John Gutteridge

Steven Bartlett and Authentic Brands Group have just launched OBSN, with plans to deploy up to $400 million into creator-led businesses. The ambition is fascinating: take creators with powerful audiences and help turn them into enduring brands. But what about the same idea in reverse? If we’re getting better at turning creators into brands, are we getting better at understanding what creators actually do to brands? Creator commerce is already extraordinarily good at selling. Most of the infrastructure around it has understandably been built to measure performance: reach, engagement, conversion, GMV, CAC. But a creator does more than create a transaction. Every time they introduce a brand to their audience, they leave something behind. They might make it feel more credible, more desirable, more culturally relevant or more trusted. They can take a brand into communities it would struggle to enter on its own. And some may sell a lot of product without adding much lasting value to the brand at all. Imagine one creator generates $200,000 in sales this month and another generates $150,000. On the dashboard, the first wins. But what if the second attracts people who remember the brand, search for it later, buy across the range, recommend it and come back again? Suddenly the calculation gets more interesting. We’ve become incredibly good at measuring the transaction. I’m not sure we’re as good yet at understanding what remains in someone’s head afterwards, or what that might be worth over time. Perhaps the next evolution is not away from creator performance, but towards a broader idea of creator contribution. Alongside audience, engagement and conversion, there’s another question worth asking: What does this person add to the brand that we actually want more of? That shouldn’t mean tighter scripts. The creator’s own point of view is precisely why people listen to them. The opportunity is to give them a deeper understanding of the brand - who it is for, what it believes, where it is different - and then let them interpret that in their own way. When working with brands across very different markets and cultures, the strongest brands are never built by making everyone say the same thing. They have a strong enough centre to allow lots of different expressions without losing what makes them distinctive. As brands move from tens of creators to hundreds or thousands, consistency feels like the wrong ambition. Coherence is more interesting. Lots of different voices, but all adding something useful to the same brand. Creator commerce is becoming very good at finding people who can create demand today. The next advantage will be understanding who can also help build the demand that comes tomorrow. #CreatorCommerce #BrandBuilding #SocialCommerce

Really pleased to see this one come together. A shared belief in the potential of small business and an exciting new chapter for Soffiah. Thanks to everyone at Mastercard who helped make it happen.

Companies are training their own disruption... Last week I found myself in one of those conversations that seems to be happening everywhere at the moment. Technology, jobs, productivity. Which roles would disappear? Which industries would be transformed? How quickly would organisations need to adapt? As I listened, I couldn't help wondering whether today's biggest companies are quietly creating tomorrow's smallest competitors. Every technological revolution redistributes advantage. Maybe this one shifts it from institutions to individuals. The people who have shaped our world were rarely distinguished by execution alone. They were distinguished by what they noticed before everyone else did. They saw friction where others accepted routine. They recognised value where others saw inconvenience. They questioned assumptions everyone else mistook for facts. That has always been the rarest skill. What's changing is how little now stands between an observation and an enterprise. For decades, brilliant ideas often died beneath the weight of capital, capability and complexity. Today, many of those barriers are falling. Research analysing more than 160,000 startups suggests generative AI is already contributing to a rise in solo founders. Stripe has also reported that the number of one-person businesses generating more than US$1 million in annual revenue has doubled since 2023. Those aren't just technology stories. They're entrepreneurship stories. Perhaps the defining shift of this decade won't be technology replacing people. It will be experienced people leaving large organisations to solve problems they've spent years understanding. Not because they've suddenly become more entrepreneurial, but because building something has never been more accessible. If that's true, history may not remember this era for the jobs technology replaced. It may remember it as the moment experience became the world's most valuable competitive advantage. #smallbusiness #startups

Every great business starts smaller than people imagine. Proud of this milestone, grateful for the belief, and even more excited for what's ahead. Never underestimate small.

Enjoyed talking with Stephanie Christopher from Vistage Australia and New Zealand. AI is creating a defining moment in history for small businesses. Unlocking the ability to scale ambition, accelerate execution, and compete on a global stage in ways that were never possible before. #SmallBusiness #Brands #Marketing

For my sins, I am a Tottenham fan. It’s been a painful few years, notwithstanding some silverware at the ‘Donkey Derby’ last year. The 2025/26 season has felt like a slow motion train wreck unfolding in a world-class terminal. Our club still carries itself like a heavyweight. The stadium is exceptional, the brand is global, the expectations haven’t shifted, and yet, in the English Premier League, Tottenham are hovering just above relegation, glancing down instead of up. That gap between identity and reality is where things get interesting. We haven’t failed overnight; we’ve drifted there. We’ve cycled through managers with different philosophies. None wrong in isolation, but together they’ve created a squad that belongs to no system. It’s not versatility, it’s confusion. Business is no different. Companies talk transformation, then pivot again before the last shift lands. Leadership redraws strategy, reshuffles teams, and over time execution turns into reaction. Energy goes inward, and progress becomes motion without momentum. Tottenham have also tried to solve long term problems with short term decisions, flirting with rebuild instead of committing to it. It’s the same trap as chasing quarterly numbers at the expense of long term health. Then there’s culture, the invisible force you only notice when it’s gone. Belief turns into hesitation, and losses start to feel expected. Culture isn’t what you say, it’s what people think will happen next. The dangerous part is how normal this feels from the inside. Manageable, fixable and temporary. That’s exactly how Kodak and Blockbuster declined. Kodak invented the future but hesitated to embrace it whilst Blockbuster saw the shift and moved too slowly to lead it. What connects them all is misalignment and a reluctance to commit. In business transformation, the alternative is simple in theory, but not easy in practice: pick a direction, build around it, accept short term pain, protect culture (if it's good) and confront reality early. Because the longer you operate based on who you were, the harder it is to change and become what you need to be next. Spurs are learning this in real time. Spare a thought for us Tottenham fans, leave your best coping advice below, we’re clearly out of ideas. #BusinessTransformation #BusinessStrategy #Brand Vistage Australia and New Zealand Tottenham Hotspur Football Club Tottenham Hotspur Foundation

The Founder evolution: From managing teams to designing systems. Founders are known to live in the work. Closing deals, writing content, and solving daily fires, they have no choice. But the game is changing. The most successful small business owners are now investing time in understanding and implementing systems. They’re building the logic that allows people to do higher value work while the machine carries the load. The key is now deciding what stays human and what becomes code.   🔹 Automate the predictable Reliability is more valuable than originality in the plumbing of your business. If a task is repetitive, rules-based, or high-volume, it belongs to the system. 🦾 Think: Invoicing, scheduling, lead qualification, and data reporting. 🦾 The Goal: Stability through consistency.   🔹 Keep the meaningful human This is where your business differentiates. You cannot automate the things that require a soul. ♥️ Think: Strategy, positioning, and high-stakes customer conversations. ♥️ The Requirements: Judgment, taste, empathy, nuance and accountability. ♥️ The Goal: Doing the right thing, not just the same thing.   🔹 The Grey Zone (where you win or lose) The best businesses don't just pick A or B. They master the hand off. This is the Grey Zone, where AI and humans collaborate to create something superior: 🏆 AI drafts then human sharpens. 🏆 AI analyses then human decides.   It’s about moments of consequence. Automate the predictable to protect the meaningful. Don't just build a team; build the logic that makes the team unstoppable. #SmallBusiness #Marketing #BusinessStrategy Vistage Australia and New Zealand

The AI noise courtesy of small businesses. I was talking to a bunch of small business owners last week who use AI tools to help them with content creation.   It’s awesome to see the rapid progress in models helping these businesses create content that would traditionally be way beyond their budget constraints and capabilities.   However, the reality is most of these businesses are pedalling hard with no chain. ☁   It’s not for a lack of effort. It’s because 99% of AI tools provide generative output without genuine strategic guidance. Big brands don't just have deep pockets; they have a foundational filter that small businesses often skip in the rush to hit publish.   A few key principles big brands take seriously that small businesses skip entirely.   ✔️Clarity before activity - Knowing where you fit before shouting that you exist. ✔️Positioning before promotion - Creating mental shortcuts for customers rather than chasing a one off viral hit. ✔️Consistency over randomness - Building a recognisable voice that persists across every post. ✔️Long term memory building vs short term hacks - Prioritising brand equity over temporary algorithmic spikes. The challenge for small businesses isn’t creating content, it’s creating purposeful content that builds something lasting. Hiding behind the marketing outputs of big brands, lies a complex web of understanding: the delicate relationship between human emotion and product benefits. ♥️ AI is world-class at predicting the next word, but it is currently incapable of predicting the next feeling. This critical foundation of strategic thinking is missing from nearly all the platforms we see today. They prioritise the how of creation over the why of connection. In the race to show up, so many small businesses are mistaking presence for influence. If we don't bridge this gap between raw generative power and human centric strategy, we aren't building brands; we’re just generating noise. 📣 The future belongs to the business owners who use AI to scale the output, but lean on a deeper, more sophisticated layer of human understanding to form the chain. 💡 #SmallBusiness #Marketing #BrandStrategy

Thanks Jamie Pitt, glad you enjoyed Soffiah.ai and you're just scratching the surface!