Revenue Growth Drivers

1. Remote work is more productive. 2. Remote work is less productive. 3. Remote work can be more or less productive, it all depends on the work and the worker. If you're getting tired of this back-and-forth debate, Scoop Technologies and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have something for you. They've done a broad-based look at how different work arrangements impact corporate performance. To date, most research comparing remote and office workers has been narrow in scope, looking at, say, data-entry workers in India or call-center workers in China. The analysis of 554 public companies that employ a collective 26.7 million people found that “fully flexible” firms — which are either completely remote or allow employees to choose when they come to an office — increased sales 21% between 2020 and 2022, on an industry-adjusted basis. That compares with 5% growth for companies with hybrid or fully onsite workforces. Among the companies that did require at least some office attendance, those that came in a few days a week boosted sales at twice the rate of those in the office full-time. Is revenue growth the best proxy for productivity? They could have looked at operating profit margins, free cash flow or shareholder returns. But as Rob Sadow says, "There is no perfect answer, but we felt this was a first step in the right direction." #productivity #revenuegrowth #remotework #office #hybridwork #consulting #flexibleworking #hr #performancemanagement

What's the relationship between company flexibility and revenue growth? For the first time we have an answer. The hottest debate on remote work is about productivity. Some CEOs have been adamant that remote workers aren't productive. Employees feel just as strongly that the opposite is true. Through a Flex Index <> Boston Consulting Group (BCG) collaboration, we analyzed the 3 year revenue growth of 554 public companies between 2020 and 2022. To account for industry differences in high- and low-growth sectors, we then normalized each company's growth rate based on its industry growth rate. What did we find? Companies that are Fully Flexible -- meaning they do not require time in office -- outperformed their peers by 16 percentage points in revenue growth between 2020-2022. Companies that are Structured Hybrid -- meaning they require some time in office, but not full time -- outperformed their Full Time In Office peers by 2x. Why does this matter? Executive teams and board rooms are regularly discussing flexible work policies. Now a CFO can go to a CEO or Board and say: (1) There is no data that public companies offering work location flexibility underperform. In fact, there is data that public companies offering work location flexibility are growing revenue faster than those that do not. (2) Offering work location flexibility enables us to attract more candidates, retain more employees, and drive higher employee engagement. (3) Offering work location flexibility also saves us cost on real estate footprint. That's a powerful argument, and one that will drive more and more companies to adopt work location flexibility over time. Link to the full research: https://lnkd.in/ech_NUG2. And a big thank you to Debbie Lovich, Rosie Sargeant, and the BCG team that we collaborated with on the analysis! #futureofwork #flexibleworking #remotework

Meta can say all it wants about AI and the metaverse, but it's still an advertising business and gets 96% of its revenue from advertisers. Here are a few of my top advertising-related takeaways from #Meta's Q4 2023 earnings call: 1️⃣ China-based advertisers are a big revenue driver On the call, CFO Susan Li noted that Chinese advertisers made up 10% of Q4 total revenue – the first time I believe she has quantified the impact. While she didn’t name names, the two biggest factors are Temu and Shein. Both are battling to gain market share and users, and are devoting huge sums to Meta ads to entice first-time buyers to their low-cost goods. 2️⃣ AI is boosting ad growth   No surprise, Mark Zuckerberg led off the call with a long discussion of Meta’s broader AI philosophy and strategic approach. But he and Li also provided valuable color about Meta’s AI ad initiatives. In addition to Advantage +, the company's suite of automated ad products, there's also generative AI. Meta's early work in generative AI is helping advertisers to quickly and efficiently create multiple versions of ads, generate ad images on the fly, and test different ad copy. Meta expects to invest more to build out these features in 2024. 3️⃣ Messaging is a growing revenue stream Meta’s click to message ads and its paid messaging product are becoming a more important source of revenue. The company didn’t share specific stats, but Zuckerberg at one point called messaging the "next revenue pillar" for the business. Also notable: Zuckerberg called out WhatsApp’s user growth in the US (without sharing figures). After many years of being underutilized, WhatsApp may finally be getting more attention in the US. 😬 What didn't get a lot of attention on the call was Reels. In the past, execs have talked about how they're building out video products and more recently, they talked about Reels' contribution to revenue. This time, Reels got only 12 mentions, and the majority of those were about how Reels related to Meta's AI ambitions. 📊 Quick advisory if you're like me and rely on Meta's quarterly disclosures of its users: This quarter was the last time Meta will report Facebook monthly and daily users. It's also no longer going to report Family of Apps monthly people. In honor of that, here's a slide from yesterday's earnings presentation. Grab those stats while you still can!

👂 What Your Lawyers Wish You Knew (But Won’t Tell You) Most law firm leaders ask: “How do we develop the next generation of rainmakers and create a BD culture?” Maybe the better first question is: “What do our lawyers actually need to get there?” Here are 10 practical steps to build a real business development culture, one that empowers your lawyers and sustains firm growth: ✅ 1. Go on a listening tour. Ask: Where do you feel stuck? What kind of support would help you most? ✅ 2. Provide individual coaching. Some lawyers need help creating a relationship plan. Others need a safe space to practice “the ask.” ✅ 3. Create (and share!) a BD budget. Even a modest, clearly communicated budget (per lawyer) gives a lawyer permission to act like a future rainmaker. It also provides you with a way to track activity. ✅ 4. Model the behavior. Show them BD matters—speak, connect, thank clients publicly. Leadership sets the tone. ✅ 5. Segment your partners. Not everyone is in the same place. Coach accordingly: rainmakers, rising stars, or those who need structure. Provide for each. ✅ 6. Establish clear expectations. Define what good BD looks like—and make it measurable and part of reviews and comp discussions. ✅ 7. Offer real training. Not just a CLE lunch. Focused, customized guidance creates measurable change. ✅ 8. Give them tools and data. Target lists. CRM support. Client insights. Conversation starters. Make it easy to act. ✅ 9. Celebrate internal wins. Share what’s working—even small wins (and maybe even efforts.) Momentum is contagious. ✅ 10. Align incentives. If your comp system rewards hoarding, no amount of training will drive collaboration. These are the kinds of conversations I lead in law firm training sessions—and many of them are steps leaders can take on their own. #LawFirms #BusinessDevelopment #LegalMarketing #Rainmakers #LawyerTraining #ClientDevelopment #Leadership #ProfessionalDevelopment

Here is the Playbook I'd use to find a balance of DR and Brand if I were to do it again. If you’re looking to find a way to invest in brand in a way that’s accountable to revenue so you can get out of the DR and Discounts race to the bottom, this post is for you. Or, if you're seeing increasing customer acquisition costs with no end in sight and know you need to find a way to invest in the longer term growth of the business, but can't because you're not able to measure the revenue impact, this post is for you. Chubbies' transition from a fast-growing, money-losing, short term revenue obsessed brand to a fast growing, profit generating, short AND LONG term revenue obsessed brand was a multi-year mess, but helped save the company. Based on everything we learned, here's how I might approach it if I were to do it again Hope this helps -- ⚖️The 3-Month Playbook for Balanced Performance Marketing 🏆Goal: Drive as much resilient revenue as short term paid revenue with your paid marketing ✍️Definitions: Resilient Baseline Revenue: - The revenue you have left over when you turn off short term ads and discounts. - Revenue from organic search, direct and organic social referral sources with short term influences removed to get to true base. Paid revenue: Revenue that’s not from resilient baseline or from email / sms 📊Results & Measuring Success 💥 Immediately: Increased quality engagements (shares, saves, comments). 🔍 30 Days: Boost in branded search, organic, and direct traffic 💵 30-90 Days: Increased revenue from organic search and direct, with high revenue per session Part I: Mindset Shift 🤔 Step 1: Rethink ROAS 🚫Increasing ROAS doesn’t drive profit growth 🔻Lower ROAS is the goal 💡Ensure team knows that Part II: Get Your DR Right 📊 Step 2: Optimize Short Term DR 🧐Run short-term incrementality tests. Ensure spend is incremental 🧮Use Marginal CAC to inform where, when and how to allocate spend Part III: Start Small. Start Now. 💸 Step 3: Put Money Behind Existing Top Organic Content ✅Use 5% of budget to boost old posts with high shares, comments and saves ✅5% for conversion-optimized ads from top organic posts ✅5% for engagement optimized ads from top organic posts Part IV: Create Content Machine 🎥 Step 4: Hire Hungry Content Creators Hire 3 creators who are hard-working learners and loyal customers 🎯 Step 5: Define Your Brand's Content Arena Identify your brand’s unique gaps (product, positioning, etc.) and the feeling/moment you want to own 🎬 Step 6: Content Machine ✌️Double your video output every week until you can’t 🛠️Constantly improve concept quality 🔻Constantly decrease cost per content piece Part V: Go From Testing to Balance 📈 Step 7: Test, Measure, and Learn Track results and apply lessons in an objective way 🆙 Step 8: Scale Budgets and Incorporate New Content 🔁Go back to Step 3 and increase budgets 🤗As the Creative Machine makes new content, incorporate it 🌗Get to 30% - 50% of budgets

Meta released its Q4 2023 earnings last night. The company saw nominal year-over-year advertising revenue growth of 24%, matching last quarter, with double-digit ARPU growth in every reporting region and an operating margin of 41% (vs. 20% in Q4 2022). Critically, its impression economics improved: it saw its average revenue per ad flip to growth for the first time since Q4 2021. I think this dynamic is key to understanding Meta's advertising turnaround: many of the initiatives it implemented over the past two years to adapt to the restrictions of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy have materialized appreciably. Meta's stock price is up 20% this morning due to its earnings beat, its announcement of a dividend, the expansion of its buyback program, and strong guidance for Q1 2024. Back when Meta began transitioning its core product experience to an open graph empowered by short-form video, I presented a framework for the four opportunities available to an ad platform to increase advertising revenue: 1. Increase “ad load,” or the ratio of ads shown to each user per session relative to organic content; 2. Increase reach, or the number of users that engage with a product and thus are exposed to ads; 3. Increase the value generated by ads through higher-quality formats or better targeting, which improves the general price paid for ad inventory through increased bids from advertisers in the ad auction; 4. Increase time spent on site, which provides more opportunities for ads to be served. In my Q4 earnings analysis published today, I detail how Meta's initiatives -- across approaches like its Advantage+ suite of tools, its partnerships with companies like Shopify and Amazon, and its measurement tools like AEM and CAPI, among others -- map to each of these opportunities. Meta Q4 2023 earnings: average revenue per impression flips to positive: https://lnkd.in/gvvrAkev

A product only scales when its strategy is tied directly to business goals. Otherwise, features become noise, and teams burn months on “nice to have” work that doesn’t move revenue, retention, or efficiency. Business alignment means: ✓ Every feature connects to metrics that matter ✓ Every design decision supports growth or cost optimization ✓ The roadmap speaks the same language as the leadership team. ⸻ Example: Healthcare Case I worked with a medical SaaS platform that had a backlog of 120+ features. Developers pushed new releases every two weeks, but churn was growing and revenue wasn’t scaling. I ran a UX–Business audit: — Mapped every feature to a business KPI — Cut 40% of backlog items that had zero business impact. — Rebuilt the roadmap so that every quarter focused on one clear business lever . Result after 3 months: ✓ Customer support tickets dropped by 22% ✓ Retention improved by 15% because patients were guided better through their journey. ✓ Leadership got visibility: for the first time, the roadmap was linked directly to revenue forecasts. ⸻ Example: Fintech Case In a fintech startup, leadership struggled to raise the next round because their pitch deck showed features, not impact. I restructured the product narrative: — Aligned UX flows with financial metrics: fewer failed transactions, faster onboarding, higher account activation. — Designed a demo around money saved and money earned, not UI screenshots. — Synced the product roadmap with the CFO’s model, so investors could see cause–effect clearly. The outcome: They closed a $7M round. Investors saw a product tied to growth levers, not just design polish. ⸻ My takeaway Business alignment is not paperwork. It’s the discipline of turning UX work into financial outcomes. When I step in, I translate design into numbers the boardroom understands — retention, efficiency, growth. That’s how design stops being a cost center and becomes a driver of business decisions. ⸻ I’ve spent over 8 years in UX and 7 years in branding, marketing, and PR. What I do is not just design — I architect clarity between product and business goals. That’s why my work stabilizes teams, speeds up decision-making, and helps products grow in markets under pressure. 

TSMC Q2 2025 results [NTD, YoY]: —Net revenue: +38.6% to 933.8B —Operating income: +61.7% to 463.4B —Operating margin: +7.1pp to 49.6% —Net profit: +60.7% to 398.3B —Net profit margin: +5.9pp to 42.7% —EPS: +60.7% to NTD 15.36 My thoughts Advanced nodes (3nm and 5nm) now account for 74% of wafer revenue, showing not just strong pull from hyperscalers, but tight utilization on the most EUV-intensive process flows. These nodes carry more EUV layers, fewer multi-patterning steps, and higher per-mm² reticle costs, a tradeoff that works only when utilization stays near 90–100%. That’s what’s underpinning TSMC’s wafer pricing power, even as macro pressure builds. On the margin front, the 12% YTD appreciation of the New Taiwan Dollar cut gross margin by over 3 percentage points, with another 2+ points of dilution expected next quarter. This is not abstract FX volatility, it’s directly reshaping cost competitiveness. TSMC now has to offset currency pressure with mix (more advanced nodes), ASP hikes, and possibly revisiting pricing structures on U.S.-bound output, where fab costs are already structurally higher. CapEx guidance remains unchanged at USD $38–42 billion, but the mix is shifting. TSMC is investing more heavily in packaging, not just front-end capacity. Technologies like CoWoS and InFO are now essential for enabling AI system-level performance, particularly for HBM5 and DDR6 integration. This marks a strategic pivot: TSMC isn’t just a foundry anymore, it’s building the physical layer for future AI system architectures. Tariff risk is no longer hypothetical. With potential U.S. semiconductor tariffs back on the table, TSMC flagged concern directly. A 20–25% duty on U.S. exports or fab imports would significantly alter cost structures, forcing clients to rethink sourcing, and TSMC to rebalance capacity between Arizona, Japan, and Taiwan. The geopolitical calculus is now a core part of technology planning. Bottom line: this quarter tells us that AI demand is strong, but so are the forces distorting global silicon economics. Between node-level utilization, currency drag, and tariff uncertainty, TSMC’s next 12 months will be defined less by technical limits and more by how well it navigates geopolitical boundaries while scaling into system-level complexity. #TSMC #Semiconductors #AI #3nm #HBM #CoWoS #EUV #Foundry #SupplyChain #Geopolitics #AdvancedPackaging

As a DTC brand, have you considered the risks of relying solely on Amazon as your growth engine, especially as its dominance in the e-commerce landscape continues to surge? Amazon’s share of US e-commerce sales is projected reach an impressive 40.9% by 2025, a clear signal of Amazon’s tightening grip on the retail market. I see this trend as a wake-up call. While Amazon offers unparalleled reach, its growing dominance amplifies the risks of over-dependence. Policy shifts, escalating fees, and fierce competition can destabilize your profitability and erode your control over your brand. The solution? Diversify your sales channels to build a more resilient business. Here are 2 actionable strategies for diversification every Amazon brand should pursue today: 1. Embrace Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Sales: Invest in your DTC infrastructure. This is the time to focus on building a real brand that stands independently to the vast search intent that Amazon offers. Use Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta, and Google as your "core four" to begin generating and converting demand to your DTC business. Selling directly to your customers lets you bypass Amazon’s fees and regain control over your brand's narrative. By forging stronger relationships with your audience, you not only mitigate the impact of Amazon’s rule changes but also unlock opportunities for higher margins and customer loyalty. 2. Tap into TikTok Shops: With now over a million creators thriving on TikTok Shops and search volumes surpassing Google in certain product categories, it’s a vibrant marketplace waiting to be explored. Partner with influencers and leverage TikTok’s powerful discovery tools to connect with new audiences and drive sustainable growth. You'll also find the discovery on TikTok drives new customers to both your Amazon and DTC business as a bonus. Why act now? Relying solely on Amazon leaves you vulnerable to unexpected disruptions, whether it’s a policy change or intensified competition. But by branching out to platforms like TikTok Shops, building a DTC presence, and exploring multiple revenue streams, you can safeguard your business and seize untapped opportunities. The data is undeniable: Amazon’s meteoric rise is both an opportunity and a risk. Don’t wait for the next policy shift to catch you off guard. Take action today—diversify your strategy, harness innovative platforms, and position your e-commerce brand for long-term success.

I recently spoke with Hailey Mensik of WorkLife News about a new report from Scoop and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) that found #flexible companies outperform those with more restrictive work policies. One compelling stat shows 20% revenue growth from 2020-2022 at companies without in-office requirements compared to just 5% at those companies with hybrid or fully in-person arrangements.     We’re not surprised that companies that have embraced #flexiblework models are outperforming those who have not. As I said in the article, “This research is dollars and cents data,” and it reflects and validates what we’ve been finding for the past ten years in our research: flexibility drives business outcomes.   Like our research, the Scoop/BCG data points to the increasing need to bring leaders and employees together to reimagine how, when, and where we work. Addressing the current divide is key to moving forward in a way that benefits both the business AND its people:   “There is a gap between the employees working flexibly that did translate into operational growth, and the way leaders are seeing flexibility, that is going to stand in the way of leaders being able to prepare their organizations to be future ready.”     #remotework #hybridwork #returntowork #returntooffice #talentretention #employeeengagement #workflex #flexiblework #flexibleworkplaces #workplaceflexibility #highperformanceflexibiity #futureofwork #reimaginework https://lnkd.in/gQSn8hkN