Too many visionaries, too much ego, endless AI evangelism and surprisingly little actual business competence. A kind of cynical perspective from someone who’s been inside the circus and made good money of it.
The problem with modern entrepreneurial culture
I have a confession to make: I’m getting increasingly irritated by entrepreneurs. I mean of course not all entrepreneurs, defo not people who build something from nothing, take genuine risks, employ people, create value and spend years figuring out how to make a business work. Those people deserve my respect, since building a sustainable business is actually a difficult thing, often thankless and considerably less glamorous than the internet want to make you believe. Nope, right now I’m talking about a different breed. The self-proclaimed visionaries, the LinkedIn philosophers, the AI evangelists, the digital transformation prophets, the founders who have somehow managed to build an entire personality around being a founder. These people lately seem to be more interested in being perceived as entrepreneurs than actually running a fucking business, and I think I’ve finally reached the point where I can’t pretend to find it amusing anymore.
Every other day, somebody on Linkedin or any “supposed-to-be-professional” Facebook group (yeah, Facebook is big in Hungary) announces that they’ve discovered a revolutionary new way of work and that’s usually revolves around some bs buzzword, usually involves AI, automation, disruption, or some combination of words that would make a management consultant wet his panties in seconds. They write about the future of (insert any) business with the confidence of someone who has personally invented electricity and they talk about changing industries, redefining human potential and building the next generation of something. Fucking clowns, sorry for my french.
I had the chance to work with several of these kind of people and the moment you look at the internal processes, you realize it’s nothing more, just a big mess. Nobody knows who is responsible for what, their reporting is unreliable, their marketing budget is being spent without a coherent commercial strategy and the people work for them are exhausted at best. The customer acquisition costs are eating into their margins and the person responsible for all of this is busy preparing another Linkedin post about the importance of having a vision.
At what point did having an opinion about the future become more important than being capable of managing the present?
I have worked with businesses across different industries, markets and organisational structures and I’ve managed marketing operations, built internal teams, worked with international stakeholders, dealt with agencies, managed budgets and been accountable for commercial results. So I think I can comfortably say I’ve seen what happens when a business actually has to deliver against its ambitions and one thing becomes painfully obvious, running a business requires considerably more than having ideas.
It requires making difficult decisions when there is no obvious answer, accepting that your favourite idea might be completely wrong, it also requires understanding financial performance, taking responsibility for mistakes, hiring people who are better than you at certain things and also occasionally shutting the fuck up long enough to listen to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Seems like lately these are increasingly unfashionable skills.
The AI revolution and the sudden arrival of a million visionaries
The AI revolution is my current favourite example. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against AI. Quite the opposite, in my humble opinion it’s an enormously useful technology, and I use it myself, you may read my article about the content engine I created for one of my clients. It can improve productivity, accelerate research, automate repetitive tasks and fundamentally change how certain business functions operate, but gooosh, watching the current wave of AI evangelism is exhausting. People who couldn’t explain their own business processes six months ago are suddenly positioning themselves as AI transformation experts, founders who have never properly implemented a CRM are announcing that traditional business models are dead and consultants who have spent their careers repackaging other people’s ideas are now selling the future of artificial intelligence. Seems like using ChatGPT a few times qualifies you to advise an entire organisation on its technological future.
No, it does fecking not.
Technology doesn’t magically compensate for a lack of business understanding and automating a broken process doesn’t make it a good process and introducing AI into an organisation without understanding its people, workflows, data quality and commercial objectives is not transformation. It’s just another expensive way of creating problems. Yeah, the technology is interesting, the people patting their own shoulders for discovering it are considerably less interesting. I call them thought leaders without a single thought of their own.
Linkedin CEOs: a full-time clowns, part-time business owners
These mfs are my favourite, really really fascinating species. Their businesses are apparently growing exponentially, their teams are incredible, their cultures are exceptional, their customers love them and every fucking challenge they encounter eventually turns into an inspirational lesson about leadership. Like come on Dave, you don’t need to go for a walk and then make a post about what did you learn about thought leadership during your chat with neighbour John, who was walking his dog with extra confidence, just enjoy your bloody walk. These people have never simply made a mistake, they have never lost a client (maybe made room for better opportunities, hm?), but mistakes are important and losing some clients and having the actual ability to learn from it is more valuable then you’ll ever be with your clown posts. Sometimes you do make mistakes, sometimes you chase a bad idea for months, that is H-U-M-A-N-N-A-T-U-R-E. When did we sacrifice our humanity to look like similar clowns and talk like an Ai agent?
I’d have considerably more respect for entrepreneurs, leaders, whatever, who occasionally admitted that they had no idea what they were doing, made a bad decision, or simply got lucky, those are also part of life. Instead of this I feel like I’m surrounded by people who seem physically incapable of acknowledging that their success might involve a little bit of something else than their personal mythology suggests. Perhaps this is the part that bothers me most, the complete absence of intellectual honesty.
Stop falling in love with your own ideas
If you recognized yourself while you were reading this article, let me give you some advice the most respectful way I know. Your business is not your personality and your ideas are not sacred, but most importantly your employees are not an audience.
I’ve encountered founders who become emotionally attached to their ideas to the point where discussing their commercial viability becomes almost impossible, it does not matter when you bring market research, performance data, financial projections and actual customer behaviour to the table and they still repeating the same bs, like a stupid parrot (sorry, parrots.) I was wondering quite a lot lately what is the psychology behind this behaviour and I was able to simplify this for myself this way: if they would admit that they are wrong or their idea is not good enough, their fragile ego will not be able to handle it. If I wanna be slightly more direct, their insecurities are becoming business liability. I really don’t want to make assumptions here, but this is kinda similar, when someone buys a BMW just to enhance the size of their manhood.
A company doesn’t exist to validate its founder’s intelligence and marketing must not exist to make the CEO feel innovative. Let me tell you one simple thing and after this I’ll finish giving advices for free. Customers don’t care how emotionally invested you are in your latest product idea, they care whether your product solves their problem or your service is worth the money and whether you deliver what you promised.
You can call yourself a visionary all you want. The market is remarkably indifferent to your self-image.
God forbid I made money from these clowns
Here is another, altough for this article my last confession. I was working with some of these visionaries and I would label this as an interesting experience and by interesting I mean I’ve had a front-row seat watching people with more money than business sense convince themselves that they were building something extraordinary. Most of them came from wealthy families and they had access to family money or inherited capital hat gave them the freedom to experiment with business ideas without ever having to develop a particularly strong understanding of what makes a business commercially viable. They could afford to be visionaries.
Jokes on you guys, I made some rather good money out of your arrogancy. Usually for a couple of months I played along. They had their grand ideas, ambitious plans, revolutionary strategies and endless enthusiasm for whatever new direction they had fallen in love with that particular month. I had the expertise they needed, they had the money to pay for it and everybody seemed happy, except there was one small problem. I eventually realised that I was working with people who were so completely blinded by their own ideas that they couldn’t even see what was happening in front of them.
They weren’t particularly interested in understanding the business, they wanted confirmation that their vision was brilliant and more importantly they weren’t looking for someone to challenge their assumptions. but wanted someone to make their assumptions look commercially sophisticated. My favourite part was that they were certainly not interested in questioning whether the money they spending was producing anything remotely proportional to the value they believed they were creating and they were so convinced of their own business intelligence that they couldn’t recognise the difference between someone who was genuinely building value for them and someone who was simply collecting a very comfortable fee for participating in their little entrepreneurial theatre.
Most of these stories ended the same way, I left, because I got bored. I admit, if I was a bit more patience, I could’ve cashed a couple of more thousand euror or dollars, but meh, money comes and goes. At the end of the day there is a limit to how much time I want to spend watching people burn through resources while congratulating themselves on their genius, at some point, the entire exercise becomes intellectually unbearable.
You don’t need another vision, bro
The cycle is always the same: endless meetings, strategy workshops, rebranding exercises, new positioning, innovation sessions, consultants presenting frameworks and founders announcing organisational transformations every six months. I’ve seen companies spend more time discussing how they should work than actually improving how they work. I’ve seen marketing departments drowning in tools, agencies and external consultants while nobody can answer a relatively straightforward question: how much incremental revenue did any of this generate? I’ve seen businesses spend fortunes on acquisition while ignoring conversion, companies obsessing over impressions while their sales processes are falling apart and organisations talking about customer centricity while making it unnecessarily difficult for customers to buy anything.
Somehow, the solution is always another initiative: another agency, another platform, another strategic partnership, another visionary hire or another workshop. Sometimes you just need to get your fucking basics right. Know your numbers, understand your customers, hire competent people, give them responsibility, stop changing priorities every three weeks, build processes that actually work and measure outcomes instead of activity. If something isn’t working, have the courage to admit it. I’m not inventing the bloody wheel since none of the above is particularly revolutionary, which is precisely my point.
Thanks for the money, chaps
At the end I should offer a big thank-you to the wealthy-family-funded visionaries, self-appointed geniuses and entrepreneurial masterminds I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years. Thank you for the opportunities, the entertaining meetings, the endless supply of revolutionary ideas and, most importantly, the invoices you paid without asking too many questions. Your confidence in your own genius was apparently matched only by your inability to figure out what I was actually doing for your money.
I genuinely hope your businesses are doing well. I also hope you’ve finally found someone who tells you what you want to hear and if any of you are reading this, please don’t take it personally. After all, you helped fund the experience that gave me something to write about.
You’re welcome and thanks for the money.
ps: I genuinely miss encountering people who are good at what they do, know why they’re good at it and don’t feel the need to explain it to everybody else.
