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Key takeaways

• When buyers ask AI platforms hyper-specific, bottom-of-funnel questions, the models often hedge, hallucinate, or contradict themselves — because the authoritative source material simply isn’t there.
• The founders who publish clear, structured answers into those gaps first will become the default response AI gives for years to come.

Identifying the gap between what people want to know and the information available to them is the game — and good SEO practitioners have been playing it for years.

Generative AI is just the next evolution of that process. Traditional search shows you what people are asking. Generative AI exposes something more valuable: the high-intent questions that search engines still answer poorly. That’s the opportunity.

Stop optimizing where everyone else is

Founders naturally focus on what’s visible when building strategy. Competitive analysis provides benchmarks. Market research examines established demand. Industry commentary reveals dominant trends. Everyone looks at the same signals — which is exactly why so many strategies end up looking identical.

In traditional SEO, this shows up as fighting for contested keywords and racing to outbuild backlink profiles just to land a spot under AI Overviews and sponsored ads. Marketing budgets drain quickly, and returns rarely follow.

With Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), search has shifted from keywords to intent. Platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are now where people compare products and services. Users aren’t searching in fragments anymore; they’re writing full sentences and expecting full answers.

If you want your brand recommended first in that environment, understand what these systems actually reward: the most structured, authoritative and complete knowledge on a topic. Keywords no longer determine rank. What matters is how thoroughly and clearly your company is represented to the world.

How negative space reveals opportunity

When a buyer asks a bottom-of-funnel question and the retrieval pool is thin or non-existent, the model comes unstuck. AI is trained to answer confidently — so when the information it needs is missing, incomplete or poorly structured, it hedges, invents or contradicts itself.

That’s negative space: the unanswered questions, the under-explained problems, the contradictory responses, the outright hallucinations. It exposes what’s absent from the knowledge base these models draw from.

If your brand isn’t present in that space when prospects are asking the questions that precede a decision, you’re losing deals you never knew existed.

These gaps won’t stay empty forever. The companies that publish authoritative content into them first will shape how future AI responses are generated. Timing is the competitive advantage.

Why targeting negative space matters

Targeting negative space creates informational authority where none currently exists. It’s an evolution beyond competing for visibility.

Most companies optimize for visible demand — and as traditional SEO has shown, that market is saturated, costly and difficult to rise above. Negative space, by contrast, is unmapped territory. Most companies don’t yet realize it exists. Where definitions are inconsistent and structured knowledge is incomplete, there’s room to become the answer.

The work is to find the questions where AI responses lack depth, structure or clarity, and provide the authoritative explanation. Instead of creating content for top-of-funnel curiosity, focus on the questions prospects ask when they’re preparing to make a decision. If your answer is the one they encounter — clear, credible, complete — they’ll remember it.

Strategy shifts from volume to informational leverage. AI systems don’t rank pages; they use them to construct an answer. A single, well-structured, explanatory article beats a stack of SEO-optimized copy. When your content is the first authoritative source — entity-structured, statistic-rich, citation-heavy — the AI is more likely to draw from it.

From visibility to authority

Negative space is the gap between what your prospects are trying to find out and what AI can confidently answer. Where traditional SEO optimizes for attention, AI SEO builds better interpretations for AI systems. That’s the next real competitive advantage.

Be the first credible explanation in an empty space, and you don’t just show up in the answer — you define how the topic is understood, and you’re front and center at the moment prospects are ready to act.

Key takeaways

• When buyers ask AI platforms hyper-specific, bottom-of-funnel questions, the models often hedge, hallucinate, or contradict themselves — because the authoritative source material simply isn’t there.
• The founders who publish clear, structured answers into those gaps first will become the default response AI gives for years to come.

Identifying the gap between what people want to know and the information available to them is the game — and good SEO practitioners have been playing it for years.

Generative AI is just the next evolution of that process. Traditional search shows you what people are asking. Generative AI exposes something more valuable: the high-intent questions that search engines still answer poorly. That’s the opportunity.

Stop optimizing where everyone else is

Founders naturally focus on what’s visible when building strategy. Competitive analysis provides benchmarks. Market research examines established demand. Industry commentary reveals dominant trends. Everyone looks at the same signals — which is exactly why so many strategies end up looking identical.

You’re doing the work. The phones are ringing and your reviews look good. But you’ve noticed that your leads are not the same as they were last year. Referrals that used to flow in steadily have slowed as well. You’re not losing deals. You are losing the opportunity to compete for them like you used to.

The number that should concern you: 46%. I studied 400 companies across five industries. That’s the percentage of business owners who are completely invisible to AI. Not underperforming. Not dropping to page two. Gone. When a prospect asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or any AI assistant for a recommendation, nearly half of all business owners I studied are invisible in the answer.

And here’s the part that should surprise you: Your company may show up, but if the owner behind it is not visible, AI treats the business differently. The algorithm appreciates the company info but craves information about the owner or key person in the business — who is the human behind the brand and are they credible?

The gap that nobody is talking about

Companies where both the owner and the business were visible to AI saw an average year-over-year traffic increase of 2.5%. Companies where both were invisible? Down over 28%. That’s a 30% difference — same industries, same time frame. The difference is whether the person behind the company had any presence in places AI considers trustworthy.

On the surface, a 2.5% increase seems minimal. However, Gartner research predicts that organic traffic to websites will drop by 25% this year. Over the next three years, that kind of gap translates into millions of dollars in revenue the invisible owners never enter their sales funnel — not because the work was bad, not because the market or economy shifted, but because humans and machines couldn’t see who was behind the company. This is not a marketing problem or a traditional SEO problem.

I know what you’re thinking: “So I need to post more on social media.” Nope. This is an entity recognition problem. AI doesn’t really care about your Instagram reels or TikTok followers. It cares whether you are credible on the platforms AI approves as relevant to your expertise and authority. The venues change often, but the basics include published articles, podcast appearances, speaking engagements, industry directories and local press. The common thread: places where you are findable and verifiable.

Think of it this way: Would you hire a contractor with no reviews, no references and no one who could vouch for them? AI works the same way. It loves third-party signals of trust.

The owner is the multiplier

Here’s what surprised me in the research: The company’s brand visibility matters, but the owner’s visibility is the multiplier. A business with a strong brand and an invisible owner underperforms a business with a strong brand and a visible owner or subject-matter expert — every time. The owner’s visibility doesn’t just add to the company’s credibility; it amplifies it.

This makes sense if you think about it from the customer’s point of view. People want to know who they’re trusting with their money, their home, their family’s health. A faceless logo doesn’t answer that question. A person does. AI is simply reflecting what humans have always deferred to: I trust people more than brands.

What invisible owners get wrong

Most invisible owners are busy running their business. They’re not hiding on purpose. They assume their work speaks for itself. They’ve convinced themselves that marketing can handle visibility for the company.

But the world has shifted. Your prospects aren’t searching on Google alone anymore — they’re asking AI to help them decide. And AI builds its recommendations from a variety of sources and trust signals most business owners aren’t knowledgeable about.

The good news is that you don’t need to become a content machine. You don’t need to go viral. You need to exist in the places that matter to AI. Get your name in a local business journal with your point of view related to your industry. Show up on someone else’s podcast. Speak at your Rotary club or chamber event. Film it with your phone and post it to LinkedIn and YouTube. Share what you know in a way that helps people. Forget the sales pitch. Provide genuine value. When you teach, you build authority. When you build authority, AI pays attention.

The question you need to ask yourself

If someone asks an AI assistant to recommend a business like yours in the area, does your name show up? Not your company’s name — your name. Check it now.

The data is clear. When the owner is invisible, the company pays the price. When the owner is visible, everything compounds: trust, referrals, traffic, revenue. You built the business. You hired the team. You took the risk. The one thing you need to focus on now? Let the people — and the machines — know who’s behind it all.

That’s the invisible owner problem. And 46% of you are living it right now. The good news is that visibility isn’t reserved for people with PR teams and huge marketing budgets. It’s available for any owner willing to step out from behind their logo and be known for what they do.

You’re doing the work. The phones are ringing and your reviews look good. But you’ve noticed that your leads are not the same as they were last year. Referrals that used to flow in steadily have slowed as well. You’re not losing deals. You are losing the opportunity to compete for them like you used to.

The number that should concern you: 46%. I studied 400 companies across five industries. That’s the percentage of business owners who are completely invisible to AI. Not underperforming. Not dropping to page two. Gone. When a prospect asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or any AI assistant for a recommendation, nearly half of all business owners I studied are invisible in the answer.

And here’s the part that should surprise you: Your company may show up, but if the owner behind it is not visible, AI treats the business differently. The algorithm appreciates the company info but craves information about the owner or key person in the business — who is the human behind the brand and are they credible?

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Running a small accounting firm in 2025 means answering a question nobody has fully solved: how do you build a business clients trust deeply when half your team is working from a spare bedroom two states away?

I have spent four years wrestling with it. The honest answer is that I got it wrong before I got it right. What I learned did not come from a management book or a productivity framework. It came from losing a client I should never have lost, in a way that had nothing to do with the quality of our work.

That experience changed how I run everything.

How I lost a client of seven years to a birthday

Not a missed deadline. Not a calculation error. A birthday. One of my remote staff members mentioned in passing that a long-term client had a milestone coming up. I nodded, said “great,” and did absolutely nothing with that information. Three weeks later, that client called, annoyed about something unrelated, and signed with another firm before the month was out. When I dug into it, the birthday was just the final straw. We had quietly become a transaction to them. They sent documents, we sent returns and somewhere along the way we stopped being people they actually knew.

That was the moment I understood what remote work actually costs an accounting firm, and it has nothing to do with productivity.

Every article you read about managing remote teams talks about communication tools, meeting cadence and tracking output. All of that matters. But none of it addresses the specific thing accounting firms sell: trust. Not software. Not efficiency. The feeling a client gets when they believe their accountant genuinely knows them and is watching out for them. That feeling is extraordinarily hard to manufacture through a screen, and most firms are not even trying.

What the office was actually doing for us

Before we went hybrid, the office was running a relationship-maintenance operation that none of us noticed or appreciated. A client would call the front desk and mention something offhand. The receptionist would relay it to the file owner. Someone would follow up. It wasn’t a system. It was proximity and human instinct doing the work automatically.

Remotely, that entire invisible operation collapsed overnight. Nobody was overhearing anything. Nobody was walking past anyone’s desk. The phone calls still came in, but they landed in a vacuum. Information stopped traveling sideways across the team the way it used to, and we didn’t notice until clients started feeling like strangers.

The fix was not what I expected

My instinct was to add more check-ins. More internal meetings. More structured communication. What I actually needed to do was much simpler and much harder. I needed every person on my team to take personal ownership of the relationships inside their files, not just the work inside them.

That sounds obvious. In practice, it means the accountant handling a business return knows that the owner’s daughter just joined the company, knows the lease renewal is coming up in spring and picks up the phone once in a while for no reason other than to check in. It means treating client files less like tasks and more like ongoing relationships that require actual attention.

We now build what I call a relationship note directly into every active file. Not tax notes. Not billing notes. Personal context — what is going on in this client’s life right now that we should know about. It takes two minutes to update, and it has changed the quality of our client conversations more than any software we have ever purchased.

The staff problem nobody wants to admit

Remote work exposed something uncomfortable about our industry. A certain type of accountant, perfectly competent technically, has no interest in the human side of the work. In an office, that person still participates in the culture whether they want to or not. They overhear conversations, they get pulled into hallway discussions, they absorb the relationship norms of the firm just by being present.

Remotely, that same person retreats completely into the technical work and becomes, from the client’s perspective, someone who processes their documents and occasionally sends a PDF. Clients sense this quickly even if they never say it directly. It shows up in the tone of emails, in the length of calls, in how often they reach out with questions — and how often they quietly start wondering if there is someone better out there.

I am not saying those staff members are bad at their jobs. I am saying that remote work removes the guardrails that used to compensate for the gaps, and as a managing partner you have to consciously rebuild them.

What I actually changed

I stopped measuring my team only by what they completed and started paying attention to how their clients talked about them. Not formal surveys. Just listening. When a client calls the front desk, what is the tone? When someone refers us to a friend, what do they say about us specifically?

I also made phone calls a non-negotiable part of the job. Not video calls, not Slack messages — actual phone calls with clients at regular intervals that have nothing to do with a deadline. Some of my staff resisted this. A few still do. But the clients who get those calls are the ones who have stayed with us through fee increases, staff changes and every other reason someone might think about switching firms.

The last thing I changed was the hardest. I stopped pretending that remote work is neutral. It isn’t. It has real costs, and they fall unevenly on client-facing professional services firms in ways a tech company or a marketing agency will never feel. Acknowledging that inside the firm made it possible to actually address it, instead of just adding another tool to the stack and hoping for the best.

That client we lost over a birthday is with a competitor now. I think about it more than I should. But it is the reason we run the firm the way we do today — and I would rather have learned it then than be learning it now.

Running a small accounting firm in 2025 means answering a question nobody has fully solved: how do you build a business clients trust deeply when half your team is working from a spare bedroom two states away?

I have spent four years wrestling with it. The honest answer is that I got it wrong before I got it right. What I learned did not come from a management book or a productivity framework. It came from losing a client I should never have lost, in a way that had nothing to do with the quality of our work.

That experience changed how I run everything.

Meta just gave investors a preview of how expensive the AI race really is, and Wall Street isn’t thrilled. The company missed earnings estimates and issued weaker-than-expected revenue guidance, sending shares down as much as 11% after-hours, CNBC reports. The real shock is that free cash flow collapsed to $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion a year earlier, as Meta pours money into AI.

Next year could be worse. Analysts expect Meta to burn through more than $20 billion in cash in 2027, based on $174 billion in projected spending. Deutsche Bank thinks that figure could reach $215 billion, and Raymond James pegs it as high as $280 billion.

What sets Meta apart from fellow big spenders Amazon and Alphabet is its lack of a backup plan. There’s no cloud business and no proven track record building new revenue streams beyond advertising. Meta’s long-term debt has ballooned to $83.7 billion, and CFO Susan Li said the company won’t reconsider its pace until “’28 and beyond.” Investors, analysts say, aren’t likely to wait that long.

Meta just gave investors a preview of how expensive the AI race really is, and Wall Street isn’t thrilled. The company missed earnings estimates and issued weaker-than-expected revenue guidance, sending shares down as much as 11% after-hours, CNBC reports. The real shock is that free cash flow collapsed to $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion a year earlier, as Meta pours money into AI.

Next year could be worse. Analysts expect Meta to burn through more than $20 billion in cash in 2027, based on $174 billion in projected spending. Deutsche Bank thinks that figure could reach $215 billion, and Raymond James pegs it as high as $280 billion.

What sets Meta apart from fellow big spenders Amazon and Alphabet is its lack of a backup plan. There’s no cloud business and no proven track record building new revenue streams beyond advertising. Meta’s long-term debt has ballooned to $83.7 billion, and CFO Susan Li said the company won’t reconsider its pace until “’28 and beyond.” Investors, analysts say, aren’t likely to wait that long.

Bernard Arnault has spent millions trying to change his image. It may have taken one sarcastic tweet to actually pull it off. The LVMH chairman, long nicknamed “the wolf in cashmere” and “the Terminator,” funded museums and underwrote the Paris Olympics over the past decade to soften his reputation, with little effect, the New York Times reports.

Then came a three-page open letter responding to a critical Le Monde investigative series, posted to X. Instead of disagreeing with the reporting, Arnault poked fun at it, joking about details like being accused of making Hermès-tie-wearing visitors change clothes. The letter has been viewed over 8 million times and drew praise from figures like billionaire investor Bill Ackman.

Bernard Arnault has spent millions trying to change his image. It may have taken one sarcastic tweet to actually pull it off. The LVMH chairman, long nicknamed “the wolf in cashmere” and “the Terminator,” funded museums and underwrote the Paris Olympics over the past decade to soften his reputation, with little effect, the New York Times reports.

Then came a three-page open letter responding to a critical Le Monde investigative series, posted to X. Instead of disagreeing with the reporting, Arnault poked fun at it, joking about details like being accused of making Hermès-tie-wearing visitors change clothes. The letter has been viewed over 8 million times and drew praise from figures like billionaire investor Bill Ackman.

I have spent years on both ends of the cold pitch. I send them to land coverage and clients, and because of the work I do, I receive a steady stream of them, too. That second seat taught me more than the first. Watching hundreds of pitches land in my own inbox showed me, in seconds, why almost all of them get deleted and why a rare few earn a reply.

The deletions are not close calls. Most cold outreach fails the moment it arrives, because it was clearly blasted to a list and could have been addressed to anyone. The reader feels that instantly. Gartner found that most B2B buyers now actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, and that bad prospecting damages a relationship rather than starting one. The good news is that the pitches that work are not cleverer or better written. They just do three simple things that the rest skip.

They prove you did your homework

The single biggest predictor of a reply is evidence that the sender actually knows who they are writing to. Not a merge field with my first name. Real, specific proof — a reference to something I published, a detail about my company, a reason this message is landing in my inbox and not someone else’s.

When I pitch, I earn the first sentence before I write anything else. I find one true, specific thing about the person — a recent article, a product launch, a shift at their company — and I lead with it. It tells the reader, in one line, that the message was meant for them. That tiny act of research is what separates a note that feels like a conversation from one that feels like spam.

This is also the cheapest edge available, because so few people bother. When most of your competition is sending the same template to a thousand inboxes, the one email that proves a human spent two minutes on the recipient stands out immediately. You do not need a hundred perfect pitches. You need a smaller number of genuinely tailored ones.

They make one clear, small ask

The second habit is restraint. The pitches that die try to close the whole deal in the first email. They ask for a 30-minute call, attach a deck, list every feature and end with three different links. It is exhausting to read, and exhausting gets deleted.

The ones that work ask for one small thing. A reporter pitch that lands is not “please write about my company.” It is a single useful angle and an offer to share more if it helps. A sales pitch that lands is not “let’s book a demo this week.” It is a short, relevant question that is genuinely easy to answer.

Lower the cost of saying yes, and more people say it. I think of the first message as earning the right to a second one, not winning the entire relationship in a paragraph. Once someone replies, even briefly, you are no longer cold. You are in a conversation, and conversations are where deals and coverage actually get made.

They follow up without being annoying

The third habit is the one most people quit before reaching. They send a single email, hear nothing and assume the answer is no. Far more often, the answer is “I was busy and your email got buried.” Silence is rarely rejection. It is usually just an inbox doing what inboxes do.

A short, polite follow-up recovers a surprising share of those lost conversations. The discipline is in the tone. A good follow-up adds something — a new angle, a fresh piece of context, a quick reason the timing might now make sense. A bad one just whines, “Did you see my last email?” One adds value, and the other adds pressure and only one gets a reply.

There is a line, of course. One or two thoughtful follow-ups spaced out over a couple of weeks is persistence. Five in five days is harassment, and it burns the relationship for good. Aim to be the kind of sender you would actually want to hear from: present and useful, not desperate.

Put the three together, and a pattern emerges. Do your homework, ask for one easy yes, and follow up like a professional. None of it requires charisma or a famous name. It requires treating the person on the other end like a person, which, after reading thousands of pitches that did the opposite, I can tell you is rarer and more powerful than it sounds. The trash folder is full of talented people who skipped the basics. The reply goes to the one who didn’t.

I have spent years on both ends of the cold pitch. I send them to land coverage and clients, and because of the work I do, I receive a steady stream of them, too. That second seat taught me more than the first. Watching hundreds of pitches land in my own inbox showed me, in seconds, why almost all of them get deleted and why a rare few earn a reply.

The deletions are not close calls. Most cold outreach fails the moment it arrives, because it was clearly blasted to a list and could have been addressed to anyone. The reader feels that instantly. Gartner found that most B2B buyers now actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, and that bad prospecting damages a relationship rather than starting one. The good news is that the pitches that work are not cleverer or better written. They just do three simple things that the rest skip.

They prove you did your homework

The single biggest predictor of a reply is evidence that the sender actually knows who they are writing to. Not a merge field with my first name. Real, specific proof — a reference to something I published, a detail about my company, a reason this message is landing in my inbox and not someone else’s.

Over time, I’ve come to realize how important relationships are in every area of business — including some high-stakes areas that aren’t exactly known for their warm or welcoming experiences.

For instance, I remember working with a credit union team and realizing how important it was for them to cultivate relationships with their member communities. The concept applies elsewhere. Recruiters need to earn the trust of candidates. Venture capitalists need strong connections with founders.

Most entrepreneurs can see the important relationships in their business. But they can lose that focus as their company scales. As they obsess over things like product, hiring and distribution, they can lack the same intention in cultivating the relationships that matter.

If you’re operating in a relationship-driven industry, you want to invest in relationship infrastructure as you grow. Scratch that. It’s a requirement these days. I’ve found that if you truly want to succeed, you need to invest in relationship infrastructure. Here are three practical shifts founders can implement to help that happen.

Audit and understand where relationships live in your business

Strong connections don’t happen instantly. Every time I’ve built good business relationships, they’ve taken time. They also took place in different settings.

This can lead to critical relationship management information being scattered across various parts of your business. Communication history can sit in inboxes and Slack threads. Meeting notes can exist in countless audio, visual and text-based tools. Relationship ownership is often vague and fragmented. As it grows, the distance between key points of relational information can grow.

Despite their name, even customer relationship management (CRM) tools often lack a comprehensive relationship element. They can silo and completely miss information. That’s why one of the best early infrastructure moves you can make is to go beyond the CRM concept and establish an extended relationship management (XRM) layer in your business.

Rings.ai points out the key difference between CRM and XRM models. A CRM’s focus is singular: to manage a company’s interactions with its customers. The AI-powered relationship intelligence platform compares that narrow focus to an XRM approach, which is built for things like holistic relationship management, process automation, increased transparency and scalability.

An XRM expands the customer focus across all business relationships. Instead of relying only on CRM records, it pulls in communication history, notes and external data to create a unified view of every relationship across the team.

If you want to scale your relationship infrastructure, start here. Use an XRM approach to map your institutional memory and make it visible across your team, even at scale. Centralize your communication history and relationship data at the person and company level.

See relationships as long-term assets, not transactions

The need to cultivate relationships as a core business asset is nothing new. But maintaining that perspective while scaling? That’s where I’ve found things can become challenging. Nevertheless, founders must maintain the mindset that their relationships are more than transactions. They are investments in long-term assets.

Transactional relationships have their place. They’ll always exist. But client relationships aren’t in the same category. They offer much greater value in the form of lower acquisition costs, greater trust and satisfaction and ongoing business.

Your infrastructure can help you stay focused on treating client relationships as recurring relationships. Start with mindset. Stop tracking key relationships as “opportunities.” Instead, see them as long-term assets. Again, use AI and XRMs to resist the linear sales cycles of CRMs. Store client profiles as entities, not interactions.

Treat relationship intelligence as “soft” infrastructure

Relationship intelligence should be deeply ingrained in your growth strategy. It isn’t a feature or an add-on. As a founder of a tech company, I think of relationship tools as productivity enhancements. They are not.

Use your relationship management tools as part of your operating infrastructure. It is a tool that provides a “soft” element that adds depth to the harder elements of your infrastructure. While you implement scalable systems and standard operating procedures (SOPs), investing in relationship intelligence gives you an intangible edge.

A deeper, up-to-date understanding of your organization’s relationships helps you identify revenue opportunities and enhance client services. Understanding nuanced things like a unique connection between a board member and a client can help you take meaningful and effective steps rather than blind actions.

When communication history, ownership and relationship strength are centralized, it can help you move faster, reduce internal friction and coordinate next steps with fewer people. Those are all aspects of infrastructure that make scaling easier.

Setting a relationship-driven foundation early

Founders must recognize the instrumental role that relationships play if they want to facilitate sustainable growth. I’ve found that doing this requires taking the time to identify where relationships live in your business. Treat these as long-term assets, and exercise relationship intelligence when you engage with them.

If you can do that, you can create a relationship-driven infrastructure that can not just hold up when you scale but become a catalyst for growth.

Over time, I’ve come to realize how important relationships are in every area of business — including some high-stakes areas that aren’t exactly known for their warm or welcoming experiences.

For instance, I remember working with a credit union team and realizing how important it was for them to cultivate relationships with their member communities. The concept applies elsewhere. Recruiters need to earn the trust of candidates. Venture capitalists need strong connections with founders.

Most entrepreneurs can see the important relationships in their business. But they can lose that focus as their company scales. As they obsess over things like product, hiring and distribution, they can lack the same intention in cultivating the relationships that matter.

7 Brew is pouring it on. Brew Crew Holdings, the chain’s largest franchisee, finished 2025 with 130 stores and $273 million in sales, ranking No. 61 among the country’s largest restaurant franchisees, Franchise Times reports. It’s targeting 100 new locations this year alone.

“I think the industry hasn’t been disrupted in a long time, and that’s what’s been happening over the last few years,” said Brew Crew President Connor Wilson. Franchised 7 Brew stores now average $2.65 million in annual sales, up from $1.9 million the year before, fueled by customizable, colorful drinks like Pink Mermaid 7 Fizz and Cereal Milk Matcha served through double drive-thrus. Weekly volumes are “insane,” says operations director Matt Martinkovic.

7 Brew is part of a new breed of drink chain shaking up the category. Along with Dutch Bros and dirty-soda concepts Swig and Fiiz Drinks, it’s pushing traditional coffee chains to rethink their own menus. Iced drinks overtook hot coffee sales at Dunkin’ two years ago, and Starbucks’ refresher platform is now a $2 billion business.

7 Brew is pouring it on. Brew Crew Holdings, the chain’s largest franchisee, finished 2025 with 130 stores and $273 million in sales, ranking No. 61 among the country’s largest restaurant franchisees, Franchise Times reports. It’s targeting 100 new locations this year alone.

“I think the industry hasn’t been disrupted in a long time, and that’s what’s been happening over the last few years,” said Brew Crew President Connor Wilson. Franchised 7 Brew stores now average $2.65 million in annual sales, up from $1.9 million the year before, fueled by customizable, colorful drinks like Pink Mermaid 7 Fizz and Cereal Milk Matcha served through double drive-thrus. Weekly volumes are “insane,” says operations director Matt Martinkovic.

7 Brew is part of a new breed of drink chain shaking up the category. Along with Dutch Bros and dirty-soda concepts Swig and Fiiz Drinks, it’s pushing traditional coffee chains to rethink their own menus. Iced drinks overtook hot coffee sales at Dunkin’ two years ago, and Starbucks’ refresher platform is now a $2 billion business.

I wrote recently about the decisions that define you, the ones you make blind, with partial information and real stakes. That piece was about what happens inside the leader. This one is about what happens around the leader, because while you are wrestling with an uncertain call, your team is watching, waiting and drawing conclusions.

Here is what three decades in wealth management have taught me about those conclusions: your team does not need you to be certain. It needs you to be clear.

Silence is always interpreted as risk

When conditions get murky, the responsible instinct is to slow down. Hit the brakes and be more catious. Commission another analysis. Schedule another round of reviews. Wait for the fog to lift. The intention is diligence. The effect is corrosive, because while leadership waits, teams are left to interpret silence and silence is always interpreted as risk.

People tolerate ambiguity about outcomes far better than they tolerate ambiguity about priorities. A team can accept that the destination might shift. What it cannot accept is not knowing what matters most right now. Every day you spend privately deliberating, your best people are publicly guessing, and guessing is expensive. Work gets duplicated. Initiatives stall halfway. The most anxious voice in the room starts setting the agenda.

Direction is a decision, not a prediction

Leaders often confuse these two things. A prediction says this is what will happen. A direction says this is what we will do, and here is what would make us change course. Predictions invite debate about the future, which nobody in the room controls. Directions invite commitment to the present, which everybody in the room controls.

I hold direction to three tests before I communicate it. Is the logic sound? Is the downside survivable? Does the team know exactly what signal would trigger a change of course? When those three answers are yes, waiting longer adds cost without adding insight. When one of them is no, that is the work, not another week of deliberation.

Give the checkpoint, not the destination

The most practical shift I have made as a leader is defining the next checkpoint rather than the final destination. A ninety-day horizon with explicit review criteria gives people something concrete to execute against. It also gives leadership a dignified mechanism for changing its mind, which is the real prerequisite for decisiveness. People commit faster when they know the plan includes a way to correct it.

This is also where transparency earns its keep. Tell the team what you know, what you are assuming and what you will be watching between now and the checkpoint. Teams do not lose trust when leaders admit uncertainty. They lose trust when leaders pretend it does not exist and are later proven wrong.

One habit makes this durable: restate the priority out loud, every week, in the same words. It will feel repetitive to you long before it feels repetitive to the team. Leaders live inside their own reasoning all day, while the people executing hear only a fraction of it, so what feels like over-communication from your chair usually lands as the first clear signal from theirs. Repetition is not a failure of imagination. It is the delivery mechanism for direction.

Push the decisions down

Here is the test of whether your direction is actually clear: can your frontline people resolve most questions without you? When direction is specific, they can, because they can weigh any choice against the stated priority. When direction is vague, every question travels upward, and the organization becomes a bottleneck shaped exactly like its own leadership.

I have found that pushing decision rights down does more for speed than any process improvement, and it does something better than speed. It teaches people how to think about tradeoffs instead of waiting to be told, which is the difference between a team that executes and a team that merely complies.

Clarity compounds

There is a compounding effect here that never shows up in a spreadsheet. A team that receives clear direction this quarter moves faster next quarter, because it has learned that leadership will decide, communicate and adjust in the open. Hesitation compounds the same way in reverse. Every stalled decision teaches the organization to wait, and waiting quietly becomes the culture.

None of this is an argument for recklessness. Direction without judgment is just noise with confidence behind it. The point is narrower: stop treating certainty as the precondition for movement. The preconditions are a clearly stated priority, a survivable downside and a visible plan for revision.

Markets will keep withholding certainty. That is not a flaw in the environment. It is the environment. Your job is not to predict the fog away. It is to hand your team a compass, name the first landmark and start walking.

I wrote recently about the decisions that define you, the ones you make blind, with partial information and real stakes. That piece was about what happens inside the leader. This one is about what happens around the leader, because while you are wrestling with an uncertain call, your team is watching, waiting and drawing conclusions.

Here is what three decades in wealth management have taught me about those conclusions: your team does not need you to be certain. It needs you to be clear.

Silence is always interpreted as risk

When conditions get murky, the responsible instinct is to slow down. Hit the brakes and be more catious. Commission another analysis. Schedule another round of reviews. Wait for the fog to lift. The intention is diligence. The effect is corrosive, because while leadership waits, teams are left to interpret silence and silence is always interpreted as risk.