8 PM on a Saturday at Mercato Metropolitano, a large food hall in South London, and we were running out of duck.
Running my first business – a small food start-up – I didn’t have frameworks or KPIs. I just had gut feelings. The sinking feeling of throwing away unsold food at midnight. The quiet satisfaction of seeing a regular customer return for the third week in a row.
I was managing a complex system by pure instinct.
Years later, I was sitting in a weekly trade meeting at a B2B publisher. We, as marketing, presented our MQLs. The editor had a list of the month’s best-performing articles. The sales director had their pipeline on a spreadsheet. Everyone had their own data, and everyone’s numbers were ‘right’. But none of them talked to each other.
