Intro: Longer newsletter today. Lots of meat in here to go along with Canada's Thanksgiving weekend. So let's slice into it...

— Rob Toth

We shifted gears recently over at Songbird Group (SBG), our strategic M&A and, now, growth agency. Here’s a bit of visibility into our own growth model.

SBG turns 11 this month. Cue birthday hat emojis.

And what got us here in the first 10+ years won't get us even to my 2027 company goals, let alone the next decade.

We've coasted on inbounds and referrals, which is a blessing and a curse. It meant client acquisition costs (capital, team, time, energy) were bare bones, margins high. But it also meant all of our sales and marketing in-house muscle was never flexed for our own brand growth. SBG (Songbird Group) is therefore a leaky bucket when it comes to it's own web presence.

That bucket's leak is an easy fix. Here’s what that looks like —

My 2027 goals for the company are to shift to an average of 1 new campaign and client per week being launched: 52 in the year. This is 4-5x our typical annual volume.

Here's how we get there.

Much of the above all wraps around one other central theme that I call TVO (trust & visibility optimization). And this I’ll put to you as a thought-exercise: how strong is your own TVO? I’ll assume you, your product, service, brand are highly trustworthy and of great value — but does your target market see this?

In case the above list reads like a kid’s Christmas list full of hopes and wishes - none of the above is new. We did many (or any relevant) of these on actual client campaigns so all of this is standard ho-hum, except the events gear which will require further tooling up and hires (coming soon). The machinery was always there, we just failed (read: I just failed) to point this at SBG itself.

In fact, drum roll … the above are now a service, packaged under a new offering called SBGrowth that went live 48 hours ago:

Fewer of us are reading Wikipedia.

Well, fewer of us humans that is. AI traffic on the site is up.

Meanwhile, this past week:

The Informa acquisition plants a flag as it took out another market leader.

But there are significant investments and capital from private equity, family offices and even VCs (yes funding events) into not just B2B events, but concerts, music festivals and more.

Events are providing AI safety nets, and meeting consumer human connection and experience demands all wrapped around high margins, recurring revenues and data.

If you have interest in a a data-deep-dive in future issues, reply back and let me know.

At SBG, we’re now live with a wellness and spa industry event co that I expect will build up competitive acquisition interest as it’s at the cross-section of both the wellness/longevity market and the events space.

A popular topic that I see circulating in various forms on LinkedIn are versions of “the LinkedIn algorithm isn’t getting us reach, and I’m seeing irrelevant posts in my feed” followed by a question to the LI readers: “where do you connect with your industry".

I’ve seen a half dozen versions of those in October alone. It’s either just for visibility (as it’s an obvious platform relevant topic and will get replies) or it’s a growing sentiment. Probably a bit of bucket A and a bit of bucket B.

Some responses to these threads are often the generic offline networking and conferences — but a few reference peer memberships specific to their vertical.

These are the b2b digital memberships that are curated around a certain market or role. Like Cameron Herold’s COO Alliance for COOs, Etienne de Bruin’s 7CTO for CTOs, Kati Kleber’s FreshRN for nurses, Vanessa Levin’s Teaching Trailblazers for Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers (one of our SBG clients, a current active campaign pursuing a strategic exit). Ryan Allis’s SaaSrise for SaaS founders or Justin Khanna’s Repertoire Pro for chefs and culinary professionals, Patrick Kearns and Kyle LaCroix’s Tennis Mavericks for tennis teaching professionals. You get the idea.

These curated peer memberships are surging.

Time for your company to launch one?

For a media, whether a strong newsletter or podcast or right now a challenged web content publisher that is still Google-dependent and dropping YoY, a membership may be a best new expansion route or revenue-resurrection initiative.

These are built up often on platforms like MightyNetworks, Circle, Skool (although that’s heavily biz opp skewed) and similar. And the go-live isn’t overly resource exhaustive.

If you want to explore what that can look like, get in touch with the SBGrowth information request form.

Hot take: what private club, local social club or digital peer membership you're part of will be a new flex.

Here’s a cautionary tale -

Recently I commented on a LinkedIn thread by David Castello, one of the brother co-owners of the domain Nashville.com . He posted about its recent sale. Price was kept confidential, though I knew it would be in the millions.

So: I posted “$2.2m?” (screenshot below). No ill will or trolling intended — but yes, I wanted to poke the bear to see if I can sneak out answers. Basic psychology tactic… present incorrect data and folks will be (often) quite quick to correct you, and end up revealing the data you’re hunting for in their answer.

That didn’t work this time. Though David did confirm they never had a price at $2.2m or that low. Which makes sense as I fully fabricated it just to see if I could get the confidential sale figure. And that last part matters because…

My post (below) on his thread.

Then a private message exchange with David.

And then this (scroll down) happened….

That’s how much you should trust what you read in AI overviews.

Monday’s knocking.

PS. New webpage went live 48 hours ago for SongbirdGroup. Come take a look.