The Sale Barn Problem

I run two businesses. One is this strategic communications consultancy called careyworks. The other is a 250-acre cattle operation called Blau Ranch. For a long time, I treated them like they existed in separate universes — different audiences, different credibility, different everything.

I was wrong about that. Not about the audiences being different. They are. The tech executives I work with don't care about Brahman genetics (besides the occasional adorable photo), and the cattle community in Austin County down outside Houston doesn't need to hear about the latest developments in AI. But I was wrong about the thing underneath, which is that I'm solving the same problem in both places. And the fact that I kept trying to separate them was making both stories weaker.

Here's the problem, stated plainly: most people default to the lowest-value channel for what they have.

In cattle, that channel is the sale barn. You load your animals on a trailer, haul them to auction, and take whatever price the room gives you that day. It doesn't matter if you've spent years building a herd with specific genetics, managed your pastures carefully, tracked lineage and health history — at the sale barn, your animals are a commodity. The buyer doesn't know your story. The market doesn't reward your decisions. You get the average price because you showed up to the average place.

In executive communications, the sale barn is LinkedIn. Or more precisely, it's the version of LinkedIn where every post sounds like it was written by the same mildly enthusiastic professional, or better yet...AI. "I'm thrilled to share..." "Here are three things I learned..." The post that could belong to anyone in your industry. The one that's competent and completely forgettable. You had a real insight — maybe it came from a deal that almost fell apart, or a conversation with a customer that changed how you think about your market — and you sanded it down until it fit the template.

Same pattern. Different animals.

At careyworks, I work to pull the real story out of someone. Not the LinkedIn-safe version. The specific, slightly uncomfortable, earned version that actually belongs to them. I built a whole system around this — I call it the Studio (coming soon) — because I learned that you can't get someone's authentic voice from a questionnaire. You have to capture them talking, circling, contradicting themselves, getting excited about the thing they weren't planning to say. Then you build from that raw material.

At Blau Ranch, my job is the same thing pointed at cattle. I'm building a brand around what we actually raise — the genetics, the land management decisions, the specific animals — so that when it's time to sell, the buyer already knows what they're getting and why it's worth more than auction price. I built a digital herd book for this. So far it tracks lineage, vaccinations, pasture rotation, but soon it'll have an AI layer that helps us see patterns we'd miss on my own. It's a content strategy for cows, if you want to be reductive about it. I don't think that's reductive. I think it's exactly what's needed.

The crossover isn't cute. It's structural.

When I sit down with a senior leader and ask them to tell me the story of their company, I'm listening for the same thing I listen for when we're evaluating calves: what's actually there, underneath the way it's been presented? The leader has a company story that's been polished by marketing until it could belong to any competitor. The calf has genetics and health history that disappear the moment it walks into a sale ring. In both cases, the value is real. The system just isn't set up to surface it.

I think this is the central problem of authenticity in professional life right now. Not that people are fake — most aren't. They're just using channels and formats that strip out everything specific about them. AI is accelerating this. You can generate a competent LinkedIn post in fifteen seconds. You can generate a competent "about us" page, a competent investor update, a competent anything.

Competent is the new default, and it's worthless, because if AI can produce it for anyone, it doesn't tell your audience anything about you.

The only thing that still differentiates is the specific, earned, human thing. The decision you made that someone else in your position wouldn't have. The way you think about a problem that comes from your particular set of experiences and nobody else's.

For me, that particular set of experiences includes twenty years of communications agency and executive thought leadership work — Edelman, Microsoft, crisis work in India and China — and ten years of learning to run a cattle operation we inherited with zero generational knowledge. The tech life funds the agriculture life. The agriculture life teaches the tech life things about patience, about systems thinking, about the difference between what looks good on paper and what survives contact with a thousand-pound animal who doesn't care about your strategy.

I used to think I needed to pick one or keep them in separate boxes so neither audience would get confused. But the confusion was on my end. The two audiences don't need to care about each other's world. They need to see that the person helping them has a real point of view, earned in a real life, applied to their specific problem. The ranch makes me a better strategist. The strategy work makes me a better rancher. And the willingness to say that out loud and stop editing out the connective tissue is the most authentic thing I can do.

The sale barn is always there. For cattle, for content, for careers. It's the easy, default, commodity path. The interesting work, the work that actually captures the value of what you have, happens when you decide to tell a more authentic story.

That's what both of my businesses do. I just stopped pretending they don't.