I’m turning 50.

I’m old enough now to refer to my age as a level, which immediately makes it sound like an achievement rather than a biological event. Level 50... Nailing it.

There are some definite advantages to getting older. I care considerably less about proving myself, I’m much more comfortable saying no, and I’ve finally worked out that being good at business doesn’t mean you have to be good at everything.

So, in no particular order, here are a few things I reckon I know as I level up to 50.

Hire people smarter than you

Hire people who are much smarter than you, then look after them and give them room to be brilliant. One of the best things about Naked is that I work with people who can do things I absolutely cannot do, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Cheerlead different ways of thinking

I also think culture should be about much more than creating a workplace where different personalities and ways of thinking are accepted. I want a workplace that cheerleads them. I want people to have opinions, challenge things, bring ridiculous ideas to the table and tell me when they think there is a better way. If you always need to be the smartest person in the room, you have hired the wrong room.

Get comfortable saying no

I’ve become very comfortable saying no to clients, which is strangely liberating when you own a business and are technically supposed to want people to give you money.

Sometimes the best advice we can give a client is that they don’t need something. Sometimes it is that, while we can do something, we are not the people who should.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

Websites are a good example. We built custom websites for years, but as websites have become increasingly business critical, we made a conscious decision to partner with specialist web teams rather than build that entire technical capability in house. For us, it came down to a pretty simple question: what gives our clients the absolute best (and safest) outcome?

That matters more to me than keeping every dollar or every piece of work under our own roof. So the specialists do what they are experts at and we do what we are experts at. Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you should.

For us, our lane is understanding who our clients need to reach and what those people actually care about. It is doing the research, making good strategic choices and telling stories people want to engage with. Then making sure the right people know our clients exist, know where to find them and, ideally, desperately want to when they do 😊

Have an opinion

I’ve found my voice more as I’ve got older too. I’m less interested in sanding every opinion down until absolutely everyone can agree with it.

That doesn’t mean having an opinion for the sake of it. Do your homework, understand the issue and be prepared to change your mind when the evidence says you should. Equally, when you know what you stand for, back yourself. I have come to realise the opinion of the loudest person around a boardroom table is not necessarily the opinion of your customer either, which is why I will always back proper research over assumptions.

Talk to actual humans

My favourite, and the easiest… Talk to actual humans. Find out what matters to them and what gets in their way. Sometimes the answer will confirm everything you thought you knew and sometimes it will completely bugger up the strategy you had already formed in your head. Both are useful.

Strategy is about choices

I’ve also learned that strategy is largely about choices. You cannot be everything to everyone, chase every opportunity or target every possible audience. Quite often, the smartest decision is deciding what you are not going to do.

Not everything is launching a rocket

The same goes for process. Earlier in my career I ran plenty of public workshops, partly because I think I felt I needed to demonstrate what I knew, show I knew what I was talking about, and partly because I overcooked things. There is absolutely a place for them, and sometimes getting people in a room together is exactly what is needed. Not every business problem requires a beautifully facilitated room full of Post-it notes. Not everything is launching a rocket – sometimes you can just get on and do it!

Marketing doesn’t need to be complicated

I think we sometimes make marketing much more complicated than it needs to be. Be distinctive. Give people a reason to notice and remember you. Keep showing up and resist the urge to reinvent the brand every time somebody internally gets bored with it, because your customers are almost certainly paying considerably less attention to your brand than you are. At the end of the day, most of our clients want variations of the same thing. They want customers who choose them, understand why they’re different and keep coming back. They want a brand strong enough that they don’t have to compete on price alone, which means better margins and a more valuable business. And increasingly, they want to be the kind of organisation that good people know about and genuinely want to work for.

The tactics change. The job doesn’t.

The tactics change, but that is really the job. Build preference, loyalty and reputation, and make sure the market understands why you are worth choosing.

Marketing isn’t the stuff we make

And perhaps the biggest thing I’ve learned is that marketing isn’t the stuff we make. The ad, website, social post, logo, event and media story are all tools. Our actual job is to understand people well enough to influence what they know, how they feel and ultimately what they do.

Know your lane

At nearly 50, I’m very comfortable staying in my lane. It’s a really fun and (I think) exciting lane, and after all these years I know my way around it.

So perhaps that is my great Level 50 revelation. Know what you’re good at and know what you’re not. Hire people smarter than you and look after them. Back good people. Do the research. Have an opinion. Say no when no is the right answer and spend less time proving you can do the work and more time actually doing it.

I’m sure there are some profound lessons about life, ageing and personal fulfilment that I should have picked up by now too.

Haven’t got those yet. Level 60, perhaps!

And I’m off to spend a week in the sun with my kids. My biggest level 50 revelation is that that is the really important shit.