The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

Ryan Levesque

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The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

Ryan Levesque

Issue #073

| The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

The “Efficiency vs. Resiliency” Dilemma…

The "Efficiency vs. Resiliency" Dilemma: What's the Biggest Vulnerability in YOUR Business?

Ryan Levesque

6 min read

-

This past week, I hosted a small group of clients here on our farm in Vermont…
 
And one of the conversations that came up after the tour of our homestead…
 
Was around the topic of Efficiency vs. Resiliency…
 
And more specifically…
 
How focusing on efficiency over resiliency can unintentionally create massive vulnerability in your business…
 
Let me explain…

1 | The "Efficiency vs. Resiliency" Spectrum...

First, we can think of Efficiency and Resiliency as being on opposite ends of a spectrum, like this:
In other words:
 
Efficiency often comes at the expense of Resiliency.
 
For example:
 
Our farm is optimized around the goal of Resiliency.
 
We have multiple forms of livestock…
 
Dozens of different food sources…
 
Fruit trees… Nut trees… Berry bushes…
 
Multiple annual production gardens…
 
Crops that perform well in wet years…
 
Crops that perform better in droughts.
 
It’s a highly-diversified system.
Now, it would be far more efficient to focus on growing one product – like raising pigs, growing apples, or producing maple syrup…
 
But that’s not what we’re optimizing for.
 
We’re optimizing for Resiliency.
 
We expect that there will be major climate swings in the coming years…
 
And I have no idea what Black Swan crisis is coming next…
 
What we do know is that a diverse, multi-species polyculture is far more robust and resilient than any single, monoculture system.
 
This is true in agriculture…
 
And it’s also true in business as well.
 
(As we’ll get to in just a moment…)

2 | The Unconventional Lesson that "Wheat, Corn, & Rice" Can Teach Us About Marketing...

If you’re a student of history…
 
Then you’re probably familiar with the incredibly tragic Irish Potato Blight of the 1840’s.
 
Reliance on a single crop left the people of Ireland incredibly vulnerable.
In the 1840’s, an unexpected potato blight destroyed Ireland’s primary food source, leading to The Great Famine, where over one million people – nearly 15% of Ireland’s population – starved to death.
* * *
Now, it’s tempting to think that this was a long time ago and this could never happen in our lifetime…
 
But today…
 
Just three cereal grains – wheat, corn and rice – account for nearly 60% of all calories consumed worldwide.
 
And in 80 years, we’ve lost 93% of biodiversity in our food seeds.
It seems that perhaps we haven’t learned our lesson afterall.
 
Which takes us to the business lesson in all of this…
* * *
Last year, in [Issue #003] I wrote about the new “Zero Click” reality that we’ve entered into in this post AI-world…
 
How 60% of all Google searches now result in a “Zero Click” search.
 
And how on mobile devices, that number is closer to 77%.
 
(Meaning that in 77% of all Google searches – because people are getting the information they need with Google’s AI Overview – they are NOT clicking to visit any other website…)
 
In other words:
 
In less than a year, SEO as a meaningful traffic source has basically disappeared off the face of the earth…
 
And the implications of this extend far beyond SEO…
 
Because the broader business lesson is this:
 
In this highly-disruptive post-AI world…
 
If you are overly-reliant on any single traffic source right now – no matter how “solid” that channel might seem to be today…
 
Your business is incredibly vulnerable.

3 | So.....What's The Solution?

Well, the alternative to a single channel traffic strategy is building a highly-diversified Strategic Content Ecosystem – like the one in this diagram below:
If you’re reliant on a Single Channel (left) and that channel disappears or is disrupted, your business can disappear with it; vs. with a Strategic Content Ecosystem (right), your business is far more resilient and robust to weather any storms that may be coming.
A Strategic Content Ecosystem is the equivalent of owning a highly-diversified, polyculture farm…
 
Except, you’ve got a diversified content traffic strategy spanning:
 
Substack…
Medium…
Facebook…
Instagram…
LinkedIn…
YouTube…
Spotify…
And more…
 
Where you’re not dependent on any single source for sustenance.
 
AND…
 
If any one channel gets disrupted, disappears, or deplatforms you…
 
You’re not going to go out of business…
 
Because you’re highly-diversified across different channels…
* * *
The challenge, of course, is that this level of Resiliency comes with a price.
 
Which brings us to…

4 | The Resiliency Tradeoff.

If the price of Efficiency is Fragility…
 
(See: Irish Monoculture Potato Blight of the 1840’s…)
 
Then the price of Resiliency is Complexity.
 
Managing any highly-diversified system….
 
Whether that’s a regenerative polyculture farm…
 
Or a Strategic Content Ecosystem…
 
Involves a relatively high-degree of complexity.
 
(This is the reason why most people don’t grow their own food…)
 
It’s also why most people struggle to sustain a meaningful content ecosystem beyond just one or two channels…
 
So how do you achieve resiliency without the complexity?
 
Simply put:
 
You hire someone else to manage it for you.
 
Like owning a farm without having to spend 8 hours a day managing it yourself…
 
You hire someone to build and manage your Content Ecosystem.
 
One that YOU own (to be clear).
 
But which you pay somebody else to manage.
* * *
When I decided to go all-in on this strategy last year, this is exactly what I did. I didn’t try to build and manage it all myself.
 
Instead, I built a team.
 
And today…
 
This team and I are doing the same thing for other founders who want the same exact thing for themselves:
 
A Strategic Content Ecosystem built around their own Thought Leadership.
 
Essentially the way it works is like this:
 
We work with a small number of founders – to build a highly-diversified Strategic Content Ecosystem around your unique thought leadership – designed to establish you as “Category of One” Thought Leader in your market.
 
We do this by taking a weekly “Source of Truth” email newsletter that you write (just like we do with The Digital Contrarian) and repurpose the content from that newsletter across 37+ different formats/channels online – across YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more…
 
You write one weekly email.
 
We handle all the rest.
 
(This is the same process I’ve been following for the last 18 months with The Digital Contrarian – an approach that’s left my private consulting practice oversubscribed, landed me dozens of speaking invitations, and even helped launch an entirely new business…)
 
Demand for this new service has been off the charts, and we’re currently 100% booked.
 
BUT… We are adding capacity to take on a few more clients right now as we speak.
 
If you’re interested in grabbing one of those spots, you can join the priority waitlist here.
* * *
Okay, I’ll leave you with that for now.
 
I hope this discussion around Efficiency vs. Resiliency has given you something to think about – especially around where you may have vulnerabilities (and thus opportunities) in your own business.
 
As you ponder that question…
 
Have a great rest of your day…
 
Remember to hug the ones you love…
 
And until next week…
 
I wish you all my best,
 
Ryan :-)

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