I’ve been making this argument since 2017
AI has now made it impossible to ignore

In January 2018, I first wrote about Reputation with Purpose. The premise was simple: the businesses that win in the long run build genuine reputation around what they actually do, what they stand for, and what they have earned the right to say. Coincidentally, that same week, Larry Fink published his landmark “A Sense of Purpose” letter to CEOs. Two people, in completely different worlds, arriving at the same conclusion independently. The framework was formally published as a PDF in March 2018. The Business Roundtable redefined corporate purpose 17 months after that. For most of the seven years that followed, the argument was whether “purpose” mattered at all. In most boardrooms, reputation work was still treated as the soft stuff.

I never thought it was the soft stuff. By then I had spent almost a decade building FTSE-level reputation programmes for SABMiller (now AB InBev). The numbers were never soft. The methodology was never soft.

Then, in 2024 and 2025, the world quietly aligned with the 2018 thesis.

Buyers stopped reading and started asking. They opened ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, typed the question, and read the answer. They checked the website. They checked LinkedIn. Only then did they ring anyone. By that point, the shortlist was mostly made.

AI engines do not reward marketing. They reward authority.

When ChatGPT recommends a firm, it is not surfacing the one that paid the highest agency fee. It is surfacing the sources it has learned to trust: substantive content, third-party validation, named experts with verifiable track records, a coherent story across the web. That is not an SEO problem. It is a reputation problem. It is the problem I have been solving for 30 years, with a new technical layer underneath.

Genuine authority earns citation. Citation earns discovery. Discovery drives growth.

The framework did not need rewriting. The market needed catching up. The values argument and the commercial argument are now the same argument. The work that earns trust from buyers is the work that earns citation from machines, because the machines are trained on what humans have already learned to trust.

This is why I built It’s a Shovel for founder-led businesses, and why I will not work on anything else.

Founder-led firms have what AI search rewards and corporates spend millions trying to manufacture: a real person at the centre, with real expertise, a clear point of view, and a verifiable track record. Most of them are sitting on the single most valuable asset in the new B2B buying environment, and they have never properly built it. They hide behind a corporate “we”. They post advice instead of opinion. They buy SEO when what they need is to be cited as authorities. The mismatch is painful, and it is entirely solvable.

The founder-led firms that fix this in the next two to three years will own categories. The ones that do not will continue to depend on referrals, which is fine until it isn’t.

I want to spend the rest of my career working with the founder-led firms I have always admired most: small advisory practices, specialist consultancies, boutique professional services, the hospitality and tourism businesses with a real story to tell. The strategic communications work I built for FTSE-level brands should be available to them, at a price they can afford. That is the gap in the market, and that is what It’s a Shovel exists to close.

If you are running a founder-led firm with something genuinely useful to say, let’s talk about how to make sure the right people, and the right machines, can find you.