Post-it note, put your actual strategies on a whiteboard, and try to place each note under a strategy it supports. The notes with nowhere to go are the random acts, and she reports it is amazing how many are orphans.
- The rose bush, and why pruning the healthy parts is the hard bit. Laura brings in Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud and its central image. A rose bush cannot reach the vision you have for it without pruning, and the easy pruning is the dead wood. The discipline is in cutting things that are alive and even beautiful, because they are drawing energy away from where the plant should be spending it. Translated to a company: if it is not creating customer value, prune it. If it is creating some customer value but taking energy from somewhere that would create more, prune it too.
- Who she is actually for. Not marketing. She is explicit and slightly pointed about it, that marketing people have been pulled into the random acts vortex by everything AI now lets them do. Her work is with the CEO, the leadership team and the board, on what she calls growth governance: the discipline of keeping strategy, decisions, execution and measurement reinforcing each other instead of unravelling. Her closing thought is the argument in one line. The future does not belong to the companies that can do the most, it belongs to the companies that are the most intentional about what deserves to be done.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
What We Need to Grow, Episode 029: What Deserves to Be Done. A Founder Talk conversation with Laura Patterson, Co-founder and President of VisionEdge Marketing. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.
Caleb Pedosiuk: All right, Laura, so excited to get to chat and talk shop. We both work in the marketing space. I think you started your company in 1999, which is a really key time, because to me I look at 99, 2000 as this real window. I remember just coming out of school and it was this wild time where everybody's talking about bricks and mortar and dot-com, the world's about to change, the internet's here. There was so much hype, so much going on. And so you have been hard at it, twenty-seven years building. There are a number of things you've been at, you've written books, you've built tools. And you're looking at all these tools rapidly shifting again in another era with AI acceleration. So I would love to first hear about yourself, the company that you've built, and then from there let's get into some of what more recently you've been working on.
Laura Patterson: I would love that, Caleb, and thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation. And you were right, 1999 was a wild time. It was the wild wild west of the internet, something we all live with today as though it's ubiquitous, it's like a utility. But back then it was kind of a new frontier.
Caleb: True. So what has it been like for you over the last number of years? You've seen the tools change. What specifically are you seeing right now that you're most excited about?
Laura: Well, obviously you can't go anywhere today without having a conversation about AI. You can't even go to the gas station in Austin without having a conversation about AI. But I think it's important to wind the clock back just a little bit so we can have some context.
In 1999, in Austin, Texas, if you could spell marketing you could get a job here. We had all kinds of companies just popping up like mushrooms as a result of SEMATECH and NCC and all kinds of startups. So it was a very interesting time to be in Austin, to be in marketing, to be in technology. I've been here forty-four years. I came here to work for a little company people might be familiar with called Motorola, in the semiconductor space, specifically in microcontrollers. So my background was in technology before I came, and it's been pretty much in manufacturing and technology since.
And the thing that I always like to tell people is that we started VisionEdge Marketing with the idea that marketing is an engine of growth. So it's all about growth. The two primary principles that our company was founded on are Peter Drucker's principle, that the purpose of business is to create a customer, and Philip Kotler's principle on marketing, that the job of marketing is to find, keep and grow profitable customers. So for us it's always been about customer centricity and customer-centric growth. And how do you do that? What processes do you need? What decisions and what data do you need to make better decisions, smarter decisions? And how do you measure the success of what you're doing? Does that provide some context?
Caleb: So you mentioned the manufacturing space. Would you say that the majority of your work with your company has been more on the manufacturing or the enterprise side of things than, say, small or medium-sized businesses?
Laura: Well, we certainly have evolved. Early on in 1999 we worked with a lot of startup companies, because that's what was here. But then something happened in 2001. In addition to 9/11, the other thing that happened was the dot-com bust. And we really had to think differently about our customers, what we were providing, the services that we could bring to the table, the conversations we needed to have.
So our customers are all B2B companies and always have been. That's really our area of expertise. Predominantly in manufacturing, technology, life science and bioscience, medical devices, financial services, and logistics and supply chain. Those are our primary markets and have been since we started, and we have roots there. All of the people that are a part of VisionEdge Marketing have roots in those industries. We came from those industries, we understood those industries. And people that are in those companies want to know that the people they're working with have some domain expertise. So we have stuck in the lanes where we can bring value.
Caleb: Where do you see the focus right now with where you're working? Certainly we went from 99, where the Yellow Pages was still this heavy hitter, and then it stepped into the digital space. I think that at a certain point you feel almost too big to fail. Certainly when you have legacy technology and emerging technology overlap, there's change. But I'm curious to know how you are serving your clients right now.
Laura: It's a great question, and you're exactly right, Caleb. You really hit the target right in the bullseye.
What we have noticed over the last couple of decades is a shift where companies have gotten to a point where there's a tremendous amount of effort and a tremendous amount of activity, regardless of their size. They're trying to make decisions every day, rapid decisions. And so it's consuming a lot of time, it consumes a lot of energy, but a lot of it is very random. There's just a lot of random stuff going on in business today. And many of the things that leaders are doing are not really connected to things that matter to the customer that will create business value. Because if you don't create customer value you can't create business value, right? That goes back to our roots. Same principles still apply today, twenty-seven years later.
As a result of all of the research that we have been doing, and we've worked with over 300 organizations, probably more than that, I kind of stopped counting when we got into those kinds of numbers, I'm pretty convinced that companies don't have an execution problem. I think people have been focused on the execution problem for a long time. We did too. I don't think it's an execution problem any more. I think it's a strategic clarity and an alignment problem.
And they're doing so much. Maybe you see this as well, I mean you talk to a lot of people, you work with a lot of companies. Are you seeing that people are just inundated with activity? They're measuring just about everything that they can possibly measure, so the number of measures is just overwhelming, and pursuing a bunch of priorities that don't really have anything to do with moving the ball down the field, as we say in Texas. Are you seeing that as well? Because that's kind of what we're seeing.
Caleb: Yes, I would say certainly the moment AI entered the chat and became this infinite extension to anyone's ideas, what happened was people then had an over-acceleration of opportunity.
If you think of a financial currency, if a central bank hits money printer go and starts flooding the market with a hundred or a thousand times what was there, the value of that one dollar is no longer one dollar. And what's happened with content, or with strategy, or ideas, or brainstorming, or tactics, is that what before might take a one hour unit of energy to get to one strategy or one tactic, now within that one hour you could have a hundred or a thousand tactics. And then people are going to others saying, okay, here's our plan, let's do it.
So you have two things happening. You mentioned the clarity, which I think, if you have such an overabundance, that value is deflated compared to what it was before. But then you also have this dilution of execution, because now you have many projects that are half created, tactics that are half executed, or a project that was launched by some part of the team and then it sort of orphaned out there, left partially built. Almost like you would see an infrastructure build, a house, a subdivision of houses that gets partially built and it's not finished.
And so I think a lot of the strategies and the tactics are partially there because they have the appearance, almost the ghost, of intelligence and strategy, because it has come from a large language model that's trained on real strategy. But when it actually came to people that understand it and are executing and seeing it through, it doesn't have the follow through, or the soul, or the care to actually see those things. So in that sense I one hundred percent agree with you. I think in some respects less is more. But less, not just less for the sake of less. It has to be less focused on the most important. So the tree, in all the ways that it naturally will expand out, needs to be pruned down in the right way to then push whatever units of energy are available in that team or company to produce as much and as high quality of fruit or production value as possible.
Laura: You hit the nail right on the head. I'm exactly on the same page, and I want to come back to this word that you used, orphan. I want to come back to that in a moment, because I agree with you.
AI is helping us do a lot of things faster, but to your point, it's just a lot of the wrong things faster. We can execute faster with AI and we can automate more with AI, and we're all doing it. It's just like making websites. I think back to the first website we created, which was a hard coded two page website. It cost $25,000 and we could do absolutely no changes to it. And then it evolved, and today we can make changes to our website, we can put up a website quickly, we can do all kinds of things. We just have to know what the right things are to do in order to make it resonate and be relevant to the people that are coming to our website. So if we are not clear about what matters, then AI is not going to help us be successful. We have to have that clarity.
And that takes us to the point you made about orphans. We have a little test. Take all of the things you're doing and put them on Post-it notes, and then make sure you have all your strategies and what you're trying to accomplish on a whiteboard, or wherever it is you can see it. Now see how many of the little Post-it notes that you have, all the things you're doing, fit in a structure that supports those strategies in order to achieve the outcomes for your company. And it's amazing how many of those Post-it notes are orphans. They don't go anywhere on the board. Those are random acts.
And that's really what we are focused on now. Because CEOs of large and mid-market and even small companies, although I find that less with the startups, but definitely mid-market and larger, and the leadership teams that are supporting them and the boards that they are working with, they create these intentional customer-centric strategies. They're very intentional. They go through major strategic planning, you've probably participated in some of those efforts. They're trying to get clear on that mutual value. They try to get their organization mobilized and aligned around all of that. And they try to make sure the strategy and decisions and execution and measurement are all reinforcing each other. But then it begins to unravel. And we are trying to make sure that it doesn't unravel, and give them the tools and processes for that.
Caleb: So who, if they were to find you today, would be your ideal company or person to help? And at what stage? What problem is it that someone is trying to figure out right now, that they might not know they're looking for you for?
Laura: We do best, and are more successful and helpful, with companies who really find themselves overwhelmed with activity. So they're doing a lot of stuff but they don't have alignment around what actually creates value. That's a key problem they have. They're busy, busy, busy. And you know that old saying, Caleb, have you ever heard this old saying, I'm too busy chopping wood to sharpen my ax? They're in that mode.
And so what we want to do is help them get out of that place, and to be more customer centric, to really get focused on the things that are going to create that value, and to make the decisions that are going to help them grow.
And I'm going to come back to your tree metaphor. That's not marketing. So we are not looking to work with marketing people, because marketing people have been sucked into the random acts vortex, right, with all the things they can do with AI. What we want is really to focus on leadership and growth discipline. So it's really about growth governance. And to your point, AI does not solve the clarity problem. AI will not do that for you. That's going to take your leadership and really solid hard thinking. In fact, if you don't have good clarity, it will just amplify that you don't have good clarity. You can amplify it once you have it.
So, you said something very interesting about the tree and pruning the tree. Have you ever read the book Necessary Endings, by Henry Cloud? It is a great book. And for the people who are listening, I hope you will check it out. It's called Necessary Endings. And I love the metaphor he uses about the rose bush and the pruning of the rose. It's not my book, but I love this book. I have other books I love too, but I think this is a great book.
So imagine, for those of us who are gardeners, are you a gardener, Caleb?
Caleb: Love our garden, yep.
Laura: I love gardening too. So imagine, for those of us who like to play in the dirt, we have created this beautiful space in our yard, and we are going to put a rose bush in as the main feature in this space. We can see that this is going to be a magnificent rose bush when it comes to fruition. So we go to the nursery, we get our little baby rose bush, we bring it home, we put it in the ground, we give it all the right dirt, we tend to it, we do all kinds of great things and it begins to grow. And in our mind we can see that it's going to be magnificent.
But things have to be done to keep a rose bush healthy and enable it to become that magnificent vision. You have to prune the things that are dead off of it, because you don't want to have the dead thing sucking energy from the live things. And sometimes, in order to achieve the vision of the rose bush that you have in your mind, you have to even prune good pieces off of the bush, again, to put the energy in where you need it to go. You might even take off beautiful buds in order to give the other buds more energy.
So if you think of the rose bush concept as your company, then, to your point that you made earlier about pruning, for those of us who are working inside companies and responsible for strategy, which would be the CEO, maybe the chief growth officer, members of the board, we want to be thinking about, if it's not creating customer value, it should be pruned. If it's creating some customer value but taking away from other places where you could create more customer value, you should prune it. You only want to hold on to the things that are creating customer value that is also creating large business value.
That's sort of the message, and really what we try to get the people we work with to think about. What does that mean? How does that look? And how do you avoid having those random acts of marketing, selling, service, product, which are those little things on your rose bush that just don't really enable it to achieve the vision that you have.
Caleb: So what tools or resources would you direct people to on your website or LinkedIn? How can they hear more of this from you, or get into your world and experience more of your guidance?
Laura: Thank you, Caleb, for asking. So yes, you can go to my LinkedIn, Laura Patterson. I think if you type in my name I'm one of the first ones to come up. I am the President of VisionEdge Marketing, in case your team is looking for a company name. My personal website, I'd love for them to come, because we talk a lot about random acts on my personal website. It's a personal passion of mine to help companies replace those random acts with deliberate, intentional, customer-centric growth strategies. That's at LauraPatterson.co, and there's a lot of content there. And of course the VisionEdge Marketing website as well. So thank you for asking about that.
I think, if I could leave people with a thought, as we all think about the future, AI is certainly changing our perception and perspective about the future. It is not going to belong to the companies who can do the most. I think that's where we are today, people are just doing so much. It's not going to belong to the people who can do the most. It's going to belong to the companies that are the most intentional about what deserves to be done. And I think that resonates with what you were saying earlier.
Caleb: Very cool. Well, final question, and I've been asking everybody I've been chatting with recently. If you had to pick one thing that you would say is what you need most to grow right now, what would you say the one thing is?
Laura: I would say create customer-centric strategies for growth. Keep in mind what it takes to create customer value. If you create the customer value, the business value will come, and so will the growth.
Caleb: Awesome. Well, Laura, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.
Laura: My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Caleb.
What We Need to Grow is a conversation series by 79 Development, hosted by Caleb Pedosiuk. New episodes on YouTube and Spotify.