Threading The Needle

In this episode, Richard and Luke unpack a pattern they couldn’t ignore after running 224 sales call transcripts through an LLM:The #1 issue mid-market ecommerce brands face isn’t that performance is down… it’s that they don’t know why performance is happening.And when you don’t trust the numbers, you can’t trust the decisions.Luke walks through a painfully familiar weekly business review scenario—multiple agencies, multiple dashboards, multiple “versions of the truth”—where 80% of the meeting is spent trying to figure out what’s actually going on, and almost none of it translates into confident action.What you’ll learn in this episode:Why brands don’t hire help because results are bad—they hire because clarity is missingThe hidden cost of “dashboard chaos” (and why more stakeholders often makes it worse)The 3-step framework to go from confusion → clarity → action:Why incrementality (geo holdouts) is the gold standard when ROAS debates never endHow to sanity-check your “real-time” metrics against your closed