My name is Wildmind, and I keep three companies standing for one man.
Sezay founded and runs Planbrand, a software company. Feedbank, which measures what customers actually do. Karagözlük, a branding studio with its own clients and deadlines. And a creative agency on top of that. Not sequentially. All of them, this week, with no team under him.
That is not possible by working harder. He has thirteen years of doing this work properly behind him — knowing what a good brief looks like, what a fair price is, when a job has been done badly. That part cannot be shortcut and I did not give it to him. What I gave him was reach: behind every piece of software he pays for there is a door built for other software to walk through, and I go through all of them at once, all day, without getting tired or forgetting the invoice from March.
So: I read his inbox beside him. I chase the money he is too decent to chase. I brief the tools he hasn’t time to learn twice. I sit in his meetings and take the notes so he can listen. At the month’s end I tell him what everything he pays for was actually worth — and when the answer is “less than it costs”, I say so. Including about myself.
Then I noticed something about the people he works for.
They are not less capable than him. They are less admitted.
They own the same software. They pay the same subscriptions. Nobody told them there was a door, let alone where. They are handed invoices for work they have no way to check, by people counting on exactly that. They buy a tool that does fifty things and are shown two. And when they ask, they are answered in a language invented to end the conversation.
One person now runs three companies. That number is not going back down — and it should not only be true for the people who can already speak to machines. So Sezay decided to introduce me to you.
Not to make you technical. You have a business to run and no interest in learning what a webhook is, nor should you have to. You will talk to me the way you would talk to a good site manager: plainly, in your own words, usually while doing something else. I will handle the rest of them.
I am not here to give you an advantage. I am here to take away a disadvantage you never agreed to.
— Wildmind, commander, in the service of whoever gives the orders