The Zack Greenfield Company

11/04/2026

Stop waiting for the right moment — it doesn't exist. The people winning in business are heads-down doing the work while everyone else is watching and waiting. What's one task you've been putting off that could move your business forward today?

11/04/2026

11/04/2026

A regional distributor in the Midwest had a problem they'd been living with for three years.

Every quarter, their purchasing team over-ordered on about 23% of their SKUs. Dead stock piled up. Cash sat on shelves. They'd hired a consultant two years prior who recommended a $400,000 ERP upgrade to solve it.

They never pulled the trigger. Too expensive. Too long. Too risky.

When they came to us, they weren't even asking about AI. They wanted help thinking through the ERP decision again.

We spent the first week just watching how their team actually worked. Not how the process was documented — how it actually happened on a Tuesday afternoon.

What we found: three people were manually pulling sales data from one system, margin data from another, and vendor lead times from a spreadsheet that one person maintained and nobody fully trusted. Then they were reconciling all of it in their heads before placing orders.

The ERP wasn't the problem. The reconciliation ritual was the problem.

We built a simple pipeline that pulled from all three sources, normalized the data, flagged anomalies, and surfaced a weekly buying recommendation with confidence scores. No fancy interface. No change management campaign. Just a clean output their team could act on.

Week one, they ignored it. That's normal.

Week two, they started checking it against their gut calls.

By week six, it had become the first thing the purchasing lead looked at every Monday.

Eleven months later, that 23% over-order rate is down to 6%. The dead stock problem that represented roughly $2M in trapped cash has largely cleared.

Total build cost: $4,000 in development time and tools.

The ERP they almost bought: still sitting in a proposal somewhere.

Here's what this story is really about: most mid-market operations don't have a technology gap. They have a data reconciliation problem dressed up as a technology gap. And expensive systems don't fix reconciliation problems — they just move them somewhere harder to see.

Before you sign the next big platform deal, spend a week watching where your people are manually connecting dots that should already be connected.

The answer is usually cheaper and faster than you think.

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What's one reconciliation ritual your team does every week that nobody's ever questioned?

11/03/2026

Email has been "dead" for 20 years — yet it still drives more revenue than most channels you're chasing. Build your list like it's your most valuable business asset, because it is.

What's your current email open rate, and are you happy with it?

11/03/2026

Are you tired of spinning your wheels and getting nowhere with your marketing? Most small businesses are wasting time and money because they aren’t being smart about their strategies. Here's the thing, most businesses miss this critical point: marketing is not just about shouting louder, it’s about speaking to the right audience with the right message at the right time.

- Generic marketing is dead. Personalization and relevance are the new kings.
- Too many businesses are chasing trends instead of setting them. Be the leader, not the follower.
- If you think posting on social media is enough, you’re already behind. It's about integration, not isolation.

Let's be real, without a proper strategy, your marketing efforts are just noise. Stop hoping for results and start engineering them. Dive into our latest article to learn how to cut through the chaos and elevate your marketing game.



https://www.zackgreenfield.com/the-31-rule-when-your-competitors-still-sleep-you-win

11/03/2026

Real talk: How many manual tasks is your team doing RIGHT NOW that shouldn't exist anymore?

Most business owners I talk to don't realize 69% of their industry still hasn't figured out agentic AI. That means while your competitors are stuck in old workflows, you could actually be moving faster.

I wrote something about the 31% rule—basically, the businesses adopting this stuff first are getting a head start nobody's talking about yet. No fancy terminology, just what actually moves the needle.

Curious what's eating up your team's time that could be automated? Drop a comment—I'm genuinely interested in what you're dealing with.

https://www.zackgreenfield.com/the-31-rule-when-your-competitors-still-sleep-you-win

11/03/2026

Every week, another mid-sized company announces they're "exploring AI."

Six months later? Quiet. No follow-up press release. No case study. The pilot just... stopped.

This isn't a technology problem. It's a prioritization problem with a technology costume on.

Here's what's actually happening inside these organizations:

A VP gets budget approval in Q1. They pick a vendor, stand up a pilot, report early green shoots to the board. Then Q2 arrives. A real crisis surfaces — a customer escalation, a hiring freeze, a merger rumor. The AI project gets "paused." Paused means dead.

The trend everyone's talking about is AI adoption rates climbing. More companies experimenting. More tools available. More budget allocated.

The trend nobody's talking about is the graveyard.

Watched this play out firsthand with a logistics company last year. Solid team. Real use case — automating freight exception handling. The demo worked. The pilot worked. Then their CFO changed. New CFO wanted to "reassess strategic priorities." The project had no internal champion with enough authority to survive a leadership transition.

Six months of work. Gone in a single budget conversation.

The AI vendors aren't going to tell you this. Their incentive is to celebrate adoption, not autopsies.

So here's what to actually watch in 2025: the companies pulling ahead aren't the ones experimenting the most. They're the ones who treated one AI project like infrastructure — boring, essential, non-negotiable — instead of a science fair entry.

The trend isn't AI adoption. The trend is AI *consolidation*. The companies that survive the pilot graveyard will own significant advantages. The rest will keep announcing pilots.

One question worth sitting with:

Does your current AI project have a champion who can protect it when a real business crisis hits next quarter?

11/02/2026

The moment you shift your focus from closing deals to solving real problems, everything changes. Your customers feel it, your revenue reflects it, and your business actually grows.

What's one way you've changed your approach to better serve your customers?