If you’re looking for explosive growth next month I’m probably not the right person.

That’s something that became very clear to me after spending a few days in Florence at the beginning of the year, to understand whether Florence could make sense as a place to spend more time working from, or even eventually as a base for a small office.

The city is not flashy. It doesn’t try to compete for attention, and it doesn’t feel like it’s constantly launching new attractions to stay relevant. There’s no sense that it needs to prove why you should be there. There is an understated quality everywhere.

If it weren’t for the cars and the way people dress, large parts of Florence could easily belong to another century.

You can feel the cultural background behind companies like Brunello Cucinelli or Rifò Even though they are very different businesses, they share a common "Florentine background music":consistency over spectacle, substance over noise.

And I can’t help but draw a parallel with my own work.

The companies I enjoy working with tend to share the same mindset I felt in Florence: head down, doing the work.

They’re not trying to hack attention every month, they’re not looking for someone to promise crazy numbers overnight, and very often they’re not even building with an exit in mind.

One of them is Extropy.io. The founder, Laurence Kirk, is one of the OGs of Ethereum and zero-knowledge proofs and has been teaching coding and Web3 mathematical fundamentals for almost a decade now. Another one is LadybugVentures, led by Jennifer Yi 🔜 Hawai'i Games Development, always building not for herself, but to help the people around her progress with her.

Different sectors, different sizes, but the same long-term attitude: be serious about what you do, want to make a real difference in the industry you’re in, and let results compound instead of forcing them.

This is the kind of #marketing I want to do more of, which also means being honest about fit: if you’re looking for explosive growth next month, or someone to manufacture attention on demand, I’m probably not the right person.

But if you’re trying to build something solid over time and want marketing that supports that rather than distorts it, I’d genuinely love to talk.