Friday Field Notes: 10/17/2025

Happy Friday, folks.

We’re in the heat of planning season. And for a lot of agencies, this means mapping out everything you’re going to do in 2026.

But a lot of agencies are also skipping the post-mortem of 2025.

I like routing everything through three questions:

• What am I doing I should stop?

• What am I doing I should continue?

• What am I not doing I should start?

The beauty of using these questions is that they’re very reflective but also tied into your goals.

A hugely exciting benefit is that when you ask different people on your team, you’re going to get different answers for everything because their perspectives within the business are completely different.

I’d strongly recommend you use these to kick off your planning efforts.

I’d also recommend you use these anytime you’re looking to get feedback from your team because a lot of times they struggle to give you quality criticism.

This is either because they’re worried about you being their boss or they don’t have enough direction to give you a good answer.

But when you ask these three questions, it helps give them this focus so that they can ask.

Anyways, I hope you’re enjoying the fall colors. And if you live somewhere without fall colors, I’ll have you know New England is gorgeous right now.

Have a great weekend!

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Lessons of the Week:

1. Build for options.

A lot of people will tell you you need to build to sell.

My issue with that advice is that it lacks the context of knowing what you want to do with your business.

My love of that advice is that, even if you don’t want to sell, building a business that can be sold has a lot of positive benefits.

One of the most important, at least for me, is that it keeps your options open. When you optimize for options, it means no matter what life throws at you, you have choices.

Most agency owners get stuck in reactivity. Then life throws a curveball and they have one choice. And that choice might be to sell your agency…the one you’ve poured years of sweat into…for pennies.

Avoid it by building for options.

2. The need for incrementalism.

Everyone’s looking for the quickest wins they can.

But that often requires HUGE steps, lots of risk, and no certainty.

Instead, what if you found the smallest possible step you could take today.

Yes, it may not get you to your goal tomorrow, but it would create certainty, primarily because it makes consistency incredibly achievable.

I’ve got a list of tasks that refresh every day. Most of them take less than a minute to achieve.

“Moment of Presence.” - A lot of times, we kept so swept in the future, that taking a moment just to realize where I am now grounds me and makes the day more manageable. This can be as simple as taking a sip of coffee but feeling the warmth travel through my body.

“Create.” - Taking a moment to create anything. A LinkedIn post. An article. A post in my community. But it’s creating something from scratch.

“Move My Body.” - This can be an hour workout. It can also be 10 minutes of stretching between meetings.

I’ve got 12 items I do daily. But each one is an incremental step that gets me a little closer to my goals.

3. AI-First vs. AI Bolt-Ons

Everybody wants to say they’re using AI in their practice.

This is great. You should be.

The problem is that, for most, AI is an afterthought, and the way that they’re leveraging it doesn’t actually benefit the outcome they’re targeting.

If you want to truly use AI as a differentiator right now, which I’m not necessarily recommending, it needs to actually be a differentiator.

You should be able to point to exactly how it helps achieve a target where not using it would make that target impossible.

If you want help incorporating this into your agency, I can introduce you to a friend, just let me know.

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Quote That Slaps:

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” – Margaret Thatcher

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Content Roll Up:

Have a great weekend!

Comment and share any of your learnings this week!