The Business Influencer's New Clothes
Snake oil and secrets
Today’s the day they find out.
It’s a daily thought, always exacerbated by difficult trading periods or plans that don't pan out as anticipated.
Today is the day that I’ll be stood in the centre of London, crowds pointing at the woman who isn’t wearing a robe made of invisible thread, but is just embarrasingly butt naked.
With every bit of media coverage I get and every award nomination, I torture myself with this idea.
Today is the day they realise that I’m a big old fakey fake.
You get the gist.
Classic imposter syndrome combined with being a high-achieving eldest daughter with chronic anxiety. I relate hard to every millennial meme. I will wear a side parting in my hair until I die; don't come at me Gen Z.
But in recent weeks, something has been gnawing at me. And when I say gnawing at me, I mean that the social media algorithm has been hurling clickbait and sound bites my way so much that I want to yeet my phone into the ocean; which, of course, I can’t do because I am addicted to the whole hate cycle. Thanks Zuckerberg.
I made the grave error of watching hours of three men arguing on a well-known podcast, to then get sucked into the online response-o-sphere where everyone who wasn’t on the podcast subsequently records content about the podcast in a never ending cycle of polarised opinions.
So and so destroys that bloke.
Whats-his-face gets owned by thingy-ma-bob.
Go woke go goat.
Or something.
Every subsidiary content creator clamouring for the attention of the original guests to validate their message or publicly argue with them.
Doesn’t matter which. Either one is great for the views. Just keep tagging them in your posts - it doesn’t look desperate at all, pinky promise.
Usually this stuff doesn’t compel me to write about it. After all, trying to debunk online idiocy would not only be more than a full-time job but would also be entirely pointless. People don’t want to have a sensible discussion about anything; they want to pick a side and then double down - because changing your mind about something in the face of new information seems to be the biggest online faux pas you can make nowadays.
This one hit different, though, because it covers two topics that are close to my heart; entrepreneurship and wealth inequality. This article isn’t about the content of that recording - I have many opinions about it that I have shared elsewhere. Yes, I too am not immune to becoming part of the response-o-sphere. At least I’m self-aware enough to know how ridiculous the whole gambit is.
This article is about who we are holding up as bastions of the revolution. The people that are being invited into Downing Street, or into the bosom of the Royal Family, or onto Question Time. The people who are having the red carpet hurriedly rolled out for them as they shimmy on by in their garbs made of the finest, glistening, invisible thread.
What makes these people qualified to be ushered into the upper echelons of decision-making society?
Turns out - not very much at all.
Now, before I go on, I need to make it clear that I am, most definitely, not talking about anyone specifically here. Nope. No Siree. I’m merely offering up some suggestions of things that people who should know better, might want to be looking at. If you think I am referring to any particular individual, then that’s on you, not me.
Apropos of nothing, remember that phony health blogger who claimed she was healing her cancer with whole food? She had a book deal with Penguin. There was a Netflix documentary about her. Anyway, I digress.
We live in a world where attention trumps ability.
If you pitch a book idea nowadays, many publishers want to know what sort of online following you have before they decide whether to go ahead. Doesn’t matter that you might be sitting on the most explosive, well-written material they’ve ever had the fortune to gulp down their eyeballs - if you don’t have the oven-ready audience, it’s going to be an uphill struggle.
So it’s little wonder that once someone has an audience, it becomes an infinite cycle of content, appearances, and invites until they fall out of favour. But in the meantime, they’ve probably paid off a few mortgages and banked enough die-hard followers to keep them in sponsorships for the foreseeable future.
Surely, you need to have done something impressive to get an audience, though?
Oh no, my sweet summer child, not in the slightest. You just need to understand the algorithm of social media, know how to get mainstream press attention and make a series of easily disprovable but never investigated claims about your own success.
Then you need a schtick. Perhaps you run around shoving a microphone into people’s faces to try and convince them to start a business. Or maybe you have absolutely zero care for the sort of misinformation your guests put out into the world and use the most shocking soundbites as clickbait for your podcast. You could have a load of different businesses and claim that you have exited multiple times over, but never talk about what you sold out for.
The more nebulous the statement, the better, really. Saying you have sold a company for more money than you’d ever need is beautifully vague. Or citing a company valuation where you held a tiny percentage of the shares.
Honestly, any of that will do. Oh, and you probably want to be a man; that usually helps.
Importantly, your message is that if you can do it, then so can everyone else. Never mind all the luck that is involved in business. Never mind that history is written by the victors.
If people succeed, it is because of your significant influence. And if they fail, then it’s because they didn’t try hard enough. It’s a win-win for you.
So how on earth are we supposed to figure out who is the real deal and who isn’t? Well, ascertaining someone’s actual personal wealth is pretty hard to do. However, it is incredibly easy to find out what the UK companies they are involved in are up to.
Now, all of this comes with a few caveats - there is a good degree of accounting jiggery-pokery that means that things might not always be as they seem, but as a qualified accountant with almost 20 years of experience running a business and working with tens of thousands of other businesses, I have a few pointers of things to look out for.
First, you can look up the filings of all UK company accounts at Companies House. You can also see a list of all the Directors of those companies. That might well include your favourite content creators and the hosts and guests on some of the most viral podcasts.
If a company has filed micro company accounts, that means that they have to have met two of the following criteria:
A turnover of less than £632,000
A balance sheet value of less than £316,000
Have fewer than 10 employees
For a small company that is exempt from filing full accounts, that is two of:
A turnover less than £10.2m
A balance sheet total of not more than £5.2m
Have fewer than 50 employees
I offer this information up, only because I have seen my fair share of people claiming to run multi-million pound revenue businesses, only to discover that they are filing micro company accounts.
In a world of “do your own research”, people seem phenomenally bad at knowing where to look in order to do this. I include large media corporations in this charge.
Next, we should follow the impact. What change are these people actually making in the world? I mean real change. Have they helped to write any sort of policy on their chosen subject matter or influenced in any meaningful way? Have they done research or collected any data?
If they are investing in other companies, at what rate and at what quantum, and how successful are those companies now with their input?
If they have pledged to invest any specific amount over time, then where is the proof?
The BBC’s Dragon’s Den, arguably the most exposure the average person will ever have to the world of business investment, has a woeful record for its entrepreneurs that received offers of investment. Research by the Telegraph claims that 50% of the deals that were successful on the show never went on to receive the investment, falling over at the due diligence stage. 23 of the 146 companies that successfully pitched in series 1-11 are no longer trading.
It doesn’t matter, though, because this is about entertainment rather than business.
Everything is just about entertainment.
And that brings me full circle back to my original point.
I am by no means perfect, but I like to think that I act with integrity. It bothers me if I don’t have enough knowledge about a subject, or the data to back up my claims. I want people to understand things fully before forming an opinion or making a decision. Or, if they don’t have the time or inclination to take the deep dives that I take, I want the people they are taking advice from to be legit.
I want the content we consume with the intention of learning to be truly educational rather than just shocking or anger-inducing or riddled with agenda and product placements.
Chug that meal replacement shake.
Buy that book.
Start your day by sitting in a bin full of ice in your garden.
Bio hack. Life hack. Time hack.
Like and subscribe.
That’s what bothered me so much this week. The entire experience left me feeling dirty. I saw with my eyes wide open how people who claim to have an agenda for the greater good are motivated only by self-interest.
I don’t know why I was surprised; I’ve been around long enough to be suitably cynical. But I guess it’s not me I was worried about - it’s the millions upon millions of people who will buy the snake oil because they believe what they have been told.
And with social media, e-commerce and Klarna, snake oil has never been easier or more consequence-free to sell.
No one is getting cancelled for selling snake oil.
No one is ever really cancelled - they just get offered a job on GB News.
This is not to say that you have to be successful at a specific thing to be able to advise people or offer insight and inspiration on it. Some of the best coaches were terrible athletes, and vice versa.
But I do draw the line at taking your one experience, extrapolating it into a brand of its own, and then trying to use that influence to get into positions of power. That’s shady. The ego required to think that your experience is everyone's experience is mind-boggling.
But who cares? Ultimately, it’s capitalism that wins here. And as long we keep scrolling, and keep responding, and keep getting sucked into the rabbit holes, the weavers with their most expensive threads will keep dressing our emperors, knowing that we’re all too scared of being called stupid or incompetent to say anything.
No one will run a basic due diligence check.
Silently, we’ll watch them walk naked into the seats of power.