What does it take to build a brand people are obsessed with?

David Hieatt has done it three times, from one small town in west Wales: Howies, Hiut Denim, and the Do Lectures.

In this episode he opens up the craft behind all three: spotting the brand nobody has built yet, catching the right moment for it, and surviving the years when the moment hasn't arrived.

We talk about what purpose was actually for (and why the word wore out), the lucky break that nearly killed Hiut, being ten years too early with a farm-to-table restaurant, writing in the AI era, and why, after 16 years, David has gone all-in on the Do Lectures, the event he calls "a beautiful pause."

Every leader thinks their advice is more useful than it is. Michael Bungay Stanier has sold nearly two million books arguing exactly that, and he reckons AI has just proved his point.

If you want the full thinking blueprint behind this podcast, grab my book, No Bullshit Strategy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Bullsh-Strategy-Founders-Actually/dp/1803136510

Michael wrote the best-selling coaching book of the last twenty years, and he's not actually a coach. His argument is simple. The instinct to jump in with the answer, what he calls the advice monster, is the thing quietly holding your team back. Your job isn't to have the answers. It's to set the frame and let the people closest to the work find them.

Then AI arrived and sharpened the whole thing. If a machine can hand anyone a competent answer in seconds, what's a leader actually for? Michael's answer is the part that stuck with me: the things a machine can't give you. Connection, context, and the courage to make a call and stand behind it.

If you've ever confused being certain with being clear, this one's for you.

Most founders think a deal is won or lost in the pitch. April Dunford, the world's leading authority on positioning, says it's already lost before the pitch starts.

Get the full thinking behind this podcast in my book, No Bullshit Strategy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Bullsh-Strategy-Founders-Actually/dp/1803136510

Positioning is the answer to one question a buyer is always asking: why pick you over everything else? Get it wrong and you never land on the short list, and you don't survive the first call. You lose before you've begun.

In this episode:

- How to spot a real positioning problem from an awareness one

- The competitor that beats up to 70% of deals by doing nothing

- Why enterprise software and a box of cereal are sold in completely different ways

- Why April makes her clients do the positioning themselves

More from me: https://alexmhsmith.substack.com/

Follow the show: https://podfollow.com/the-rare-mind

Katelyn Bourgoin has spent years studying why people buy, and she's arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion for anyone trying to build a name for themselves online. Being good at what you do is no longer enough.

Everything we talk about here sits on top of the ideas in my book, No Bullshit Strategy. If you want the full thinking behind it, start here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Bullsh-Strategy-Founders-Actually/dp/1803136510

The reason it's no longer enough is everywhere you look. Content has never been easier to produce, so there's more of it than ever, and AI has quietly turned every expert into a generic one. If what you know sounds like what a chatbot would say, people will treat it as exactly that. The best email marketer in the world and a free answer from Claude start to look like the same thing.

So Katelyn's work is about finding what she calls an ownable idea. Not the category you work in, but a specific perspective on it that becomes yours. The thing you're known for. The thing that sounds like an echo when anyone else tries to say it.

We get into why most experts don't think they have an idea (and why they're wrong), the five questions that surface one, and why having it is only half the job. The other half is the conviction to keep saying it. I also hand her my own unfinished idea and let her pull it apart.

I write more of it every week at https://alexmhsmith.substack.com/

The fastest way to grow your business isn't to add. It's to subtract.

That's the argument Eric Partaker makes in this episode, and it's one I needed to hear as much as anyone. (I should probably take his advice myself.)

Eric coaches CEOs for a living. Six hundred of them and counting, after a career that took in McKinsey, the early days of Skype, and a chain of Mexican restaurants. So he's watched a lot of people try to grow. And the ones who do it badly nearly always make the same mistake: they reach for more. More products, more channels, more initiatives. It feels like progress. It's actually just complexity, and complexity is what kills scale.

The ones who pull off something genuinely big do the opposite. They cut. They decide what they're not going to do, and then they don't do it. Most founders don't have a growth problem at all. They have a focus problem.

We get into 10x goals, why a "realistic" target quietly caps you, and the strange freedom of setting a goal you've got no idea how to hit.

If this is your kind of thing, I write more of it every week at https://alexmhsmith.substack.com/

The Rare Mind is a new podcast from strategist and No Bullsh*t Strategy author Alex M H Smith. In an era when any old idiot can access best practice tactics from AI, it's going to be the ways you think unpredictably that actually count.

Each episode, Alex sits down with the business leaders who've been there and done it - to unpack their unique strategic lessons in a way that makes them relevant and applicable for everyone.

If you're a business leader who wants to turn the way you think into your ultimate weapon, subscribe now. First episode coming soon.

For more from Alex, subscribe to The Rare Mind newsletter: https://alexmhsmith.substack.com/