ON SHORT-TERM WINS VS LONG-TERM COSTS AND TELLING YOURSELF THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR DECISION MAKING PROCESS
Radical transparency usually gets talked about as something we owe other people—disclose the supply chain, name the sponsor, show the "true" cost of making the thing. All of that matters, for sure, especially for a purpose-led business (as my clients' businesses and my own are), and I'll get there. But there's a version of radical transparency that has to come first, before all that. It's harder, IMO, because it’s all internal: being honest with yourself about what your decisions cost, tradeoff-style.
That's where this starts. Inward. And since I'm asking it of you, I'll go first.
Here's a pattern I see often in client sessions: creative founder hits a plateau (sales flat, inquiries quiet, the work feeling a little stale, boredom with what's been built, exhaustion, etc.) and decides the answer is a rebrand. New logo, new colors, new website. The launch gets a burst of likes, a few DMs, a little hum of attention. It feels like momentum. And a few months later the business is in exactly the same place, minus the money and the energy it took to rebrand. No genuine return on investment. The quick hit of eyeballs was never going to convert into long-term impact, because nothing underneath had changed. We all know the term "lipstick on a pig," right?
Nine years into my practice, I decided it was time to rebrand Weird Specialty. From the outside, it looked like a visual refresh, and sure, it was, but there was more to it than that. That part was just the visible tip of a bigger strategic shift: updated service models and pricing, new initiatives integrated into my practice, a new social media strategy, and my first advertorial released into the world.
Transparently, I did all this because I could feel a plateau looming… not here yet, but coming. My business model was maintaining, but not growing; my client base primarily came through referrals, but cold inbounds were lagging and my social audience wasn't growing. And I was sort of relying on what had worked before, lacking curiosity. My interest in remaining best in class was waning because I wasn't really putting effort into things that were actually driving me, my business, or my reputation forward. I can't say I was being lazy; I was just… uninspired, and couldn't quite figure out why.
The fact of the matter was, staying on the same course without checking my coordinates wasn't an option. So I did what I ask my clients to do, sorta becoming my own client. I audited my base's needs: what we actually work through in sessions, and how that has changed over the past nine years. I shifted my rates to meet the sophistication and expertise levels I’m work at today. I looked hard at my own market relevance and competitive landscape. I invested in outside expertise to recalibrate my brand positioning for business development and new client acquisition. And I began to define new goals, recalibrate my strategy, and action that. This was not only a financial investment but a shit ton of time and effort, because I genuinely had to think about the bigger picture: mid-career, middle age… I needed to invest in understanding what my long-term goals were now. What was I building towards, and frankly—was I actively on course? Even building it uniquely for myself, strategy doesn’t stay relevant forever.
The new look was the last step of the work, not the first. (I worked on the new visual identity with the Office of Opal, btw.) And what will continue to roll out into the world isn't a string of one-offs. It's my new (bigger) strategy, made visible.
First to launch was my evolved service model and new rates. More confidence, more clarity, and more sophistication. Immediate conversion ensued. The "right" clientele came knocking, and my schedule filled up fast. I felt more confident in the work I was onboarding because my own discernment and earnestness were being met by aligned clientele who knew exactly what they were signing up for. Flow state commenced with ease and grace. Just what I hope for, for my clients.
A few months later, my "advertorial" film for Weird Specialty, Off Course, On Purpose was released. This part-art film, part-marketing content, has been a huge success. People loved the visuals and the styling. But what landed was the message. The rollout has already brought a wild number of new followers and real inbound inquiries. Not just because the film was pretty (it is), but because it pointed alongside all the other changes in the same direction, toward the same long-term goal: a sustainable, regenerative, best-in-class practice I can count on for the next ten years. And then I'll likely have to do this all over again, because staying on course is an ongoing administrative and operational priority, amIright!?
That's the difference. A rebrand for eyeballs asks, how do I get noticed this month? A rebrand for relevance asks, what does the business I want in a decade need from me now?
James Daunt, the bookseller who turned around both Waterstones and Barnes & Noble after everyone (and I mean everyone) said Amazon had already won, made the same distinction at a much bigger scale. He didn't rebrand either chain. He actually, shockingly, cut the marketing budgets to zero. Not everything needs a rebrand; it might be that it needs a new strategy. What he changed was what happened inside the stores: who chose the books, how they were shelved, whether a bookseller in one town could make their shop feel like it belonged there. His core principle, in his words: "never sacrifice the medium and long term for the short term."
I cannot stop thinking about how fucking solid this statement is.
He doesn't say the people who ran those businesses before him were stupid. He says they got fixated on short-term results and locked themselves into a downward spiral of short-term decisions, each one trying to fix problems that needed long-term thinking. But I'd bet he was being generous, and that they also got caught chasing short-term gains/wins that deterred them from staying on course to bigger wins.
That's the danger I want to name. Not bad ideas. Good-enough decisions, made for this minute or this month, that quietly cost us the business we actually want to have in five years.
WHOSE CLOCK? WHOSE METRIC?
Before we go further, I want to hand you one tool, because it's the thread running through everything that follows. When you're facing a decision (a discount, a hire, a wholesale order, a rebrand, a collab, an invitation, or an opportunity), ask two questions.
Whose clock is this on? Who benefits from this decision, and when? This month's cash flow? Next quarter's launch? You, five years from now? Your team? Your customers? Someone you'll never meet?
Whose metric is this? Whose definition of success are you using? Yours? A buyer's? A platform's? An algorithm's? A stranger's on Instagram? A capitalistic society's?
There's an old idea in economics called Goodhart's Law. The plain version: when a number becomes the goal, people stop serving the thing the number was supposed to measure, and start serving the number. Followers were supposed to measure connection. Launch- or liquidation-week sales were supposed to measure demand. Your schedule being slammed was supposed to measure a healthy business. At some point, for a lot of businesses, all those short-term measures stop measuring what they were intended to, and shifted into something else, like means becoming ends.
Daunt saw this play out on the shelves. When he took over Waterstones, and again at Barnes & Noble, one of the first things he did was stop accepting the money publishers paid for prime display space. Every table, every endcap had a price on it, which meant the publishers, not the booksellers, were deciding what each store put in front of its community. Someone else's metric, sitting at the front door. He turned that money down and handed the choice back to the people who actually knew their customers. (Generally speaking, I kinda think he sees his store managers as librarians: they know their community better than he does.)
The beauty of being in business for ourselves is that we are always there for the very first and last mile. But I'd bet you've let someone else's metrics into your business. The wholesale buyer's sell-through terms. The platform that rewards whatever kept people scrolling yesterday. Corporate terms influencing your own. The peer whose launch made yours feel late, etc., etc., etc.
The script for my film was the most important thing, because it was the message I wanted people to hold on to. Put plainly: I believe you should set your own goals and establish your own metrics for success. With my clients we dig out what's already true first, the life they want to live and the work they want to put into the world. Then, and only then, do we attach financial benchmarks to steer toward.
Values first, metrics second. When it flips, you end up very efficiently chasing a number that was never yours, following a path you never chose.
And yes, sometimes choosing your own metric means you won't be everyone's cup of tea. Good. Creative entrepreneurship is a radical act of self-care, love, and rebellion. Measure accordingly.
THE QUARTER VS. THE CENTURY
Short-termism is a dry word for a familiar habit: making decisions for what pays off now, even when it costs you later. Not necessarily because you're reckless, tho I see that in certain clientele's MO. Because now is loud and later is quiet. Junk food vs. a home-cooked meal. (I have a theory that creative entrepreneurs are kinda like addicts. They get high on the new and now, seeking another hit.) Now has an invoice due, a launch date, an inbox full of asks. Later is elusive and not rewarding in the moment, ephemeral even.
We learned this as kids in many an Aesop fable. Most of us forgot it the minute we dove into starting our businesses.
Remember the tortoise and the hare? The hare mocks the tortoise for being slow, so they race. The hare sprints out so far ahead, and is so sure of the win, that he lies down for a nap. The tortoise just keeps going, one steady step after another, and crosses the finish line while the hare is still asleep. "Slow and steady wins the race" is a saying I never forgot and bring up often.
Here's what I notice now, as an adult running a business. The hare didn't lose because he was fast. He lost because speed made him arrogant and inattentive. He was racing for the crowd, for the look of winning, and stopped paying attention to the actual course. (Pride, one of the noonday demons, in a nutshell.) The tortoise never once looked at the hare. She only looked at the road.
I love me a tortoise, always have (collected them as a child, even.) I have another theory that the tortoise in this fable might also be metaphorically a late bloomer, but that's a story for another time. Recently in a client session we were chatting about the necessary REFRAME: LATE BLOOMER = In my own time. #boom
Then there's the ant and the grasshopper. All summer, the grasshopper sings and plays while the ant hauls grain into storage. When winter comes, the grasshopper is starving and goes to the ant for help. The ant turns him away: you sang all summer, so now you can dance. There are actually two versions of this fable. In the original, the ant declines to let the grasshopper in, and it dies of cold and starvation!? Later retellings softened it (Disney's 1934 short is the best known), so that the grasshopper has to entertain the ant all winter in order to be let in.
If I'm being honest, I've never had a soft spot for the grasshopper, but I understand the appeal. Most creative folk ARE the grasshoppers. The singing is the work. And the ant's refusal to share has never sat right with me either; that's scarcity mindset dressed up as virtue, which gives me the ick. So the lesson I take isn't stop singing. It's sing AND store. It's the softened retelling, even?! Know what you do best, and find others to collaborate/work with, so stability, care, and pleasure can all exist. Make the work, and build the granary while the sun is out, because winter always comes. Slow seasons, maintain seasons, the market dipping, a body that needs rest. The founders who last are the ones who planned for winter in July.
Turns out the fables have data behind them, even in the land of quarterly earnings calls. McKinsey and FCLT Global studied 615 large and mid-sized US companies from 2001 to 2014 and sorted them by how they behaved: steady investment, honest earnings, not contorting themselves to hit quarterly targets. The long-term group grew revenue 47% more and earnings 36% more than everyone else. They also took a harder hit during the financial crisis, and recovered faster. That's the honest part. The long game costs something up front. (To be fair, critics have pointed out that the study may be mistaking differences between industries for differences in mindset, so hold it as evidence, not gospel.)
Big-company data is one thing. Here's what it looks like at the scale most of us actually work at.
In 1990, at twenty, Ani DiFranco scraped together, begged, and borrowed enough money to start her own record label, Righteous Babe, in her hometown of Buffalo, New York. One reason: to put out her own music. She sold tapes at her shows as she toured. No big publicity budget. A slow build, fan by fan. When the major labels came calling, she said no.
In the short term, that meant walking away from the kind of signing money most young musicians dream about. Over the long term, press at the time noted she was earning about $4.25 per album sold, compared to the $1.25 the chart-topping bands she hung out with were making from their major labels. More than that, she kept her work, her voice, her politics, and her pace. She has defined the label's success in musical and human terms rather than financial ones. That's the tortoise. That's the century view, rather than the quarter.
Compare that to the darlings of the direct-to-consumer boom that raised fast and grew faster. Allbirds' annual sales fell from about $277 million in 2021 to about $190 million in 2024. In 2026 it sold off its brand assets for $39 million, and the public company left behind announced it was pivoting to AI computing infrastructure. You can't make this up. That's the hare, getting passed while napping.
These are the two ends of the same spectrum. At one end, what tech writer Ed Zitron calls the Rot Economy: growth for growth's sake, the fire that eventually burns everything around it. At the other, Japan's shinise, the centuries-old family businesses whose purpose was never profit but rather continuation, long-term survival. Every one of us is somewhere on that line, and every decision moves us a little in one direction or the other.
So here's a tool. Before your next big decision, fill in all three columns, and fill in the third one before you decide, not after.
YOUR DECISIONS ARE YOUR ETHICS
Let's get uncomfortable, shall we? Your values aren't what's written on your About page. They're the pattern your decisions leave behind.
Behavioral economists call this revealed preference: what you actually choose, when choosing costs something, tells the truth about what you value. The plain version: show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I'll show you your ethics. #yikes
When Daunt took over Waterstones, the company was spending roughly $30M a year on marketing. He set it to zero on day one, and it has stayed there. Asked why the previous team had spent it, his answer was, essentially, that they were too frightened not to. Fear is a metric too. It just never shows up on a spreadsheet. To be honest, I think a lot of what's going on in the world, especially these days, is rooted in reactive, fear-based decision-making. And I’m not alone thinking it ain't looking to good out there.
Compare that to Dr. Bronner's, the family-owned soap company that, for more than twenty years, has capped executive pay at five times what its lowest-paid, fully vested employee earns. As of 2026, starting pay for full-time employees is $29.11 an hour. Extra profits go to causes the company believes in, more than $100 million since 1998. That's a value turned into a rule. Nobody at that company has to re-decide, in a weak moment, what fair pay means. I'm talking a LOT about fair pay in client sessions these days, and setting up profit-sharing models. #justsayin
But I do want to recognize that it is damn hard for my client base to manage the burdens of care for those working for them. Under the U.S. Small Business Administration's guidelines, the upper limits for a small business generally reach a ceiling of 1,500 employees (for manufacturing) or $47 million in average annual revenue (for non-manufacturing industries). However, these caps vary significantly by industry. And in 2026, the SBA proposed removing those ceilings altogether, which means "small" may soon have no upper limit at all. But think about that!? Policy built for a 1,500-person "small business" WILL NOT WORK for a five-person studio. As I like to say, my clients are often simultaneously their most expensive and cheapest employee. Reactivity and short-term decision-making play into this, and then roll out into weird policies and procedures that become unsupportive and unsustainable.
And then there's the case that keeps me honest. Mara Hoffman ran her label for fifteen years before she hit a wall. She felt she was mostly adding more stuff to a world already buried in it. So she took a successful business apart and rebuilt it, while sales were climbing. She never took outside investment. Over time she cut petroleum-based fibers, then wholesale and the overproduction built into it. She won the CFDA's Environmental Sustainability Award in 2023. The next year, after twenty-four years, she paused the brand, even though her sales had grown. Now Mara is leaning into another chapter of photography, visual storytelling, and creative direction, on her own terms. Her reflection, paraphrased: our culture teaches us how to begin things, and almost nothing about how to end them. I completely agree. Starting things is the drug-like state to swim in: anything is possible, because potential lies in the eye of the beholder. There's no accountability yet.
If I'm being honest, I almost left her out, because she complicates the story. That's exactly why she belongs here. The long game is not a guarantee. Doing the right thing doesn't promise you'll win, because winning is abstract and personally defined. Or I guess I'm arguing for reclaiming that. Sometimes the values-led decision isn't to scale, or even to survive. It's to stop on your own terms rather than keep going on someone else's.
Then there's the version where the words and the decisions come apart. Everlane trademarked the phrase "radical transparency." It published what its clothes cost to make and where they were made. In 2012 it even shut down its website on Black Friday to protest the excess, then later reversed course and joined in like everyone else. Private equity money came in, debt piled up (roughly $90M of it), and in 2026 the brand was sold to Shein. Of all the buyers!
I'm not interested in dunking on anyone. I'd bet plenty of the people who built Everlane believed every word. But that's the lesson. The brand said radical transparency on the outside. The decisions underneath (whose money, whose clock, whose metric) were telling a different story. The short-term decisions told the truth before the brand did.
It's the same trap I've named before as Greed, one of the noonday demons: charging a premium for values you aren't paying for anywhere else in the business.
So, the audit. Write down your three most important values. Then open your calendar for the last month and your bank statement for the last quarter. Where does your time go? Where does your money go? Where do they match what you wrote down, and where do they contradict it? Don't fix anything yet. Just look. That's the radical transparency part.
WHY THIS IS YOUR MOMENT
Pressure to trade the long game for the short one always peaks at the same moment: the end of the year. For product folks, it's the holiday discount email. For practitioners and service providers, it's the year-end package deal, or the rate you quietly drop to fill January. For artists, musicians, and writers, it's the gig, the commission, or the collab you say yes to because it pays now. The fear of a quiet season. Everyone else is doing it, so it’s gotta be ok for me too, right?
Here's what behavioral pricing research says actually happens, and it applies whether you sell candles, or sessions on the clock: every customer or client carries an internal "reference price," a sense of what something should cost, built from every price they've seen from you before. Each discount you run, every rate you cut, gets folded into that number. Do it often enough and your sale price becomes your real price in people's minds. You trained them to wait. Junk food, again: a quick hit now, a crash later.
That doesn't mean never run a promotion or offer a sliding scale. It means know whose clock it's on, and whose metric you're chasing, before you hit send or say yes. Is this decision coming from your values, or from fear?
In an economy that rewards whoever burns brightest this quarter, the founder who makes long-term decisions is the contrarian. And contrarian, in a world drowning in sameness, is what gets remembered. The shinise didn't last three hundred-plus years by winning holiday seasons. Ani DiFranco didn't build a life's work by taking the signing bonus. Dr. Bronner's doesn't re-argue fair pay every quarter. And Mara Hoffman didn't keep going just because stopping was harder to explain. They decided what they were for, and let that decide the rest.
It's what I found when I became my own client, too. The rates, the service model, the film: none of it was a quick hit. Each piece was a decision made for the practice I want ten years from now, and the right clients showed up because of it, not in spite of it.
So here's the flip side of the table from earlier. Same kinds of decisions, made for the long game.
Be the tortoise. A late bloomer, in your own time. Sing and store. Define winning for yourself, and measure accordingly, even if it means you won't be everyone's cup of tea.
Telling yourself the truth is the first half. Holding the line when the short-term pressure shows up (in the moment, tired, scared, with an invoice due) is the second, and that takes its own set of tools. For now, start here: what is this decision really trading away? And whose clock is it on?
#getwithit
— gJ
