HeyJaredWide Awake & Wondering
A sharp, curious take on business, marketing, and leadership—told through personal insights, smart questions, and a creative lens shaped by brand intelligence and cultural curiosity for New Orleans.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 15, 2026
Latest issues
WA&W #66 Four People On Your Team Would Write Four Different 2027 Plans. Your CFO Already Filed Yours Under Expense. (opens the original)
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Half the room was in a major metropolitan high rise. The rest were tiles on a Google Meet, dialing in from different locales.We were closing out the year’s numbers. Every department had a slide. Not one of them had next year on it.The room changed when we put up cancellation rates we believed were more than ten percent above our category competitors. Not a projection. Last quarter.The CFO and the longest tenured investor had already flagged which line gets trimmed if the quarter comes in soft. E
Meet me in Notes. It's where the New Orleans stuff lives. (opens the original)
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I just published my daily musings and insights on Substack Notes, and would love for you to join me there!I keep a running list on my iPhone of things I notice while exercising around City Park and Bayou St. John in New Orleans that don’t earn a full essay. A hand painted sign on Freret Street. A founder I met at Applied Arts Coffee who’s rebuilding her pricing model on a napkin. A line I overheard at Ralph’s On The Park that made me rethink a client’s positioning deck.Most of those never made i
WA&W #64 Nobody In That Room Called Themselves A Founder. That Was The Problem. (opens the original)
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It’s always busy at the beginning of a semester, but it’s especially busy as Sam McCabe and Farah Wells host WolfPack U Final Pitch Competition this week on September 10th. Find the details at the end of this essay. Sam and Farah enlisted me back in May to help mentor and coach these finalists on their way to build their pitch across the Summer break. I came away impressed with their ability to find their niche and the problems to solve. <a href="https://www.loyno.edu/academics/f
WA&W #63: The Curious 5 with Maartje van Krieken “Says Who, Why Now” (opens the original)
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What I am learning from Maartje’s Business Emergency Room SuccessTalking with Maartje at a Tulane Innovation Institute event sharpened something I have been circling in my own fractional CMO work: the difference between selling tools and doing real triage. I walked into a “brand intervention” event recently where everyone on the panel was selling a real lever: PR, media, even a branding campaign. No one stopped to diagnose and ask what problem the business was actually trying to solve.
WA&W #62: You Do Not Have One Customer. You Have Three. Only One Of Them Pays You. (opens the original)
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The worksheet came back with four customer profiles on it. Two of them were alive and clearly thriving personas. I could tell you what the first one drives, what she is afraid of, and what she wants her life to look like in three years, and I could tell you all of it because the client had written it down without being asked twice.The third profile had two words in it.The fourth was empty.The third one was the customer who pays.What a buyer persona looks like when somebody actually means it<
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