Global whirlwind restarted + early start for B2Bs

The fastest pacing January for the global economy and what to expect

I’ve been covering the weekly business bulletin for over 5 years now and core business cycles keep repeating themselves.

For example, here’s a March 2021 edition:

#AskPeshev 84: Is Your Business Safe? growth-blueprint.beehiiv.com/p/askpeshev-84-business-safe

This flashback is stressing on the “error ratio” of making decisions. We keep iterating as a society, as business leaders, as investors. The goal is to get more answers correct than wrong - and not get 100% straight.

Ultimately, the efficiency of iterating fast can justify some mistakes along the way. But if we keep betting on the wrong horses all the time, we fail to learn from our mistakes and rectify them in the right direction.

I really love the move from MailChimp to beehiiv as it’s now possible to share these flashbacks from the newsletter archives. It’s public and out there in the open. If anyone wants to run a background check on what I’ve done and said before, it’s public.

That’s a great mix of:

1. First-party data for connecting with actual humans
2. Great open and delivery rates vs. the social noise
3. Still the historical element of retaining knowledge (like blogs or individual social accounts)

Email is king - the highest ROI channel out there. This is why I sat down with Alexander Ivanov of Hypergen to uncover cold email playbooks, deliverability, dedicated IPs, Clay playbooks, and a lot more in the latest “B2B Growth Hacking Playbook” podcast episode:

Definitely recommended on email best practices - bookmark it for the weekend if you’re still catching up on emails.

Otherwise, you may end up like Salesforce sending something like this to Jason M. Lemkin :

So, what do we see this week?

This is the fastest-pacing January for the past 5 years (conservatively, 15+ years).

Most business categories aim for a strong Q4 - both B2B and B2C. The Black Friday/Christmas sales seasons, making the most out of annual budgets, hitting annual quota, wrapping up or closing deals to get ready for the new year.

(Exceptions exist in each industry - ski resorts, insurance, healthcare, but this is the overarching premise.)

But this month, we see some monumental changes in the global ecosystem.

• Trump being back in power. This was finally established after a busy Q3/early Q4 last year, but the closer he approached the inauguration date on Monday, the tension pressed the buttons on different initiatives, industries, and even countries.
• Israel finally made peace (at least temporarily) with Gaza. Hostages are getting swapped. After 15 months, the end may be near for the foreseeable future. No matter where you side, I always favor peace and predictability.
• TikTok got a temporary ban. I saw their CEO was present during Trump’s inauguration, so the odds are, some deal is bound to happen eventually. But it still shows that some threats are real and may very well kick in. The previous administration was strong with public suggestions, but enforcing them was dubious in some cases.

This subset, and many more - such as the DOGE department starting, a number of procedural changes around DEI, global funding, taxes and fees, inevitably leads to businesses waking up early in January and not taking a prolonged holiday or just a slow Jan/Feb to reflect on the past year and how to navigate the new one.

We see more executives back in office early on.

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