No, We Are Not on Your Feed

Some absences are accidental. Ours is not.

If you have looked for Valiant Growth Makers on LinkedIn, you will not have found much. No posts celebrating ourselves. No carousels explaining frameworks. No announcements about how honored and humbled we are. This is a decision, not an oversight, and this article is the closest we will come to explaining it.

The scene explains itself

Open LinkedIn for five minutes and the case makes itself. An entire industry is talking about work instead of doing it. Everyone is a thought leader. Every engagement is transformational. Every firm is honored to partner with every client. The volume is deafening, and the substance underneath it is thin, because attention spent on performing expertise is attention taken away from practicing it.

We decided early that we would not compete in that arena. Not because we could not, but because the executives we serve are precisely the people most fatigued by it. They have sat through the theater. They can price it accurately. What they cannot easily find is a partner who spends every available hour on their problem instead of on an audience.

How work actually reaches us

In two years, virtually everything we have done has arrived through two channels: a client coming back, or a client sending a peer. Nothing about that is glamorous, and everything about it is telling. A senior executive does not put their name behind a recommendation lightly. A returning client is making a fully informed decision, having seen exactly what we deliver and how. Neither can be purchased. Both must be earned, engagement by engagement.

Some of what carries us also runs deeper than VGM itself. The partnerships we are proud of are the kind we have with Ipsos in MENA, who were my favourite research company and people throughout my years at Nestlé, and who remain both a partner and a gateway to clients today. Relationships like that are not built through business development. They are built through years of shared work holding up.

Why we will not become a publishing house

This article is an exception, and it will stay one. We have no editorial calendar, no content strategy, no plan to feed an algorithm weekly. The reason is simple arithmetic: our thinking is the product. We would rather pour it, undiluted, into the clients who came to us on trust than serialize it for strangers.

There is also a deeper reason. Clients approach us knowing we will choose depth over volume, every time. Taking on less to deliver more is the entire model. A firm that spends its best hours producing content for the market is quietly telling its clients where they rank.

The trap we refuse to walk into

There is a lifecycle we watched repeatedly from the client side, and it irritated us every time. A boutique starts brilliant. Sharp, hungry, custom in everything. Then it grows, and somewhere along the way the deliverables become products. The proposal arrives suspiciously fast because it is a template. The offering is on a shelf, and your business is expected to fit it.

That moment is the death of the thing that made the boutique worth hiring. It is also, ironically, anti-brand building, from firms that sell brand building. VGM has no ambition to reach that stage. Not as a phase we are in before scaling, but as a permanent position. Everything we build is designed around the exact contours of the problem in front of us, because that is the only honest way to do this work.

Enough, on purpose

The philosophers we admire had a phrase for this. Epicurus, and Montaigne after him, lived by lathe biōsas: live in obscurity. Not obscurity as failure, but obscurity as discipline. The version of success that needs to be seen is expensive. It costs focus, it costs honesty, and eventually it costs the work itself.

We would rather be indispensable to a small number of leaders who can tell the difference than familiar to a market that cannot. Two years of nothing but referrals and returning clients suggests the approach holds. The impact is tangible, measurable, and quiet, and we intend to keep it exactly that way.

Thanks for reading,

Karim

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