He’d seen her book.

He told her he might make her method mandatory for every company he acquires.

She didn’t pitch him.

He came to her.

Same expertise as before.

Same track record.

Same client results.

One thing different.

She had something that made the case before she was in the room.

That’s Credibility Leverage.

Most professionals ask: “How do I get in front of more buyers?”

The better question is: “What happens when a buyer finds me on their own?”

Expertise lives inside the person who has it.

It shows up when you’re in the room. It disappears when you’re not.

Without a credibility asset, every new prospect starts from zero. You re-prove yourself every time. The track record that should be opening doors is locked inside your head.

A book changes that equation.

Tabetha’s mentor from twenty years ago found her on LinkedIn after her book was published a couple of weeks ago. He ordered a copy.

He emailed her: “I’m 40 pages in. I know 20 people who need this.”

He read the book and then, unprompted, asked to send her to the people he cared about.

That’s the difference between having expertise and a credibility asset.

Expertise says: trust me.

A book sends evidence ahead.

Chris Cornelison, one of our clients, had two paid speaking contracts canceled.

The event organizers’ reason: he didn’t have a book.

He met me at a conference.

Read my book in the hotel room that night.

Booked a call with us the next morning.

Ninety days later, his book was done.

His speaking fees doubled.

He’s been fully booked for two years.

Zero selling. The book created the belief.

I know this from the inside, too.

When my book Unstoppable Referrals launched in 2014, 15 people with influence in my market shared it to their networks.

5,268 leads got a copy in the first week.

I went from a local solo consulting firm with a part-time assistant to inbound inquiries from across the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

Podcasts called.

Conferences called.

From places I’d never been.

None of that was in my outreach plan.

The book found those rooms on its own.

But don’t just believe those stories…

The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn study asked 2,000 business professionals about thought leadership.

75% said a specific piece of thought leadership led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering.

Not a sales call. Not a referral.

A piece of content they found on their own.

By the time most buyers contact a vendor, 57 to 70 percent of their decision is already made.

They’ve done the research.

They’ve formed an opinion.

When they call (whoever they call), they’re close to decided.

That should scare you.

The question is: what did they find when they looked you up?

Why a book and not another 300 LinkedIn posts?

Because 81% of Americans say they want to write a book.

Not because they’re writers.

Because they know what it signals.

“I committed my thinking to paper. I was willing to be wrong in public. I believe this enough to put my name on it permanently.”

You can’t manufacture that signal.

Most of your competitors haven’t built it yet.

The ones who have stand in a different category.

Your expertise is real.

Your results are real.

What your clients experience is real.

The question is whether the right buyer can see any of that before they work with you.

A credibility asset makes you findable and believable before you say a word.

It gives you “credibility leverage”

Steve “credibility travels” Gordon

P.S. Next week: Visibility Leverage. How to be findable by the right people without being online all day.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in two ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Not as a box to check.

As a practice worth understanding.

The more I read, the more I think it has something to say about how we’re designed to work — and what most of us are missing.

Here’s what I noticed.

There’s a word most of us use incorrectly.

Appreciation.

In conversation, it means…

Gratitude.

Thanks.

Recognition.

Fine. But in financial terms, appreciation means the increase in value of an asset.

A portfolio appreciates.

A piece of land appreciates.

A well-built business appreciates.

Most founders never apply that second meaning to the work they’ve already done.

They finish a project and move to the next one. They close a good quarter and immediately open the next. They build something meaningful and never let it land.

The asset is there. The value never registers.

And so the question — have I done enough? — never gets answered. Because you’re already moving.

That’s The Appreciation Gap.

Not a productivity problem.

A value-creation problem.

You’re sitting on an appreciating asset and treating it like a sprint you haven’t finished yet.

I know this from the inside.

In the early years of building this company, I didn’t stop.

Constant anxiety.

Always one more thing to do.

No peace, no rest, never a moment where it felt like enough.

That’s a good way to burn out. It’s also a good way to stop being creative, because you can’t generate anything new when the treadmill never stops and your mind never recovers.

I was trying to out-hustle my nature.

You can do it for a while. Entrepreneurs can run hot. But business is the infinite game.

The strategies that win in the long game are the ones aligned with how you’re actually built — not the ones that override your limits until your limits override you.

What I found in the Sabbath study was a pattern worth paying attention to.

At the end of each day of creation, before moving on, God paused. He assessed. He reflected. He declared: It is good. At the end of the sixth day: It is very good.

That pause was not downtime. It was appreciation.

The act of reflecting on what had been made increased its value. It fixed the meaning of the work before the next work began.

Then came the Sabbath. One full day of complete stop.

Not because the work was done — it never is. But because the conditions for “enough” were already set. Provision was built into the structure of creation before the week started. You take action. You apply wisdom. But the foundation was there before you showed up.

Trusting that is not passive. It is a deliberate act.

The minute you try to fill every space, you’re making a different statement. You’re saying the provision isn’t there, and you have to manufacture it yourself.

That’s a hard way to live, and it’s not a long-term strategy.

Right now, AI is manufacturing anxiety throughout business at a scale I haven’t seen before.

Even the people at the frontier feel it. Andrej Karpathy (one of the co-founders of OpenAI and now at Anthropic)--someone who helped build the technology–tweeted within the last year that he feels behind on AI.

If someone at the leading edge of the technology feels behind, that tells you something.

The anxiety isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s structural. It’s a feature of this moment, not a reflection of where you actually stand.

Which means working harder doesn’t fix it.

Consuming more information doesn’t fix it.

Moving faster doesn’t fix it.

The practice of intentional pause is more important right now, not less.

As AI takes on more of the production work, writing, research, scheduling, and systems, what remains most valuable in the people who use it is judgment and creativity.

You cannot access either from inside chronic anxiety.

The firms that build deliberate reflection into how they operate will have a clarity advantage over the ones just reacting to the noise.

The Appreciation Gap will widen.

The firms that close it will compound.

The ones that don’t will grind harder and wonder why nothing seems to stick.

The question “Have I done enough?” doesn’t get answered by doing more.

It gets answered by stopping long enough to appreciate what you’ve already built — and trusting that the conditions for enough were set before you started.

Build that pause into the week. Before the calendar fills itself with something less important.

Look at what you’ve built.

Call it good.

Steve “enough is enough” Gordon

P.S. The calendar will fight you on this. White space feels like waste until you experience what comes after it. Try it once, deliberately. See what the next working day looks like.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Watch:What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

Full week back in the office. No stages, no airports, no handshakes in hotel lobbies. Just me, the quiet of my Florida office, and a blank canvas.

I’m spending the week building AI agents to transform every part of our company. Not automating old tasks. Building new capabilities. It’s one of those weeks where the work is the thinking.

Which brings me to something I keep running into.

Every conversation I have these days about AI lands in the same place.

“What are you using it for?”

And almost every answer is some version of the same thing: doing existing work faster, cheaper, with fewer people. Cutting the cost of content creation. Reducing research time. Shrinking the number of steps in a process.

All of that is fine. None of it is the game.

Here’s the problem with building your AI strategy around productivity.

Productivity means reducing the cost of output. That’s a bounded gain.

You can only reduce cost to zero.

You cannot go below zero.

That’s The Productivity Ceiling.

And everyone racing to cut costs with AI will hit it at the same time. When they do, you will have gained nothing structural. You will have optimized yourself to the same level as everyone else who optimized.

The firms that figure this out will be playing a completely different game.

The question I’m asking is different.

Not “how do I do this cheaper?”

“What can I now do that I couldn’t do before?”

That question has no ceiling.

I’ll give you three examples from the past few weeks.

We launched a new website. Fully built and optimized for both traditional search and AI-driven discovery.

We didn’t hire an SEO agency.

We didn’t replace anyone.

We added a channel we weren’t going to buy.

New capability. Not lower cost.

One of my clients built internal software. AI-powered analysis that was cost-prohibitive before. He can now do a level of due diligence on every deal that his competitors can’t match.

That analysis became a new service offering.

The new offering attracted new clients.

One AI tool turned into a product line.

Another client is in healthcare. He’s using private LLMs to analyze data on Parkinson’s treatments.

The data existed before.

The connections between it did not.

He is creating new value (treatments) from data that was always there but couldn’t be fully understood. That new value will be worth a great deal to patients… and the practice is growing fast as a result.

In every case, the pattern is the same.

New value is being created.

Not existing value delivered cheaper.

This matters a lot when you zoom out.

Twelve to eighteen months from now, the firms using AI for growth will have a structural competitive advantage. Not because they use AI. Because the value they deliver is better. AI is the enabler. The better value is what people pay for.

Tesla is the clearest example at scale.

Tesla is not a car company that adopted AI.

Tesla is an AI company that makes cars.

When electric vehicles started getting traction, every major automaker built one. They approached it as a new powertrain for an existing product.

Tesla built something different. They built an AI vehicle that happens to run on electricity.

The result is a driving experience that the others couldn’t replicate.

We bought one last year for my wife.

I was not an EV person.

I had no interest in an electric vehicle.

We bought it because the driving experience is extraordinary. On a long drive, I can engage full self-drive. I can drink a cup of coffee. I arrive after five hours refreshed in a way that never happens when I’m the one driving.

I know some of you are skeptics. Once you try it, you’ll understand.

Tesla’s market cap is 10 times the combined valuation of all other U.S. automakers.

Not because they use AI.

Because they used AI to deliver a driving experience that is, for many people, a dream come true.

The other companies built efficient electric vehicles.

Tesla gave people something they didn’t know they wanted until they had it.

AI is the enabler.

What people want is the result.

The firms that understand this are asking a different question than everyone else chasing the productivity ceiling.

They’re asking: how do I use AI to give my clients a dream come true experience?

Your answer to that question will have no ceiling.

The firms still asking “how do I cut costs?” are playing a game with a zero lower bound.

Which question are you asking?

Steve “making dreams come true” Gordon

P.S. Most firms have the raw material for a dream come true offer. They just haven’t asked the question yet. Start there.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in four ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. [substack.stevegordon.io]

Watch: [What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future]

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Where’s Steve:

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 17-20 - Exit Planning Institute Growth & Impact Summit, La Jolla

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

No flights. No speaking gigs on the calendar. Just my office, my coffee, and the kind of quiet week where you can actually hear yourself think.

My phone buzzed Thursday afternoon. It was Amy.

Amy is a client. She’s an AI privacy expert.

She works with major companies, the kind whose names you’d recognize. She published her book in January.

Thursday’s text was the kind of update every author hopes for and most never get.

She’d been invited to speak at the Tech Futures conference in New York City. Five thousand attendees. The exact people who buy what she sells. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway are podcasting from the event.

She didn’t apply. She didn’t pitch. She didn’t network her way in.

The invitation came to her.

Here is how it actually happened. A reader of her book, an AI thought leader in his own right, was originally asked to speak. He had to decline. So he put Amy’s name forward, and he sent the organizers her book.

They read it. They liked it. They invited her in.

A book she wrote, in the hands of a stranger, did the work of getting her on a stage with 5000+ in the audience.

That’s not a fluke.

That’s The Author Effect™.

The Lottery Ticket Mistake

Most authors treat a book the way most people treat a lottery ticket.

Launch it. Wait a few weeks. See if anything happens. If nothing big happens fast, get discouraged, write it off, and move on.

That is not how the asset works.

A book is not a launch event. It is a deployment vehicle.

It is an asset that pays over years, not weeks. And only if you keep deploying it.

Most authors stop deploying right when the asset is starting to compound. They publish in January. A few podcasts in February. By April they are half checked out. By summer they have decided the book thing did not work.

They did not fail. They never started.

I have written about this same dosage failure in other channels. The consultant in Miami who said “LinkedIn doesn’t work” while posting once a week. The client who sent twenty-five copies of his book and called it a failed experiment.

Same root cause. Different surface.

The Author Effect™

Three things compound when an author keeps deploying.

Reach you didn’t create. Other people start putting your name forward. Amy’s invitation did not come from her network. It came from a reader. The book did the proof work for someone who was not even Amy.

The same week, she got nominated for the prestigious Fortress Cybersecurity Award. Same mechanism. The book was in the room. She wasn’t.

That is a different kind of marketing than most experts have ever experienced. You are not pushing. The asset is pulling.

Asymmetric rooms. A book gets you into rooms you cannot network your way into. Amy is about to stand on a stage in front of five thousand of her perfect prospects, alongside two of the most listened-to voices in business media.

No amount of LinkedIn posting, cold outreach, or personal branding gets you into that room. The book does.

Compounding velocity. Each deployment makes the next one easier. Since February first, Amy has done four podcasts, two book events, and two webinars. She has given away around a hundred copies and sold about three hundred more.

Several hundred people in her space now know her work directly. Each appearance creates the next one. Each reader becomes a possible referrer, like the one who sent her book to Tech Futures.

This is the Author Effect. Not the launch. Not the Amazon ranking. The slow, steady, compounding return on a book that keeps being deployed long after most authors stop.

Finally Write the Book. Then Keep Pulling the Lever.

Two failures, in this order.

Failure one is never writing the book.

Most experts have been thinking about their book for years. Talking about it. Outlining it in their head. Telling people they are going to write a book.

And never doing it.

Every year they wait is another year the asset is not compounding. The Author Effect cannot kick in for a book that does not exist.

This is the bigger gate. It is also the one where most people are stuck.

If you are in that group, stop thinking about it. Write the book.

An imperfect, finished book is worth infinitely more than a perfect, unwritten one.

Failure two is writing it, then quitting too early.

Amy is at month four. She is doing well. She is also at maybe ten to twenty percent of full deployment.

A serious author at full deployment in year one looks like this:

• Forty plus podcasts.

• Twenty plus webinars.

• A thousand or more books out the door, gifted, sold, mailed, handed to prospects.

• A handful of speaking stages.

• Every sales conversation seeded with the book before the call.

That is the deployment plan. There is no shortcut. There is no version of “the book worked” without it.

The good news: once the asset exists, you are not creating anymore. You are deploying. The work is mostly the same kind of work, repeated.

I told Amy this yesterday. She has done well. She has also barely scratched the surface.

She wrote back: “The author effect is real!!”

It is. And like most, she’s experiencing it less than 6 months after her launch.

What’s Coming

The trust gap is widening fast.

In a year, AI will have flattened most of what shows up online. Articles. Posts. Even most podcasts. Generated, generic, indistinguishable from each other.

Buyers already feel it. The ninety-four percent of B2B buyers using LLMs to research vendors are not trusting what they read.

A real book, written by a real expert, structured around hard-won ideas, sitting on someone’s desk or in someone’s hand, is going to read like signal in a sea of noise.

Because books are special--there is no greater signal of expertise, credibility, and authority.

A year from now, the experts who already have the book and are deploying it will look untouchable. The ones still saying “I’m going to write it someday” will be invisible.

This week Amy texted me a sentence most authors never get to write.

The asset she built in January is still working in May. It will still be working next May. It will still be working five years from now if she keeps pulling the lever.

A book deployed for one quarter is a launch.

A book deployed for three years is a category.

The difference between the two is not the book. It is the author who refused to stop.

If you have already written one and put it on the shelf, the work is not done. It is barely started.

If you have not written one, the question is not whether you have the time. The question is whether you understand what you are losing every day without one.

Steve “the author effect” Gordon

P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in four ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Become Unavoidable Inside Your Market — Be Everywhere Now is our done-for-you omnipresence service. We pick the right places, create the content, and put you in front of your defined audience everywhere they show up.

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

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Where’s Steve:

• May 27 — Boston Small Business Expo (speaking)

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 10 - Small Business Expo, Chicago (speaking)

I just left New York City after speaking at a conference. Tomorrow I’m on stage in Minneapolis at another one. Two cities. Two days. Same world.

That’s not an accident. And it isn’t ambition. It’s the play.

Two weeks ago I was at 1200 person conference at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville.

We had books. We had a booth. We had real conversations.

In a day and a half, we booked 57 appointments.

Not contact cards. Not “I’ll email you next week.” Actual calls on the calendar before the conversation in the booth was over.

That’s the number. But the number isn’t the lesson.

The lesson hit me sitting in my hotel room that night.

This audience has local chapters. They have a member directory you can look up. They get mail at their offices. They live on LinkedIn. They have podcasts.

We had just produced one of the best event runs of the year. And I realized we were leaving 2x or 3x of it on the table.

Because the event was one node. Not the whole strategy.

The Visibility Illusion

Here is what most firms believe.

They believe they are doing marketing.

They post on LinkedIn when they remember. They send a newsletter when they have time. They go to one event a year and scan badges. They follow up once or twice.

Then they go quiet.

They mistake a little bit of activity for presence.

The market doesn’t see them. It can’t. The message is aimed at everyone, yet spread thin and inconsistently across channels that don’t connect.

That is the Visibility Illusion.

You feel like you’re marketing. The people you want to reach have no idea you exist.

Watch what most firms do at events...

They scan badges. They send one or two manual follow-ups. They sound like salespeople. They give up.

That is the symptom. The illusion is the cause.

Narrow + Deep = Be Everywhere Now

Here is the move.

Narrow means a defined group. Not “all financial advisors.” Not “all law firm owners.” The members of a specific organization. The attendees of a specific conference. The readers of a specific publication.

A real list of real names... Not anonymous “Internet” connections.

Deep means looking for every single way you could possibly be in front of that group.

Their events. Their local chapters. The podcasts they listen to. The publications they read. Their LinkedIn feeds. Their mailboxes. Their inboxes.

The book they’ll pick up. (Your book ;-)

You map it. All of it.

Be Everywhere Now is what happens when you put content in every one of those places. You appear to be everywhere that group looks. You appear bigger than you are. Inside that defined audience, you become the #1 player.

You don’t need more marketing. You need the same marketing pointed at fewer people, more times, in more places.

There are two distinctions worth keeping straight here.

Visibility is not presence. Visibility is one impression. Presence is repeated, multi-channel, across the contexts that matter to the buyer.

Reach is not resonance. A firm with 50,000 random impressions per month loses to a firm with 500 right people seeing the right message 20 times each.

The math the reach crowd misses is simple. “Dosage” is per-person, not gross.

How it played out in Nashville

Here is the whole play, in order.

1. Pick the right defined audience. A defined group. High concentration. Identifiable members. Real gathering places. A real online footprint. We didn’t pick “all advisors.” We picked a small sub-group.

2. Show up offline with your best asset in their hands. Books in the booth. Real conversations. The book does the IP work. The conversation does the trust work. The two together do something neither does alone.

3. Don’t take cards. Book the call right then. This is the line that separates the pros from the amateurs. The amateur scans badges, hopes, chases for two weeks, and lets the conversation go cold. The pro turns the conversation into a calendar slot before the conversation ends. Calls happen the following week. Momentum intact.

4. Then go everywhere they go between events. Local chapters. Their podcasts. Their LinkedIn feeds. Direct mail to their member list. Sponsor the chapter dinner. Same defined group, encountered everywhere.

5. Walk into the next event already known. The booth conversation isn’t cold the next time. It’s a continuation. The 57 becomes 100. Then 150.

That is what narrow plus deep actually looks like. Not a niche. A saturation map.

What’s coming in the next 12 to 18 months

We’re living through a recession right now... a trust recession.

Markets are moving towards a winner-take-all condition.

Inside every defined audience, the #1 slot is about to get taken. Once it’s taken, it’s gone for years.

More firms are waking up to The Snapback.

Digital arbitrage is dead. Building an ecosystem wins...what I call “Be Everywhere Now”

The smart firms are about to pick a defined audience and saturate it.

The first firm to commit to omnipresence inside a defined group becomes the obvious choice. The second firm to try the same play arrives to find the slot already filled. Same audience. Same channels. But a competitor already living in every meeting, podcast, mailbox, and inbox they planned to use.

Firms still chasing reach won’t slowly fade. They’ll wake up one quarter and realize someone owns the audience they thought was wide open.

By then it costs 5x to dislodge them. If it’s possible at all.

The window is open right now because most firms are still chasing everyone. That window closes faster than people expect.

The Choice

You can keep doing scattered marketing aimed at everyone, and stay invisible to anyone who could buy.

Or you can pick one defined audience and become unavoidable in it.

You don’t need a bigger marketing budget. You need a smaller target and a deeper saturation map.

Pick one defined audience right now. Name every place they show up. How many of those places are you currently present in?

That number is your starting point.

Steve “be everywhere now” Gordon

P.S. Next week I’ll show you the economics that make this play even more lopsided.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in four ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

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Where’s Steve:

• May 27 — Boston Small Business Expo (speaking)

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 10 - Small Business Expo, Chicago (speaking)

Successful operator.

Built the right way.

Not the kind of guy who rattles easy.

He was rattled.

He was telling the room that, almost overnight, his Google traffic, paid AND organic, had dropped by 90%.

Big plans for the quarter.

A few of them now on hold.

I sat there thinking, I cannot imagine a 90% drop in a major traffic channel.

The thing keeping his business alive right now is the blocking and tackling they’ve been doing offline.

Real conversations.

People meeting people.

The stuff a lot of marketing people quietly stopped respecting somewhere around 2005.

The Free Marketing Mirage

For about fifteen years, online marketing had an arbitrage edge that flattered every firm that touched it.

Penny clicks on Google.

Free reach on LinkedIn.

Cold email that landed in inboxes instead of spam folders.

Content that ranked because there wasn’t much competing for the slot.

You could get prospects on calls and into sales conversations for almost nothing.

That world is over.

It’s not that those channels stopped working. They didn’t. The arbitrage is gone.

The thing that made digital marketing feel “free” was never the channel itself. It was the gap between what you paid and what attention was actually worth.

That gap has closed.

The windows used to last years.

Google had five, six, seven years of arbitrage.

Facebook had a similar run.

When new platforms launch now, the window is months. Sometimes weeks.

A 90% drop in a major channel is not a freak event anymore. It’s the new normal.

Firms still running their marketing like it’s 2018 are going to wake up one quarter and find their lead engine is gone.

They will not see it coming.

They’ll think it’s a temporary blip.

It won’t be.

The mirage is the belief that “free” marketing is cheap. It’s the most expensive thing in your business right now, because what it actually costs is the upper bound on your growth.

The Second Thing That Broke

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Free reach disappearing is only half of what changed.

The other half is trust.

The same fifteen-year window that gave us cheap attention also flooded the channels with operators who didn’t deserve it.

Prospects watched.

They learned.

By 2026, the average buyer’s guard goes up the second they’re alone with a screen. Suspicious by default. Polished landing pages, vague claims, people they’ve never heard of selling certainty about things nobody can be certain about.

And it’s getting worse fast.

A recent study of 900,000 new web pages found that 74% of them now contain AI-generated content. Three out of four. Buyers can feel it even when they can’t name it.

The internet trained them to be careful.

Their guard is not up the same way in person. Not at an event. Not when a real book lands in their mailbox with a personal note. Not when they meet someone who is actually an author rather than someone running an ad.

I’ve watched this play out in our own marketing over the last twelve to eighteen months.

We’ve been doing more and more events. And consistently, people walk up to me at the booth and tell me they’ve been reading our content.

They already know what we think. The event isn’t the first touch. It’s the room where the proof they already collected online finally meets a person.

It runs the other way, too.

Prospects meet our team at an event, then go check us out before they get on a sales call. Our salespeople hear it directly. “I went and looked at your stuff, and I was impressed.” That sentence shows up over and over.

That is the ecosystem working.

Offline opened the door. Online held the proof. The two channels are not competing for budget. They’re feeding each other.

So now we’re living with two forces moving at the same time.

Reach got expensive.

Trust got harder to earn online.

The world is snapping back to a more complete way of going to market.

Online is no longer your reach engine. It’s your proof engine. Google’s Zero Moment of Truth research told us years ago that the average buyer interacts with about 7 hours of content across 11 touches in 4 locations before they ever talk to anyone.

That’s still true.

What’s different is what online has to do during those seven hours. It used to find the prospect. Now it has to convince a prospect who already found you somewhere else that you’re real, that you think clearly, and that you’ve been at this long enough to trust.

A 2026 study found that 94% of B2B buyers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to research vendors before they ever pick up the phone. They are vetting you before you know they exist.

Offline is the door. The events. The direct mail. The in-person presence. The book that arrives in a mailbox. The handshake at a booth.

Offline opens the door because that’s where the prospect’s guard is down. Direct mail is delivering a 42-to-1 ROI right now for firms doing it right. Live event sponsorship is converting at a fraction of the cost per quality conversation we get online.

Most people are doing online wrong, which is why the ecosystem matters. They post. They publish. They show up. But they don’t reveal their unique thinking. So when a prospect meets them offline and goes to look them up, what they find is thin. Generic. Indistinguishable from a hundred competitors.

The door opens, and the prospect walks back out.

You don’t get to pick one anymore. You used to. Not now.

The Move

Two things to do, both obvious once you see the problem.

Stop calling it “free.”

If a marketing activity only happens when you do it yourself, that’s not free. That’s a salary you’re paying yourself in time.

Real marketing has a budget. Real marketing pays for the door to open and pays again to make sure that what’s behind the door is worth walking into.

Build the ecosystem on purpose.

Offline opens the door. Online holds the proof. Both have to be there or the system breaks. Some firms will do their offline through events. Some through direct mail. Some through pure referral and a book that travels for them. That part flexes by industry.

The online side does not flex. You need a body of work that reveals how you actually think. Not posts that summarize what other people have said.

Your thinking.

In your voice.

Deep enough that a prospect can dive in and feel like they know you before they meet you.

That body of work is the asset that lets the ecosystem do its job. Without it, you can attend all the events you want. People will meet you, like you, look you up, and not find anyone home.

I’ve watched what this looks like when it works.

A boutique consulting client of ours in the Boston area mailed her book to her top 100 prospects. Then she expanded the list to 500. Then she held a small but powerful book launch event at an exclusive club. Forty or fifty people in the room.

The right forty or fifty.

Six months. Three speaking engagements. Multiple six-figure opportunities walking in the door.

She didn’t pick offline over online.

The book opened the door. Her body of work, sitting online, did the proof work behind the scenes when prospects went to look. The offline play landed because the online presence backed it up.

Narrow and deep, on purpose, both sides at once.

I’ll tell you the second story next week. I sponsored an event in Nashville and walked out with 57 high-quality appointments in a day and a half.

It changed how I think about the next five years of how we go to market.

What This Costs You If You Ignore It

The HVAC owner’s 90% drop isn’t a story. It’s a warning.

Every firm that built its growth on cheap online attention has the same exposure. Most of them won’t see it until the channel breaks.

The ones who do see it are quietly rebuilding their marketing on fundamentals that don’t depend on platform pricing.

Even if your online reach holds, you still lose if you can’t open doors offline. Trust online is going the wrong way, and it’s not coming back. The firms that win the next five years are the ones running both halves of the system at the same time.

Not picking. Not switching. Running both.

The free marketing mirage is the belief that you can grow a serious firm on whatever you can squeeze out of unpaid channels in the cracks of your week. Whether that channel is online or offline, alone, it’s not enough.

That belief has a sell-by date. It’s already past.

Stop optimizing for “free.”

Start building the ecosystem.

See you next Saturday,

Steve “narrow and deep” Gordon

P.S. Next week, the magic fishing hole. What happened in Nashville, and what it taught me about the way successful firms are going to grow over the next five years.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in three ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Join me on Substack: The ONLY place to find the full back catalog of Freedom Firm Insider issues and more exclusive insights to grow your firm. substack.stevegordon.io

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

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Where’s Steve:

• May 7 - Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)

• May 7-9 - NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)

• May 27 - Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

• June 2-4 - Strategic Coach CoachCON 26, Orlando

• June 10 - Small Business Expo, Chicago (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

Same story. Again and again.

They ask it questions.

They get answers.

They feel productive.

And that’s where they stop.

I grabbed my notepad and started sketching. Three circles. Because sitting in that room, I realized there’s a word for what most people are doing with AI.

Addition.

AI Addition

Most people add AI to their workflow.

They bolt it on.

Ask a question, get an answer, move faster.

That’s AI Addition.

Linear.

Helpful.

Limited.

When 42 super-successful entrepreneurs are all describing the same one-dimensional use, you start to see how much is being left on the table.

The real results in my business haven’t come from adding AI. They’ve come from multiplying with it.

AI Multiplication: Three Dimensions

There are three dimensions of AI. Each one multiplies the others.

Dimension One: Insight.

Ask AI questions.
Get answers.

Research a topic.

This is where everyone starts and where most stop. It feels productive because it is productive. Just barely.

This is what the entrepreneurs in the room kept describing.

“I asked ChatGPT about X.”

“I used it to research Y.”

Linear value. One dimension.

Dimension Two: IP.

Load your proprietary knowledge into AI.

Your methodology. Your playbooks. Your decisions. Your operational IP, the judgment you’ve built over 10, 15, 20 years in your domain.

This is how you clone expert-level thinking. Junior people start operating like seniors. The firm’s expertise stops living in one or two heads.

IP is the hinge dimension. Without it, you just get faster mediocrity.

Dimension Three: Iteration.

Compress the cycle. Experiment, improve, experiment, improve.

AI lets you take more turns in a day than you used to take in a quarter.

One dimension: you’re smarter.

Two dimensions: your team is smarter.

Three dimensions: you’re running away from the field.

Four Examples

I’ve been running this in my own business. Here’s what all three dimensions look like working together.

LinkedIn Ads. Cost per lead was $846. Now it’s $532. Still dropping.

Dimension One: I had AI research the current best practices for LinkedIn advertisers in 2026, then pull the best performing ads from similar companies in the LinkedIn ad library. It now updates me weekly, automatically, on what competitors are running.

Dimension Two: I’m a trained advertising copywriter with 15 years of running campaigns. That’s operational IP. Our positioning, our past winners, yes. But the deeper layer is the knowledge about what makes advertising work for businesses like ours. All of that, loaded in.

Dimension Three: Testing used to take two to four weeks, mostly because I was the bottleneck. We hired an agency. Fired them because they couldn’t match what we were doing internally.

Now AI pulls data from three different platforms I used to check manually, gives me a report with recommendations, and creates 15 ad angles in five minutes. I pick the ones worth testing. The cycle went from a month to 48 hours.

Do the math. Monthly testing gives you 12 improvement cycles a year. At 48 hours per cycle, you get over 180. Same year. Fifteen times the reps. That’s what compounding looks like when you use all three dimensions.

Project Management Tool. We ran on Airtable. Ten thousand dollars a year. 60% of what we needed.

Dimension One: We used AI as our lead developer. I know the principles of software development from a prior company, but the details have faded. We leaned on AI for that insight.

Dimension Two: We have a unique process with many sub-processes for delivering our clients’ books, written and published in 90 days. We trained the AI on every step so it could build software perfectly tailored to our delivery model.

Dimension Three: Someone on the team sees something that should change. They record a Loom video. We decide if we want the change, then tell the AI to implement it. Feedback to feature used to be one to three weeks with a hired developer. Now it’s 24 hours.

SEO Site. I’ve known how to do good SEO for years. Never had the bandwidth.

Dimension One: AI researched the latest SEO and GEO practices for 2026. GEO is generative engine optimization, how you show up inside AI tools when people search. Full site audit in under 15 minutes. Technical issues, content gaps, a complete punch list.

Dimension Two: I brought my own knowledge of SEO and of our business to judge the AI’s output. It’s not always right. Sometimes you have to redirect it. You have to know the difference between a good answer and a correct one. That’s where your IP earns its keep.

Dimension Three: First version of the rebuilt site in an hour. I gave feedback from my phone between conference breaks. Within 48 hours I had a fully redesigned site, technically optimized for both SEO and GEO, with 25 articles written in my voice using ideas from my book and these newsletters. All done for me. That same AI now analyzes our traffic weekly and proposes updates. We’re already seeing a 20% bump in organic traffic.

This Newsletter. Used to take three to four hours of my week.

The idea for this one came to me in that Strategic Coach room. On a break, I took a photo of my sketch. Walked into the hallway and described what you’re reading now. My AI junior writer runs on all three dimensions.

Dimension One: best practices from the best copywriters.

Dimension Two: my books, my prior newsletters, my voice as IP, and all of these original ideas.

Dimension Three: I iterated this draft in meeting breaks and while walking from security to the gate at O’Hare, dictating changes into my phone.

Total time: 37 minutes.

Every one of these results required all three dimensions working together. Dimension One alone would not have moved any of these numbers.

A year from now, firms still doing AI Addition won’t be slightly behind the multipliers.

They’ll be in a different category.

Everyone uses AI now. That gap is gone.

Stop adding. Start multiplying.

See you next Saturday,

Steve “multiplication, not addition” Gordon

P.S. Last week I wrote that AI amplifies those who can define the what. This is what that amplification looks like. Addition gives you answers. Multiplication gives you an unfair advantage.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in three ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Want a Freedom Firm?: Read The Freedom Firm Manifesto >> The roadmap for a business and life you’ll love.

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

Share Freedom Firm Insider

Where’s Steve:

• May 7 - Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)

• May 7-9 - NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)

• May 27 - Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

An hour delayed.

I’m using the time to plan, outline, and write this issue, chatting with my AI writing partner between interruptions.

This newsletter used to take three to four hours of focused writing time. Today it’s happening in stolen moments sitting on the tarmac.

Also on my mind: Rory McIlroy winning the Masters last weekend by a single stroke. A week that looked like a heart monitor. Six-shot lead after two rounds. Tied after three. Down by three during the final round.

Then up by two going into 18, drove it way right, almost into the 10th fairway, bogeyed the hole, and still won by one. Reminds me of entrepreneurship. As long as you keep playing, you have a shot.

I can write this newsletter from an airplane seat because I know what a great newsletter looks and feels like.

Two decades of writing.

Thousands of newsletters sent.

I didn’t learn that last month.

I earned it over years of reps.

AI didn’t give me that knowledge.

But it made that knowledge explosive.

And everyone is getting something wrong right now.

The Replacement Myth

The dominant narrative: AI is coming for your job. It’s coming for the experts next. The robots will replace the humans.

I don’t buy it.

Not because AI isn’t powerful. It is. I use it every day. I’m using it right now.

But the narrative misses the point.

The bottleneck has flipped.

For decades, the constraint was execution. You knew what good looked like. You just couldn’t afford to build it. Couldn’t find the right people. Didn’t have the bandwidth. The ideas were there. The resources weren’t.

Now execution cost is trending toward zero.

But someone still has to define what “great” looks like. Someone has to write the spec. And that takes something AI doesn’t have. Years of reps. Pattern recognition earned in the field. Hard-won taste built one mistake at a time.

The real risk isn’t being replaced by AI.

It’s being replaced by a competitor who has expertise AND AI.

Define the What

I’ve been testing this in my own business. Let me show you what I mean.

Start with SEO. I’ve known what good SEO looks like for years. Never had the bandwidth to do it myself. Never had the budget to hire someone for something with a long payoff period.

Last month I built an SEO-optimized site in 48 hours (really about 3 hours over 2 days). We’re already seeing a 20% bump in traffic. I defined the what. AI built it.

We manage book projects for clients. Highly complex. A repeating production process, not individual projects. We’ve tried every project management tool. None fit.

Last year we spent five figures and three months building a custom Airtable app. It got us 60% of what we needed. I rebuilt it as a custom app in less than a week. Minus the $10K per year Airtable subscription. It’s at 80% now and improving every week. Updates are as easy as telling AI what to fix next. By voice.

Our LinkedIn ads used to eat three to four hours of my week. Now it’s 30 minutes. Another 30 to create new ad tests.

We went from testing monthly (because that’s all I had time for) to testing weekly. Cost per lead dropped from $846 to $532. Still trending down. I defined what good ads look like and what good performance means. Built that definition into the AI. I still make the calls. AI does the rest.

Then there’s this newsletter. I have an AI junior writer who interviews me for each issue. Organizes the outline from my ideas. Creates a first draft that I tweak and edit.

The finished product you’re reading could not exist at this level without my ideas, my thinking, and my definition of what a great newsletter looks and feels like. Built over two decades and thousands of newsletters sent.

The pattern across all four: I didn’t ask AI “what should I do?”

I told it “here’s what great looks like. Now build it.”

I do the highest-level thinking and decision-making. AI does the rest.

The Skill Nobody’s Talking About

You don’t need to be a programmer. You don’t need to understand machine learning.

The advantage is experiential.

If you’ve spent 10 or 20 or 30 years in your domain, you already own the asset. You know what great looks like. You’ve built taste that can’t be Googled.

That knowledge is now the scarcest resource in the economy. Not data. Not code. Not compute power.

The ability to define a great outcome.

And the separation is about to accelerate. Those who embrace this will compound. Those who cling to the old ways will fall behind. Not slowly. Fast.

Because unique IP begets more unique IP. Every time you define what “great” looks like and AI executes it, you learn something new. You refine. You get sharper. The muscle builds.

It’s not a gift. It’s a skill. And every rep makes the next one faster.

The Real Question

Forget whether AI is coming for your job.

Ask a better question: have you spent enough time doing the work to know what “great” looks like?

If you have, this is your moment.

Stop debating replacement. Start defining outcomes.

The world belongs to the people who can define the what.

See you next Saturday,

Steve “define the what” Gordon

P.S. I landed in Chicago and finished this between the gate and the Uber. Two years ago that sentence would have been impossible. What are you sitting on that AI could amplify, if you just defined the spec?

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in three ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days. [Learn more →]

Want a Freedom Firm?: Read The Freedom Firm Manifesto >> The roadmap for a business and life you’ll love.

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

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Where’s Steve:

• April 19-21 - Exit Planning Summit, Nashville (at Gaylord Opryland)

• May 7 - Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)

• May 7-9 - NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)

• May 27 - Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

Where’s Steve:

April 15-16 – Strategic Coach 10x Ambition, Chicago
April 19-21 — Exit Planning Summit, Nashville (at Gaylord Opryland)
May 7 — Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)
May 7-9 — NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)
May 27 — Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

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Maybe someone shared one of my Notes. Maybe Substack recommended this publication. Maybe you Googled something about growing a professional services firm and ended up here.

However you got here, let me tell you what this place is about. And more importantly, whether it’s for you.

The Pattern I Can’t Unsee

I’ve spent the last 15 years working with professional services firm owners. Consultants, financial advisors, attorneys, accountants, functional medicine practitioners. Smart people running real businesses.

And I keep seeing the same thing.

They’re great at what they do. They have happy clients. Solid reputations. Good revenue.

But their market has no idea they exist.

They’re the best-kept secret in their industry.

Meanwhile, competitors with half their talent are landing the premium clients. Getting the speaking invitations. Fielding the inbound calls.

Not because they’re better. Because they figured out something most professionals never do.

Being good isn’t enough. You have to be the obvious choice.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Most professional services entrepreneurs followed the playbook they were taught. Master the craft. Deliver great results. Build relationships. Grow through referrals.

And it works. Until it doesn’t.

Because that playbook builds a business that can’t function without you.

Every new client needs your brain.
Every big decision runs through your calendar.
Every vacation gets interrupted.

You didn’t build a business. You built an expensive, high-paying job.

I call this the Founder Tax. It’s the systematic penalty you pay because of how your business is structurally designed. The more successful you get, the higher the tax.

And now AI is accelerating the problem. Generic expertise is being commoditized in real time. If a prospect can’t tell the difference between your advice and what ChatGPT gives them for free, you have a positioning problem that no amount of networking will fix.

What I Write About Here

The Freedom Firm Insider is a weekly newsletter for professional services firm owners who want to escape the Founder Tax and build what I call a Freedom Firm.

A Freedom Firm has three qualities:

1. It generates demand without depending on the founder’s personal hustle.

2. It delivers results through systems, not just the founder’s brain.

3. It’s worth something to someone other than the person who built it.

Every Saturday, I write about what it takes to get there. The patterns I see across hundreds of firms. The mistakes that keep smart people stuck. The architecture that separates firms that scale from firms that trap their founders.

I also write about what’s coming. AI is reshaping professional services faster than most people realize. The firms that document their expertise, name their methodology, and own a category will thrive. The ones still selling “consulting” or “advisory services” with no differentiation are going to get squeezed.

I’ve been wrong before. But I’ve been watching this closely for a long time, and the pattern is getting clearer every month.

Who This Is For

You own a professional services firm doing somewhere between $300K and $10M in revenue.

You’re good at what you do. Probably too good. Your expertise is the product, and that’s both the strength and the trap.

You’re tired of being compared to people who aren’t half as good as you.

You suspect there’s a better way to grow than trading more of your time for more revenue. You just haven’t seen the blueprint.

If that sounds like you, you’re in the right place.

Who This Is Not For

If you’re looking for quick-hit marketing tactics, this isn’t it.

If you want someone to tell you AI is going to solve all your problems, I’m not your guy.

If you’re building a lifestyle business and you’re happy where you are, that’s great. Genuinely. But this newsletter is for people who want to build something that outlasts them.

A Bit About Me

I’m Steve Gordon. I run Million Dollar Author.

Over the past decade, I’ve helped 300+ professional services firm owners write books that turned them from “one of many” into the only logical choice in their markets.

Not vanity projects. Business tools.

My first book generated over 5,000 leads in a single week and doubled my business. That experience taught me something I now teach to every client: the book isn’t the point. Becoming incomparable is the point. The book is the vehicle.

I’ve written five business books. I’ve spoken at more conferences than I can count. And every week, I sit down and write this newsletter because the patterns I’m seeing are too important to keep to myself.

What To Do Next

If you’re new here, subscribe. You’ll get the Freedom Firm Insider every Saturday morning. No spam. No daily pitches. Just one idea per week that might change how you think about your business.

If you want to go deeper, here are three editions to start with:

• The Golden Handcuffs — Why your expertise is both your greatest asset and your biggest liability. And the three-step process to break free.

• The Impressions Trap — Why most professionals waste money on visibility before building the one asset that makes it all work.

• The Hidden Tax You Pay Every Day — The five invisible taxes that punish you for being successful. And how to eliminate them.

If you want to talk, reply to any email I send. I read every one.

Welcome to the Freedom Firm Insider.

Steve “start here, go anywhere” Gordon

P.S. I also post shorter observations in Substack Notes between editions. If you’re on the Substack app, that’s where the daily thinking happens. The newsletter is the deep dive. Notes are the real-time signal.

P.P.S. When you’re ready, our team is standing by to help you in three ways:

Become a Published Author — Million Dollar Author helps you extract your expertise into a book in 90 days, without writing a word. [Learn more →]

Watch: Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s Warning to Businesses

Watch: What Amazon’s 30,000 Layoffs Reveal About the Future

Where’s Steve:

April 8 — Small Business Expo, Washington, D.C. (speaking)
April 19-21 — Exit Planning Summit, Nashville (at Gaylord Opryland)
May 7 — Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)
May 7-9 — NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)
May 27 — Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

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Where’s Steve:

March 25 — Small Business Expo, Philadelphia (speaking)
April 8 — Small Business Expo, Washington, D.C. (speaking)
April 19-21 — Exit Planning Summit, Nashville (at Gaylord Opryland)
May 7 — Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)
May 7-9 — NAPFA Spring Conference, Minneapolis (speaking)
May 27 — Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

Share Freedom Firm Insider

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Where’s Steve?

Come see me in person at one of these upcoming events:

March 10 – Small Business Expo, Miami (speaking)
March 16-17 – Law Firm Growth Strategies Summit, West Palm Beach
March 25 – Small Business Expo, Miami (speaking)
April 8 – Small Business Expo, Washington, D.C. (speaking)
April 19-21 – Exit Planning Summit, Nashville (at Gaylord Opryland)
May 7 – Small Business Expo, New York City (speaking)
May 8 – NAPFA Spring 2026 National Conf., Minneapolis (speaking)
May 27 – Small Business Expo, Boston (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

Share Freedom Firm Insider

Where’s Steve?

Come see me in person at one of these upcoming events:

March 3 – Small Business Expo, Orlando (speaking)
March 10 – Small Business Expo, Miami (speaking)
March 16-17 – Law Firm Growth Strategies Summit, West Palm Beach
March 25 – Small Business Expo, Philadelphia (speaking)
April 8 – Small Business Expo, Washington, D.C. (speaking)
April 19-21 – Exit Planning Summit, Nashville

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

Share Freedom Firm Insider

Where’s Steve…

Come see me in person at one of these upcoming events:

March 3 – Small Business Expo, Orlando (speaking)
March 10 – Small Business Expo, Miami (speaking)
March 16-17 – Law Firm Growth Strategies Summit
March 25 – Small Business Expo, Philadelphia (speaking)

I’d love to meet you face to face. If you’re at any of these, come find me and say hello.

Share Freedom Firm Insider

Share Freedom Firm Insider

Share Freedom Firm Insider

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