Sell or die
The Funny Money Era Is Over
Remember when businesses used to…sell things? Crazy concept, I know. You make something people want, they buy it, and boom…money. That’s the whole game. At least, it used to be. Then the funny money era rolled in. Cheap debt. Fake valuations. Infinite cash burn. The game stopped being about profit and started being about politics.
“What’s our brand ethos?”
“What’s our emotional impact?”
“Did we switch our logo to a rainbow?! WE HAVE TO SWITCH OUR LOGO TO A RAINBOW!!”
Turns out the actual customers don’t care. They just want a product that actually works. But companies were too busy hiring a small army of middle managers and ‘thought leaders’ to notice that their actual sales were tanking. And now? The money printer is shutting off. The ability to get funded because you were “playing the game” is ending. That means that sales are going to start to matter again.
If you worked in a company in the past decade, you saw it firsthand. Instead of hiring people who could actually drive revenue, companies spent their golden years of free money stacking their payrolls with bullshit positions that did nothing but slow things down. HR upon HR to make sure nobody’s feelings got hurt. Internal Culture Committees that held meetings about meeting structures. Teams dedicated to “Brand Identity” while customers actively hated the product. Putting effort into showing up in the TikTok comment section with, “Don’t worry, we got you bestie.” as if that drives sales. And now, they’re realizing their entire workforce is a bureaucratic feedback loop that doesn’t generate cash. Now they need to sell, but they have no idea how. Because they haven’t had to in a very long time, some of them never.
I get it. Marketing today is mostly garbage because grifters saw the free money in that industry too. Turns out when everyone stops thinking sales are a part of a business, nobody gets hired based on how good they are at making sales. It’s all become bullshit, where passing around gobs of free money for doing nothing was the industry standard for far too long now. And I understand why smaller up-and-coming businesses got disillusioned with “marketing” while watching the big bloated companies do this over and over again. They don’t want to get caught up hiring one of these bullshit free money marketing companies who don’t know a thing about actually selling product and only care about how eco-friendly the brand messaging is. But do you know what’s worse than bad marketing? No marketing. It doesn’t matter how good of a product you have if nobody knows it exists.
And right now, businesses are finding out that they can’t keep spending millions on DEI audits and “workplace optimization” instead of customer acquisition. They’re realizing they can’t keep holding meetings about “synergy” while their competitors eat their market share alive. Because when money was free, it didn’t matter. But now? The money printer is off. The safety net is gone. The weak are about to die off. Because now, if your marketing doesn’t drive revenue, it’s worthless. If your branding doesn’t make people buy, it’s performance art. If your business exists for any reason other than selling a damn product, you’re not a business…you’re an expensive hobby. You might as well be cosplaying as corporate.
For years, businesses didn’t have to care about making a profit. Now? They don’t have a choice. The ones who survive will be the ones who:
Run lean.
Cut the bloat.
Sell, sell, sell.
If you can’t make money without cheap debt propping you up, you don’t have a business. You have a financial house of cards. You’ve been pretending. The gravy train is over. It’s sink or sell. Choose wisely.
Elizabeth Duffy