Hey friends,

I was on an AI discovery call with a client recently and somewhere in the middle of it they mentioned, almost in passing, that a young woman working on their factory floor had paid her way through medical school doing the job.

I stopped them. That's a fantastic story. Why is nobody outside this building hearing it?

They agreed immediately. Of course it's a great story. Everyone inside knew it. It had simply never left the room.

That's the pattern, and it's worth sitting with for a second. The problem is almost never that a business has no stories. The problem is that the stories stay inside.

At another manufacturer I met a bloke whose father founded the company. Some of what they built decades ago is still running today. Everyone there knew that too. It had never been told to a single customer.

You probably already know one of these in your own business. When did you last tell anyone outside about it?

This is where people misread the problem. It isn't ignorance. The floor knows. The GM knows. Sales definitely knows.

The gap is that marketing sits somewhere else. Either it's outsourced to an agency at a distance, or it's one or two people internally who aren't in those rooms and aren't on those calls. For them to get hold of a story, somebody has to remember it exists, decide it's worth mentioning, and then actually walk over and mention it.

That almost never happens. Not because people don't care, but because the person with the story is busy running the operation, and nobody's job is to go looking.

So marketing works with whatever scraps make it out to them. And the material that would actually make people stop scrolling stays exactly where it was.

Meanwhile the real supply is everywhere. It's in the sales conversations happening today. It's in the internal discussion about a problem the team just solved. It's in an email thread with a client who asked a question nobody had thought about before. It's in a win that gets mentioned once in a Tuesday meeting and never again.

Then the algorithms demand more content, and the same small pool of information gets recycled into slightly different shapes.

Before any of the clever stuff, there's one unglamorous step. Capture the conversations.

Most of your intellectual property lives in meetings and calls. Internal ones, external ones, the phone call in the car. Record them and store them. That's it. You don't need a system. A folder in Google Drive or SharePoint is enough to start.

For online meetings, a tool like MeetGeek will handle it. For physical meetings, your phone works, or one of the small recorder devices that clip to the back of a phone. For phone calls, turn it on.

Always tell people you're doing it and ask permission. For clients, it can be a simple line in your terms and conditions saying you transcribe your conversations. Most people don't mind at all when you're upfront about it.

And be selective. I'm not saying record everything and dump it in. Your sales inbox is customer conversation, so that's fair game. A closed management meeting is not. You don't need to turn it on for everything, and the prompt you write later can be told to pull out learnings and stories while ignoring prices and commercial detail.

Once the material is sitting somewhere, point an AI at it.

I use a scheduled task in Claude, and the instruction is written in plain English. Something like: go into my Google Drive, there's a folder called meeting transcripts, read it and understand what's going on. Check the sales email. Look at these other sources. From all of that, pull out the five or six stories we could share with the marketing team.

No code. No technical language. If the connections are already in place, it takes five or six minutes to set up.

What comes back is a list. The salesperson explained our process this way and the client loved it. We hit this problem last month and this is how we got around it. This customer came to us with something we'd never been asked before.

That's the part that changes things. Nobody now has to remember to walk a story over to marketing. The remembering is done for you.

I use manufacturing examples because the contrast is sharp. Big operation, plenty happening, almost none of it surfacing.

But this is the same in every business I've ever looked at, and it lands hardest in sales and marketing.

Every professional services firm has a partner who explains something brilliantly on a client call and never writes it down. Every agency has a strategist who solved a hard problem last month and told three people. Every software company has support conversations that reveal exactly what customers struggle with, sitting in a ticketing system nobody in marketing has ever opened.

The pattern is identical. The knowledge is created by people talking. The content is produced by people who weren't in the room. And the gap between them is where all your best material goes to die.

There's a second half to this, which is getting your own thinking out.

We built a small app called Tacit for exactly this. It knows who you are, what you care about, and who your audience is. It sends you one or two questions a day. You don't have to open it daily. You can leave it a week and answer a few at once.

The question sitting on my screen right now is about the reworked media bargaining bill and the wider set of payments large tech platforms will have to make. It asks: when you sit with an SME owner who says AI isn't a priority this week, how do you help that owner read news like this, and which single decision about their own business does it create?

I record a quick voice note with my actual thoughts. It turns that into a LinkedIn post.

That post isn't AI slop, because the thinking is mine and the world doesn't have it. The tool did the scanning and the prompting. I supplied the view.

This is why telling your team to post on LinkedIn almost never works. It's not laziness. Staring at an empty box and inventing a topic is hard. Being asked a specific question about something you already have an opinion on is easy. The name Tacit is deliberate, because capturing tacit knowledge is one of the genuinely hard problems in any business.

Same principle for the newsletter you're reading. Ours comes from two places. Either a conversation we've already had, or me sitting down and recording two or three minutes of thoughts on something. Tanisha takes it from there. Start to finish it costs her about half an hour a week. We could never do it regularly before, because pulling the information together consumed too much time to be worth it.

The dumb monkey move is assuming that because everyone inside knows the story, it's been told.

It hasn't. Your team knowing something is not the same as your market knowing it. Those are two completely different things, and businesses confuse them constantly.

The second version of the same mistake is deciding the story isn't interesting enough to share. Usually dressed up as modesty. That's just our normal work. Nobody would care about that. Trust me, they would.

Attention spans keep getting shorter. If you're not out there, people don't remember you.

And remember who you're actually selling to. We're not selling to AI agents yet. If you're selling to Boeing or Melbourne Airport or Coca-Cola, you're not selling to a logo. You're selling to a product manager, an innovation lead, a person with a job to do and a boss to please.

Marketing isn't selling. It's keeping a relationship with that person going consistently, so that when they do need something, you're already there. I meet people now who open with a question about my Europe trip, because they've been following along. That's not a sales conversation. That's trust that already existed before the meeting started.

Think of one thing that happened in your business in the last month that you told a colleague about and nobody outside ever heard.

That's your test case. You already have it. It cost you nothing to find.

Then pick one place where conversations already get recorded, or could be with almost no effort. Your sales inbox is usually the easiest. Point an AI at the last month of it and ask one question: what are the five things in here that a customer would find interesting?

Don't publish anything yet. Just look at the list.

The businesses that look like they have great content usually don't have better stories than you. They just have a way of getting them out of the building.

Everything worth saying about your business is already being said out loud, somewhere, every week. In a call, in a corridor, in a reply to a customer who asked a good question. It stays there because the path from the person who knows it to the person who could tell it doesn't exist.

Build that path. That's the whole strategy.

On 28 September I'm delivering the Occasional Address at a Deakin University graduation ceremony at the Waterfront campus in Geelong.

I studied at Deakin, so standing on that stage in front of graduating students and their families is not something I expected when I was the one sitting in the audience.

It also ties neatly to everything above. That hall will be full of people who have just done something hard, most of whom will walk out and never tell anyone the story of how they did it. I intend to say something about that.

If you're graduating that day, or someone in your family is, come and say hello afterwards.

See you next week,

— Aamir

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