Hey everyone,

I'm packing a bag for Cologne as I write this, and I just did the math on the last two weeks. We gave away 500 bras in one of the the biggest campaign we've ever run, and before I could catch my breath we walked straight into our 10th birthday. No gap. That's kind of the whole story of my job right now.

Engine room is everything that ships this week. The birthday sale goes live Tuesday. Five brand collaborations. A matcha bedding launch. A basics shoot the team just wrapped, and they're already planning the next community event. Sarah sat down and wrote an actual letter to our community for the campaign, no script, no agency, something i believe in, building out a new content format across channels. The job of brands this year is to actually be authentic, go eye to eye with your customer.

Cockpit is the other half, same days. We're pulling ourselves back up to the strategic level between all the operative noise: refining a five-year plan, stress-testing the levers that actually decide whether it happens, working on a pitch deck for something i can’t talk about yet. I'm flying to Cologne for our team offsite where the whole point is to challenge each other on the fundamentals and think bigger than feels comfortable. Detour to my parents near Stuttgart on the way, and a week of Julia solo with the kids while i'm gone.

Switching between those two all day, every day, is the actual gig. The switching cost is brutal, and we do it as a tiny team, which is both the charm and the problem.

I keep handing more and more of our marketing ops over to AI agentic workflows I build myself. The reporting, the customer-voice mining, the weekly content grind, the analyses I never used to have time for. Honestly, without that I couldn't stem half of what lands on my plate. And it's not only faster. It opens up moves that flat out weren't possible before, like reading thousands of customer messages and turning them into ad angles in an afternoon. Some nights I catch myself fantasizing about spinning up a second company on the side, just me and a stack of agents, full solopreneur.

It definetly isn't ideas either. We have more good moves than we can actually run. The bottleneck is pure time. Hours in the day, and how many hats one person can wear before something slips. Paid social is the clearest example, we're nowhere near where we want to be there yet, so we're about to try some radically new formats, including building ads from real conversations with our own customers. Not done yet. So many open ends, but lets not whine about it.

And there's a layer under all of it I don't put on LinkedIn. Three kids. Parents getting older. A family that needs me to be more than a guy answering messages at the airport gate.

I won't pretend i've got the balance right. Some weeks the cockpit wins and the floor wobbles. Some weeks ti’m super stuck in the machine room and I never look up at the horizon. Maybe that's the job. You don't get to pick. You keep a hand on both and keep moving.

Through all of it I keep surfing. Doesn't matter how the session goes, I come out of the water and my mood has flipped, and so has my persepctive on whatever stressed me out atm.

Anyways. Bag's packed, the sale goes live Tuesday, and somehow we turn 10. Off to Cologne.

If you run something, or wear too many hats, reply and tell me which one is hardest to take off. Or the call you made that looked bad from the outside and turned out right. I read every one.

Philipp

P.S. Half my advisory chats lately are less "what's the tactic" and more "how do I hold all of this without dropping a piece." If that's your week, hit reply. No deck required.

also, share this little newsletter with someone you think might benefit from it. As a thank you, you’ll get some of the AI workflows which save me hours every week. And you’d make me super happy.