Contact
Get in touch.
I read these myself, usually within a day.
Podcasts
I'm good on a podcast.
Chemist to agency partner is an unusual arc and it makes for a real conversation rather than a book plug. Reach out and let's talk.
Elsewhere
- Substacksfwunlocked.substack.com
- LinkedInfrancisskipper
- Points Southpointssouth.agency
- SFWReconsfwrecon.com
Speaking
More than 250 rooms.
Conferences, client boardrooms, internal teams, universities.
Less often since 2020 than before it, but it never stopped. Recent sessions include AI training for a nonprofit's field team, an AI workshop for a consulting practice, and internal AI training for agency teams.
What I talk about
Deciding what deserves to exist. AI made production free and did nothing for judgment. Most organizations now generate more work than anyone can evaluate, and almost none of them have a way to decide what's worth doing. One question, applied without mercy.
Why your oversight function can't keep up. A committee with five responses watching a system with thousands of behaviors isn't governance, it's witness. Drawn from twenty-five years inside regulated industries and what cybernetics worked out about it in 1952.
The brief is where strategy dies. Strategy degrades with every handoff. Most organizations lose theirs somewhere between the decision and the execution, and nobody notices because everyone's busy.
One line
Francis Skipper is the author of So F***ing What? and the founder of Points South Consulting.
Short
Francis Skipper is a former chef and chemist who has spent twenty-five years in rooms where being wrong has consequences: regulatory compliance, pharmaceutical research, and two decades of agency work for enterprises including Novartis, AstraZeneca and Ericsson. He founded his first company in 2001 and Points South Consulting in 2019, and he now builds AI decision systems for businesses in complex, regulated industries. He writes at SFW:Unlocked.
Full
Francis Skipper started at a bench in South Carolina as a formulations chemist and built websites at night under his own shingle. Since then: patent research and bioinformatics at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, regulatory compliance and ISO auditing inside Fujifilm, digital strategy for pharma and biotech at WPP, and ten years as an equity partner at 451 Marketing leading a team of twenty-five for clients including Ericsson, AstraZeneca, Hologic and Insulet.
In 2019 he founded Points South Consulting, where he builds AI decision systems for businesses operating in complex, regulated, high-stakes environments. He also worked on the digital marketing campaign for The Intellectual Devotional, a New York Times bestseller.
Twenty-five years of watching capable people do unfocused work produced one question he asks of everything: so f***ing what? It became a framework, then a system, then a book: So F***ing What?: The One Question That Wins Pitches, Kills BS, and Gets Results. He writes weekly at SFW:Unlocked.