Five 10-minute curated insights in a private podcast to help you face CEO pressures. Then, each Wednesday, The Leadership Letter delivers one piece of clear, honest thinking from someone who has spent 20 years in the seat you're sitting in. Practical enough to use. Human enough to matter.
Selling like a human
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Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 11 MINUTES | 17 JUNE, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM I closed my first deal at seven. It was summer. I knocked on a neighbour’s door and offered to fix her garden. She said yes. Certain I couldn’t complete the task on my own, I found three other kids on our street, “borrowed” their parents’ tools, and turned up the next morning as a four-person crew. We weeded, we raked and when the job was done, we returned the tools. By the end of that summer I’d made more money, in real terms, than I would until I left school. Here’s what I didn’t understand at the time. The gardens needed doing. But that wasn’t what people were paying for. They were paying because something about watching a group of kids organise themselves, knock on the door, and get after it made them feel something. They weren’t buying gardening from children. They were buying the feeling of it. I’d sold them something human. I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
See you next Wednesday, Phil Hayes-St Clair |
The Leadership Letter with Phil Hayes-St Clair
Five 10-minute curated insights in a private podcast to help you face CEO pressures. Then, each Wednesday, The Leadership Letter delivers one piece of clear, honest thinking from someone who has spent 20 years in the seat you're sitting in. Practical enough to use. Human enough to matter.
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