Build A Culture Of Truth-Telling In Your Business transcript

The other day my 6-year-old walked up to my office and he said, "Hey Dad, you may not be able to log into your phone for a few minutes." And I knew right away what had happened when he said that, right? And I asked him, I said, "Well, buddy, did you try to log into my phone? Did you try to enter the PIN?" And he turned around and said, "No." And then started to walk away and then turned back around and said, "Actually, yes." Now, my 6-year-old knows that he's not supposed to use my phone, particularly when I'm not there.

We're really stingy about screens in our house. And he just had this really hard thing. He told me at one point, he said, "Dad, it's so hard not to use it." And of course in that moment, what he was wrestling with was something so deeply relatable, not only in terms of a draw to use the phone when you're not supposed to, but so deeply relatable on a deeper level. It was a kind of an amazing parenting moment that happens, right?

I, of course, when he told me, "Yes, I did do that," when he knew he was not supposed to do, I immediately gave him a hug and said, "Buddy, I'm really proud of you. You did something really brave by telling me the truth that was really hard to tell me in this moment." And that little anecdote was this reminder of something that is so real in organizations, which is that it is often the case that we fear to tell the truth organizationally because we fear the cost of it.

That was happening with my son, right? He He thought he would get in trouble for using my phone when he knew he wasn't supposed to. And so, his first instinct was to lie to me. And, you know, he probably felt some shame about that or whatever, and I understand. He was just being self-protective. And he turned back around and told me the truth. And I wanted in that moment to do the same thing that you want to do when you hear that story, right?

Which is to reward him for telling the truth. You know how hard it is. And it's just, like I said, so relatable to want to shade the truth. And I think that what's happening there at the 6-year-old level is happening in organizations all around all the time. And it's something I've noticed a ton in a whole bunch of recent conversations about the way organizations function and I'm being reminded of it sort of constantly right now and I want to talk about it for a few minutes here.

Here's the basic point that I see, okay? It's this. Great organizations prioritize seeking and telling the truth internally. And both of those are really important. They prioritize seeking the truth and telling the truth internally because the truth of what is really happening in your organization and your product and your service and all those things is like the most valuable thing that you can possibly have, okay? And the core problem with that is that the truth is very often unpleasant.

First, it's hard to discover, okay? First, it's hard to discover, but when you discover it, it's also often unpleasant. And that is what I want to talk about right now, which is uh how to think organizationally about pursuing truth and then how also to think about telling truth and creating a culture that prioritizes truth at every possible level including when it is hard. I was talking to Taylor Holiday a while back about this thing that was really vexing to me and and this is the reason why you should care about this a lot because ultimately money follows the truth and I think that's really clear.

In the end of the day, the truth will show up organizationally, financially in your business. If you are doing something that is wrong and bad for your business, okay? At some point, you will pay the piper on it. You may have a lead time. There may be a gap between when you start doing the wrong thing and when the outcome happens, but it will happen and I've watched it happen repeatedly. I I you know, recently saw it on sort of I'd say a 6-month timeline.

Somebody made a bad decision in an organization and then over a longer timeline realized that, but they had spent 6 months and a whole bunch of money before they realized that decision was bad. And so at first, they couldn't see that the truth was different than what they thought. And now of course that happens in organizations all the time. You you make the best decision you can and you just discover the the at times more or less.

I'm not being critical here at all. But, the problem is at some point, even though it didn't show up right away, the poor decision and the the lack of truth in the way they were going about their thing. They're doing something wrong, doing something having strategies that were not true representatives of the best way to do things in their business. They they were doing something wrong and it show and it showed up. It cost a whole bunch of money.

And that reality is is happening all the time in businesses. This is this is what I started to tell you about with Taylor. I I was telling you Taylor. I said I was I was lamenting to him at one point like, Taylor, I don't understand. Why is it the case that so many people seem to have such a hard time? Maybe maybe humans are just incapable of assenting to data-driven truth when it goes against their expectations. Like maybe we just can't do it.

Maybe humans are just incapable of following the data instead of their gut, you know? It which is which is basically a way of saying doing what's true even when it's unintuitive, which is a really hard thing to do, okay? And he said, oh, they can. They just all work for private equity firms and for major sports franchises, right? And I think that was a great observation. It's it's an illustration of the same point, which is that if you can do this really well, if you can be a relentless truth-seeker even at the cost of your own first first aside from your instincts and secondly at the cost of your ego, if you can do that in your organization, you can be an incredible contributor because at the end of the day, the money follows the truth.

If the truth is a picture of where the money is or is not, you can spend a bunch of money really really badly for a long time and eventually you you you get crushed for it. Or you can not spend a bunch of money and you lose growth because of it or whatever. And so, at the end of the day it does that. And that's why the brightest minds go to these places where there's a whole bunch of money flowing through them, right?

Like major sports franchises where teams have rebuilt giant analytical machines. If you look at the Los Angeles Dodgers who've been a really influential organization in sports, right? My my favorite team in in all sports, the Dodgers have like 50 or 100 or something, I don't know, some huge staff full of analytics people and their whole job, so far as I can tell, is to help discover truth in the organization, surface truth.

That's the point, okay? And they're willing to follow these analytics as major sources of information. Now, I I don't want to get into a debate here about analytics versus feeling or whatever, but you get the idea, right? A whole bunch of money is flowing through that organization. Private equity firms are thinking really carefully about how money works down to the data and penzling things out and they're hiring people who could do that because there's a whole bunch of money to be made there.

So, if you can do this really well, it can be worth a lot of money. And over and over and over again, what I see is a lack of attention to finding out what is actually true. And it's probably my biggest goal over the next bunch of months at Ahrefs Growth, at least one of them, is to start building a culture of truth seeking and truth telling. And so, I want to tell you three ways that I think you can do that. Now, before I do, I want to tell you also you should subscribe to this podcast wherever you watch or listen.

If you like the content that I am presenting today, then you will like my future content as well. Subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. I'd also love a comment and particularly on this episode, I'd love to hear about if you agree or disagree with me or if you see this happening in organizations, you've seen it happen before where sort of a blissful unawareness of truth has hurt you. Tell me the story, ask me a question, leave it in the comments.

I will respond to it because I read every comment that comes out. If you've listened to this podcast for any period of time, you know that I'm a huge fan of my friends at [music] More Staffing. More Staffing is the Philippines-based hiring agency, recruiting agency that I use to staff my teams. Kind of using all the time to build my team as we grow. They're just awesome. They connect you to really great Filipino talent.

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So, here we go. Three ways that you can, uh, build a culture of prioritizing truth so that you can build a great business, okay? Number one, prioritize truth-seeking constantly, okay? What I mean here is build a culture of documentation. That's really what I mean. And this is like the one of the biggest efforts. Patrick, my business partner, who you've heard on this podcast, he's the builder of AJFOS, our operating system for our agency, just recently built a feature into our operating system that's like basically a wiki for, uh, for all of our information, for all of our knowledge in our organization.

And we are starting to get relentless about this, recording every meeting we possibly can and getting the notes from that, recording every piece of information, every strategy we can, everything I think about media buying, every kind of playbooky kind of thing that we can, um, you know, just it's plus, you know, organizational standards and organizational processes and things like that that are sort of normal parts of organizations and getting as much as we can into our Wiki.

And that's just step one, right? That's just step one. Step two is not just doing that, but actually taking it a step further and starting to think about how can we make a more of a point of doing this kind of thing in the moment or right after the moment. And here's what I mean. I was with Daniel from my team, growth strategist and business partner at AJF Growth, one of my other business partners, right? Daniel and I were walking, we were talking about something we had heard at the Meta Performance Marketing Summit.

And we were just we were just reflecting that like after this dinner we had had with some people, we were thinking, we need to start getting to a point as an organization like where mid-meeting if someone says something important that needs to happen, we stop the meeting, we write it down right now, we assign it right now. If we need to take 5 minutes to do it right then, we do it. Everybody takes a break, one person's job is to write it down, record it somewhere.

Obviously, there's the AI note-taker and all that kind of stuff, too, but that stuff gets ignored so much. So, you have all that stuff going in the background, but somebody's job right then and there is to do this because so often it's the case that organizations fail to actually action things they believe. Look, if it is the case that one attribution method is better than the other, then you need to write that down and make sure everybody does it if you are an ad agency, right?

That's just like a top-of-my-head example. There's probably more of them, okay? Now, some of these things are going to work better and differently in different accounts, and I get all that, but you should at least record the hypothesis. If you get a test result from some test you run, then you need to record that somewhere, not only for that brand, but across the organization so you can start building the information.

If somebody has an idea or a strategy that we think is a really big difference maker, write it down right now if we want to actually implement it. Build the implementation plan in that moment and and do it because that's the way that an organization is actually going to turn ideas into action. There are so many ideas that die on the vine, not because they're bad ideas, but because there's no plan to action them. There's this gap between the idea and the action, and the more you can actually connect those, the better.

So, for us it's about building this culture of documentation that we're going to start trying to do over time here. Now, we'll see if we could do it, right? I've already started writing down the need to do that in our culture, of course. I'm listening to my own advice even at this level. And at the baseline underneath that is actually something sneakier, which is the notion that some strategies actually are better than others.

And this is something people debate all the time. They say things like like, you know, every brand is different or whatever. And I think that's really fundamentally wrong. Every brand is different in one way, but there are actually things that work better really consistently. And you should be as an organization, whether an e-com brand or whether you're an agency or anything else, you should be committed to finding those and knowing those are the most valuable things that you have, because the more you can align your actions towards what is actually true, what actually works, what's actually real.

And it's not as easy as it sounds, right? Of course, it's hard to find those things sometimes, but if you can align your actions towards those things, what's going to happen is you're going to generate more value in the business. And so, um so it's about recording it, it's about internalizing it, it's about finding ways to live by it, and it's about having a culture of discovering that truth. And of course, validating those things when you test them.

I mean, testing is part of what you do in those things as well. But that's the first thing, is building a culture of documentation. And of course, in the age of AI, this is all dramatically easier to operationalize than it used to be. That's one of the reasons that we care a lot about documentation at this point, is that it's just much easier to automate and operationalize different things that you believe in the age of AI than it was before, you know, uh it's really hard to get humans to behave consistently.

So, okay, so there's that. Build a culture of documentation, and and of course, as part of that, build a culture of of testing as well, okay? One of the most important things you can do in your organization is figure out, understand deeply, and optimize for what things on your website are actually driving value in your business versus sapping value in your business. And the tool that helps you do that better than anything else is [music] IntelliZoom.

IntelliZoom is CRO testing CRO way beyond the basics. There's a couple reasons that that's the case. The first is that IntelliZoom allows you to test the things that really move the needle for value creation in your business with your customers. [music] That's things like the price of your products, uh the shipping threshold, the amount you're charging for shipping, all the standard offer stuff that you do including your first uh your new customer uh first purchase offer, the 10% off you're giving the people if they're a new customer, that kind of thing.

Test all of that stuff, find out not only if it is actually helpful for your business, but actually if it's driving not just conversions, but profit. And the beauty of IntelliZoom is not only that you can test those real needle mover type things, but that you can actually measure the outcome of every one of those tests on the on the basis of actual profit per visitor, not just revenue per visitor, not just conversion rate because IntelliZoom ties into your COGS data, so it knows how much your your products cost and when people when you give a discount or change the price or whatever and there's trade-offs between conversion rate and AOV [music] and uh and you know discounting and all that kind of stuff.

IntelliZoom spits out the information for you and the result for you based on the actual profit per visit, which is going to factor in all of those things. And so you can test the most important things, you can test them relatively easily, doesn't take a developer to get it installed, it's quick and fast, they can help you make that happen if you run into any issues, and IntelliZoom will get you going to build a culture of testing into your organization to find the most important things in the uh spirit of this episode to find the truth about what's happening in your business and to to optimize towards that all the time.

Go to IntelliZoom.io and tell them uh that I sent you. Use the code Ferris20, f a r i s 20 to get 20% off for the first 3 months. IntelliZoom.io. Build that into your business, be testing all the time, be learning all the time, drive more value all the time. Number two, second to that, right, is prioritize truth when it's costly. So let's say you run a test of some kind and when you run that test, it makes something you did look bad.

And I've had this happen plenty of times, okay? Implemented a new offer strategy for a brand at one point and it turned out the cohorts off those offers performed much worse than I had expected them to do. Well, I can turn around as I measure the cohort behavior off of that offer, okay? For for a supplement brand, I can turn around and say, "Oh, here's all the reasons why I think that didn't quite work out or whatever it is." Or, I can own it and I can say, "Hey look, we tried to do this thing and I thought it was going to go this way, but it actually went that way.

And when it went that way, it was worse for us. And I now see that because I tracked the outcome of what I did." There's two ways to manage it. You can handle that. One of them is in response is like sort of the well, that was a bad idea and you were wrong and you got to pay for it now, you know, in some way. Pay for it whatever way, right? Another way to do it is to reward that behavior and say, "It's really your hypothesis was reasonable and I appreciate that you brought the truth forward and that makes me believe in you more, not less, even though you had the wrong decision in this particular case." If you can actually do that second one, then you can really be somewhere excellently because prioritizing the truth and it's costly is the way to actually make the largest gains.

I had a fascinating conversation with Olivia Corey, name checked on two episodes this week. Olivia Corey from House incrementality firm when I was at the Meta Performance Marketing Summit last week. And if you want my recap on that, by the way, it's the it's the episode just before this one. So, go backwards on to the five things I I took away from the Performance Marketing Summit. Olivia said something that was really fascinating.

She said one of the problems they have at House and I've heard other people in incrementality and testing kind of places say this. One of the problems they have at House, right, is that the results often make the spend decisions look bad organizationally. And so, so what happens is the organization does a test, they get the results back and it looks like somebody just wasted a whole bunch of money. And therefore, there's organizational inertia to actually telling the truth about what happened because somebody's going to get in trouble for it.

Now, some manager somewhere has to go to their VP or to their boss or whatever and say, "I got this really, really wrong." And that's a big problem. Or, how about this? What happens when the incrementality test says you should spend less and grow slower? Like I've had that conversation with brands plenty of times. Nobody wants to hear that. Even if it's the right thing, nobody wants to hear that. And so, the truth is costly at that point.

And very often, people don't actually want the truth. And what I am telling you right now is to want the truth, to prioritize the truth about what's happening in your business. Because if you have that, if you can actually prioritize the truth in your business, you are much more likely to waste less money and to generate more value in the business. Okay, not just waste less, but also to grow more. Because you can accomplish those things.

So, that creates costliness at different turns in the business. This is what my son was wrestling with in that story I started with, right? It was costly to him to tell me the truth, but he prioritized the truth anyway. In fact, this kind of truth-telling, this kind of costly truth-telling, I think is one of the most valuable things in employees and in organizations in general. And it's another thing I really want to build into my organization.

I want to constantly reward people who tell me the truth at cost to themselves. You know, because if if I can hear that, then I know I can trust you. And I know I can trust you to be a truth-seeker ongoing, and I can trust your integrity in the future. We're all going to make mistakes. We're going to make big mistakes. And I'm okay with that. Like it's going to happen. But if we can actually be an organization that says when somebody takes accountability for their mistake, whether that's I don't know, I no matter what kind of mistake it is, then we can, within whatever reason is is or with within whatever is reasonable and possible, that we can actually go and reward that, then that can be really good.

The truth often is costly, and if you can prioritize truth when it's costly, uh you can you can uh really create a lot of value. Okay, third and downstream from there, uh prioritize the truth relationally. Prioritize the truth relationally, okay? Um there is a great image that I will post now if you're watching this. If you're not watching it, I'll just explain it to you. It should be fairly clear. Somebody posted on Twitter, and it's a simple graph, right?

And uh and the the the basic image is is uh two lines diverging, okay, on a graph. And uh and it looks like this, right? Uh the x-axis is time and the y-axis is uh sis- the the functionality of a system. So, the the higher up on the axis is a more functional system, the lower is a is a less functional system over time, okay? And the basic idea is that the more unkind truths you tell over time, the more your system moves toward a functional system.

The more kind lies kind lies you tell over time, the more your the more your system becomes a dysfunctional system. I think that's totally right. It is totally right that if you are telling if your organization prioritizes unkind truths, okay? Now, it doesn't mean you have to be mean when you deliver them, but they're truths that are hard to hear would be another way to say that. The more you can do that, the more that you are able to um make your whole system work better.

Uh people are going to get clear feedback and people are going to get better faster and all those things. And what I have found is that people actually like unkind truths. They They like it when you tell them the actual truth because they know they can trust you then when you tell them something positive later, the kind truth later, right? They really believe you. And so, if you can shoot really straight with people, you can get somewhere.

Now, this is really hard for me. I'm a people pleaser in a lot of ways. I related a lot to this quote from Brent Beshore in his annual letter uh 2025 annual letter. He said, "Throughout the year, I felt increasingly pressed to take a hard look at a character flaw that has plagued my life, fear of man. This shows up as people pleasing, a reluctance to tell the truth, a shading of the truth, and difficulty saying no. These may seem independent, but they're not.

They're deeply connected and deeply embedded. I'd known about it, but mostly ignored or justified it. This year, the truth became clear. It's ugly and destructive. It deadens my heart and hurts those around me. It's the quiet constant calculus running in the background of my day. What do they think of me? What do they need? Did I say that right? Are they disappointed? Did I disappoint them? Can I recover? It's like living inside a courtroom that's always in session.

The irony is that fear of man often wears the costume of virtue. It looks like kindness and being quote easy to work with. It looks like being agreeable and relational. Sometimes it is those things, but often it's not. Often it's not love, it's self-protection. It's me trying to manage outcomes by managing perception. And once I started it, once I saw it, I started to notice the many variations. Conflict avoidance, codependence, vague over committing, resenting people for requests I said yes to, and a subtle habit of not saying the full truth when the full truth might cost me something.

I love that quote. I know it's a little long, but relationally it is so challenging if you're like me to do this because the truth often does cost you something, which is what I was saying a second ago. And so, to build into your culture relationally a culture where you say this. Now, this is hard to do. I think this looks like the form of managers giving clear feedback to people very often. Leaders telling people honestly where the organization is at.

Just telling employees where they really stand if they're doing good or bad work. Again, this is something I really challenge with, but I I I really struggle with. But you can see how what B Shore is saying is correct, which is that the reason I don't do it is self-protective. It's not love for others, it's that I have a hard time being the one that tells the truth. It's off often, if not almost always costly in the short term, but in the long term it's much more costly, which is what the point of that graph is that I showed earlier.

In the short term, doesn't look like much cost, but over time it picks up cost in the organization a whole bunch. Like I said, I had that conversation with Daniel at the Performance Mark met a Performance Marketing Summit and it just reminded me of this idea that we have to build this muscle into our organization all the time. The truth is the most valuable asset that I have. And that's strategic truth, that's truth between teammates, and all the rest.

It's this knowledge set that AJF Growth has and delivers to our clients. As I've said a lot of times, an agency functionally at its core is operationalized knowledge. And so, having that knowledge is really, really great, but you have to make sure it gets used, and that often means telling people you are not operationalizing the knowledge correctly, or hey, you don't know the knowledge enough. So, I have to document it and show it to you.

I have to build better SOPs. I have to build tools that help you get that, because the knowledge is the really, really important thing. That's true if you're an e-commerce business, it's true if you're a service business, probably even more so than others. And of course, as always, as best as you can, okay? It's not always going to work perfectly, but and you're not always going to know the full truth. That's obviously part of it.

But it's a build that all the time into your culture in every possible way. We're seeking the things that are really best. We're seeking to do those things. We admit it when we're wrong, and we tell people the truth when uh constantly. If you build that into your culture, you're going to create a ton of value in your business all the time. All right, thanks so much for watching or for listening. Shout out to More Staffing and Intel Gems, my sponsors for this episode.

Follow up with both of them. The links for them are in the show notes. If you have thoughts on this, email me, podcast@ajfgrowth.com, or leave a comment on this video uh or audio, depending on which share where we're accessing [music] it. Do that, and I will respond. I read and respond to every single one of those, like I said. If you want to work with AJF Growth as we seek to do as we seek to tell the truth with our clients, which is another thing that we're definitely working on, go to ajfgrowth.com, and tell me a little bit about your business on the intake form there, and we'll see if we can be of some help to you.

Uh thanks so much for watching or for listening, [music] and I will see you next time.