The framework, and the book
I took a red pen to forty-five slides the night before the pitch.
It was 2008, a Fortune 500 pitch, and every senior manager in the building was throwing weight into the deck. More graphs, more case studies, the client logo garden. Slide after slide of us talking about ourselves, and not one that said why any of it mattered to the person deciding whether to write the check.
What happened next
So I wrote three letters across the cover in red. SFW. So f***ing what? By morning we had asked it of every slide. Forty-five became fifteen. Fifteen became six. Those six won a three-million-dollar contract.
The filter
What SFW means
That question turned into a filter, and the filter turned into everything else. It's one question, not a checklist. If you can't explain why something matters to the business, to the audience, to the outcome, it probably doesn't.
Because most work isn't bad. Most work is fine, competent, on-brief, and completely unable to say what it's for. That's the expensive kind. Bad work gets caught. Fine work ships, costs money, and dies quietly.
Why does this matter?
The book
Manuscript complete. Looking for the right home.So F***ing What?
The One Question That Wins Pitches, Kills BS, and Gets Results
Eight frameworks and one filter, from twenty-five years in rooms where being wrong has consequences.
F***ing
What?
Proof
The framework isn't theory.
It's the filter behind fifteen-plus AI systems now running inside real businesses: content, research, reporting, business development, and behind SFWRecon, a prospect-intelligence platform I built.
Every one of them exists because something got asked so f***ing what? and survived the answer. Plenty of others didn't get built at all. That's the point.
Who's asking
Former chef. Former chemist.
Bench chemistry, patent research at Vertex, regulatory compliance at Fujifilm, then twenty years of agencies: WPP, iProspect, partner at 451 Marketing. Two companies founded, starting in 2001.
The writing
One question, a red pen, every room.
Long-form every week on strategy, AI systems, and the decisions worth making.
SFW:Unlocked on Substack
The full archiveFramework thinking, AI systems, and the question before the question.