The Pursuit-Attraction Balance: A Better Way to Build a Great Business

“The goal isn’t to chase customers but to create something worth choosing.” — Seth Godin

Introduction: The Physics of Commercial Attraction

When I first stepped into Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2015, I carried with me all the usual British preconceptions—low wages, aggressive supplier treatment, the corporate behemoth that swallowed small businesses. What I found instead was something entirely unexpected.

During one of my first visits, I attended Walmart’s famed Saturday Morning Meeting where CEO Doug McMillon posed a rhetorical question: “What makes Walmart special?” As I spent the week engaging with their technology division, this question rattled around my head continuously.

By the end of my visit, I had witnessed something I hadn’t seen in the 150+ organisations I’d previously worked with—a company of remarkable scale that somehow maintained a culture of genuine compassion and humanity, where leaders created a magnetic environment while communicating that everyone was valued.

This disconnect between external perception and internal reality sparked a question that would ultimately lead to this book: What makes certain organisations naturally attractive? What creates that gravitational pull that draws customers, talent, and opportunities toward some businesses while others must constantly chase after them?

In a world of increasing competition and dwindling attention, certain businesses seem to defy gravity. While others struggle to be noticed, these companies attract customers, talent, and opportunities with a natural magnetism that makes aggressive marketing and selling less necessary. They become what we might call “the obvious choice”—organisations that people instinctively gravitate toward.

Let’s acknowledge an important reality from the outset: becoming the obvious choice doesn’t mean you’ll never need to actively pursue customers, especially in your early days. Every successful business—even those that now seem to effortlessly attract opportunities—began with founders rolling up their sleeves, making cold calls, sending outreach emails, and doing whatever it took to land those crucial first clients. There is no magic formula that allows you to skip the hard work of building credibility and momentum.

However, there is a profound difference between businesses that remain in perpetual pursuit mode and those that gradually shift the balance until they’re primarily pulling rather than pushing. The framework we’ll explore isn’t about eliminating the need for active business development, but rather creating conditions where, over time, your ratio of inbound to outbound opportunities improves dramatically.

The Reality of Early-Stage Business

In 2004, Tobi Lütke wasn’t running a billion-pound technology platform. He was a programmer who, together with his partners, had built a simple online snowboard shop called Snowdevil. When customers began asking questions about the shop’s technology rather than the snowboards, the seeds of what would become Shopify were planted.

The early days weren’t glamorous. Lütke personally onboarded each merchant, sometimes spending hours on the phone walking them through the platform. He drafted endless emails explaining features, fixed bugs at midnight, and did whatever was necessary to make those crucial early customers successful. There was no magnetism, no gravitas—just a founder relentlessly pursuing opportunities and learning from each interaction.

“When we launched Shopify, we were essentially begging people to use it,” Lütke has recalled. “We offered to set up their entire store for free just to get them on the platform.”

This reality—that even the most attractive businesses begin with active pursuit—is essential to understand. The journey from pushing to pulling is gradual, not immediate, and the early pursuit phase isn’t just necessary; it’s valuable. Through active outreach, founders:

Gather crucial feedback about what customers actually value
Develop the stories that later create gravitational pull
Build the evidence that makes future attraction possible
Learn which aspects of their approach create meaningful differentiation
Establish the relationships that generate early word-of-mouth

The pursuit phase isn’t something to grudgingly endure until you can become “magnetic.” Rather, it’s a crucial investment period where you earn the very badges of credibility that will later form the basis of your attraction.

From Pursuit to Attraction: The Progressive Shift

While all businesses begin with pursuit, the most successful gradually shift the balance toward attraction. Consider the journey of Mailchimp, the email marketing platform founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius.

In their early years, Mailchimp’s founders actively pursued every client they could find. They made cold calls, attended local business events, and personally reached out to potential customers. There was no natural pull—just determined founders hustling for opportunities.

“For the first several years, we were really just focused on surviving,” Chestnut has said. “We were taking any client we could get.”

Yet over time, something remarkable happened. As they documented client successes, refined their product based on user feedback, and developed their distinctive brand voice, the balance gradually shifted. By 2007, they were receiving as many inbound enquiries as outbound ones. By 2010, inbound opportunities significantly outpaced outbound efforts. And by the time Intuit acquired them for $12 billion in 2021, Mailchimp had become a gravitational force that entrepreneurs naturally considered when starting a business.

This progressive shift from pursuit to attraction follows a predictable pattern:

Pursuit Dominant: Almost entirely outbound efforts with minimal reputation or referrals
Early Balance: Mix of outbound with growing inbound from early successes
Equal Balance: Roughly equal outbound and inbound, with established reputation
Attraction Advantage: More inbound than outbound, with strong gravitational pull
Attraction Dominant: Primarily inbound, with outbound reserved for strategic opportunities

The timing of this evolution varies dramatically based on industry, market conditions, and approach. For viral consumer products, the shift might happen in months. For complex B2B services, it might take years or even decades. What matters isn’t the speed but the direction—the gradual improvement in your pursuit-to-attraction ratio over time.

The Five Components Framework

During my time consulting with enterprises and building companies, I’ve observed that this evolution from pursuit to attraction isn’t random. It follows a pattern that can be understood and accelerated through a framework with five interconnected elements:

Essence: The irreducible cultural spirit that drives your business
Positioning: The strategic location where your essence can exert maximum impact
Gravity: The accumulation of mass that attracts people to your business
Storytelling: The communication and reinforcement of your position and essence across all touchpoints
Learning: The continuous adaptation and positioning that ensures you remain the obvious choice as the market evolves

Let’s explore each element to understand how they create natural attraction in the marketplace.

1. Essence: The Cultural Spirit That Drives Success

On a crisp autumn morning in 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC’s research facility. As researchers demonstrated their graphical user interface, his eyes widened with recognition. In that moment, something crystallised, not just a product vision, but an animating spirit that would define Apple for decades: the relentless pursuit of simplicity, beauty, and human connection in technology.

This singular moment captures what lies beneath the surface of truly enduring companies, an animating spirit that transcends balance sheets and business plans. In a world fixated on metrics and quarterly forecasts, this intangible force, what we might call a company’s essence, often goes unnamed yet touches everything: how decisions are made, innovations birthed, customers served, and legacies built.

Essence is not merely branding or corporate values statements framed on lobby walls. It is the emotional and philosophical core that drives decisions when no one is watching, the implicit understanding that guides a thousand daily choices. It manifests as the spiritual electricity running through an organisation, felt by employees, customers, and often, the broader culture.

I experienced this firsthand during my years as COO at Emergn. After seven years of growth, with many ups and downs, we finally uncovered and articulated a mission that had been present but unclear. The moment we settled on it as a leadership team, everything seemed to “click” into place. It was subtle, but important—driving momentum from that point forward. This wasn’t just a statement crafted for marketing purposes; it was the crystallisation of our authentic purpose that had been present but unnamed.

2. Positioning: Finding Your Place in the Market

In physics, the position of an object determines everything about its interaction with the world around it. A satellite in low orbit moves differently than one in high orbit. A boulder at the mountain’s peak has different potential energy than one resting in the valley. Position, in physical terms, establishes the conditions under which all future events unfold.

In commerce, positioning works similarly: where you place your business in the competitive landscape fundamentally determines how customers perceive you, which rivals you confront, and what gravitational forces you can feasibly exert. Your company’s essence—that distinctive spirit we just explored—remains potential energy until properly positioned.

This positioning challenge resembles the strategic thinking behind real estate development. A brilliant architectural design (representing your company’s essence) requires the right location to achieve its full potential. Place a luxury boutique hotel in an industrial zone, and its elegance goes unappreciated. Position it in a vibrant cultural district or scenic overlook, and suddenly its value multiplies. The same building, with identical features, becomes transformatively more valuable through proper positioning.

When April Dunford, author of “Obviously Awesome,” consults with companies struggling to gain traction, she often discovers the same root issue: their inherent value is obscured by improper positioning. “It’s not that the product is bad,” Dunford explains. “It’s that it’s being evaluated in the wrong context, against the wrong alternatives, by the wrong customers.”

3. Gravity: Adding Mass to Become the Obvious Choice

Picture a swirl of cosmic dust somewhere in the backwaters of the universe. At first, nothing distinguishes one speck from another, but over time a handful of particles collide, stick, and begin to spin. Each collision adds a gram of mass; each gram intensifies the tiny gravity well. Eventually that once-invisible speck becomes a planet—and all the comets, moons, and satellites in the neighbourhood can’t help but notice.

Building a company is astonishingly similar. A startup launches with scarcely any pull of its own, a lone founder floating in a marketplace crowded with bigger celestial bodies. To survive, the founder borrows gravity—credibility from past achievements, trust from early relationships, relevance from existing industry narratives—until the fledgling enterprise can generate a field strong enough to stand alone.

That journey is rarely fast, never linear, and always cumulative. Mass now is momentum later. The marketer’s billboard, the product designer’s update, the salesperson’s handshake—they are not isolated acts. They are collisions of dust that gradually thicken the core.

When Shopify began, it had no gravitational pull of its own. But with each merchant success story, each product improvement, each piece of educational content, it added mass to its market position. Today, it naturally attracts entrepreneurs without the intensive pursuit efforts of its early days.

4. Storytelling: Communicating and Reinforcing Your Position

Storytelling is how companies communicate and reinforce their position and essence across all touchpoints. It is the ongoing process of sharing compelling, authentic, and adaptable narratives that make your business memorable and magnetic. Storytelling ensures that your company’s unique spirit and value are consistently expressed to customers, employees, and the broader market.

5. Learning: Continuous Adaptation and Positioning

Learning is the discipline of continuously adapting your business based on feedback from customers, shifts in the market, and internal progress. It is about establishing systems and mindsets that keep your positioning fresh and relevant, ensuring you remain the obvious choice as conditions change. Learning is what allows your business to evolve, improve, and stay ahead of competitors over time.

The Pursuit-Attraction Diagnostic

How do you assess where your business currently stands on the pursuit-attraction continuum? The following diagnostic tool provides a starting point:

New Business Acquisition: How do you primarily gain new customers?
- Level 1: Almost entirely through active outbound efforts (cold calls, pitches, advertisements)
- Level 2: Primarily outbound with some inbound referrals from early customers
- Level 3: Roughly equal mix of outbound pursuit and inbound interest
- Level 4: Primarily inbound interest with targeted outbound for strategic growth
- Level 5: Almost entirely inbound, with outbound reserved for specific opportunities
Knowledge Source: How do you primarily learn about your market?
- Level 1: Through active pursuit of information (cold calls, research, asking directly)
- Level 2: Mix of pursuit and some unprompted customer feedback
- Level 3: Equal balance of sought and volunteered information
- Level 4: Primarily through unsolicited customer and market input
- Level 5: Rich, constant stream of unprompted market intelligence
Talent Acquisition: How do you primarily attract team members?
- Level 1: Aggressive recruitment, often requiring substantial convincing
- Level 2: Active recruitment with occasional inbound interest
- Level 3: Balance of recruitment and applications based on reputation
- Level 4: Primarily inbound applications with targeted outreach for specific roles
- Level 5: Strong pipeline of qualified candidates seeking to join
Effort Distribution: How is effort allocated between pursuit and attraction-building?
- Level 1: Almost all effort focused on immediate pursuit, minimal investment in attraction
- Level 2: Majority pursuit with some documentation of successes for future attraction
- Level 3: Balanced investment in current pursuit and future attraction
- Level 4: Majority investment in attraction systems with targeted pursuit
- Level 5: Primarily focused on maintaining and evolving attraction systems

Based on your scores, you can identify your current position and next evolution steps on the Pursuit-Attraction Evolution Matrix:

Current Stage	Characteristics	Evolution Focus	Next Actions
Pursuit Dominant (Avg 1-2)	Heavy outbound selling, limited inbound interest, constant hunting	Begin translating pursuit into attraction	Document early successes, gather testimonials, start sharing insights
Early Balance (Avg 2-3)	Mix of outbound and inbound, beginning reputation, some referrals	Systematise success documentation	Create case study templates, develop sharing processes, build referral systems
Equal Balance (Avg 3)	Roughly equal outbound/inbound, growing reputation, active community	Amplify existing gravity	Increase content sharing, leverage customer stories, develop thought leadership
Attraction Advantage (Avg 3-4)	More inbound than outbound, strong reputation, talent pipeline	Optimise attraction systems	Create specialised gravity for new segments, systematise storytelling, refine positioning
Attraction Dominant (Avg 4-5)	Primarily inbound business, waiting lists, talent magnet	Maintain and evolve attraction	Continuous positioning refinement, evolutionary storytelling, selective pursuit

The Counter-Example: Quibi’s Impatient Approach

To understand the dangers of attempting to skip the pursuit phase, consider Quibi, the short-form video streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. Launched in April 2020 with an astonishing $1.75 billion in funding, Quibi attempted to manufacture attraction without earning it through the gradual process we’ve explored.

Rather than beginning with active pursuit and learning, Quibi deployed massive marketing campaigns before validating their concept with real users. They spent lavishly on celebrity content without first understanding what their audience actually wanted. They attempted to create instant gravity through resources rather than earned credibility.

The result? Quibi shut down just six months after launch, having burned through hundreds of millions of pounds without ever building sustainable attraction.

The lesson is clear: Even with enormous resources, the pursuit phase cannot be bypassed. The progressive shift from pushing to pulling requires patient investment in all four components of our framework—essence, positioning, gravity, and learning to tell stories.

Business as Continuous Creation

As we conclude this introduction to the pursuit-attraction framework, it’s worth reflecting on a profound insight from poet Maya Angelou: “Creativity is a bottomless well. The more you use, the more you have.”

This wisdom applies perfectly to the work of building an obvious choice business. The most successful companies don’t view positioning as a one-time event but as an ongoing creative act—a continuous process of learning, adapting, and storytelling that maintains gravitational pull despite changing conditions.

Like artists who find that creative work generates more rather than less energy, the most magnetic businesses discover that attraction begets attraction. Each successful customer interaction, each piece of content that resonates, each problem solved—all add to the gravitational field that makes pursuit progressively less necessary.

The chapters that follow will explore each component of our framework in depth, providing both philosophical understanding and practical tools for implementation. We’ll explore how to discover and articulate your essence, how to find your optimal market position, how to systematically build gravitational mass, how to communicate and reinforce your position through storytelling, and how to continuously learn and adapt to maintain your obvious choice status.

Whether you’re just beginning your entrepreneurial journey or leading an established enterprise, this framework offers a path to gradually shifting the balance from perpetual pursuit to natural attraction—a way to become not just successful today but the obvious choice tomorrow.

The Pursuit-Attraction Diagnostic Worksheet

1. New Business Acquisition

How do you primarily gain new customers?

Level 1: Almost entirely through active outbound efforts (cold calls, pitches, advertisements)
Level 2: Primarily outbound with some inbound referrals from early customers
Level 3: Roughly equal mix of outbound pursuit and inbound interest
Level 4: Primarily inbound interest with targeted outbound for strategic growth
Level 5: Almost entirely inbound, with outbound reserved for specific opportunities

Your Current Level: _______

2. Knowledge Source

How do you primarily learn about your market?

Level 1: Through active pursuit of information (cold calls, research, asking directly)
Level 2: Mix of pursuit and some unprompted customer feedback
Level 3: Equal balance of sought and volunteered information
Level 4: Primarily through unsolicited customer and market input
Level 5: Rich, constant stream of unprompted market intelligence

Your Current Level: _______

3. Talent Acquisition

How do you primarily attract team members?

Level 1: Aggressive recruitment, often requiring substantial convincing
Level 2: Active recruitment with occasional inbound interest
Level 3: Balance of recruitment and applications based on reputation
Level 4: Primarily inbound applications with targeted outreach for specific roles
Level 5: Strong pipeline of qualified candidates seeking to join

Your Current Level: _______

4. Effort Distribution

How is effort allocated between pursuit and attraction-building?

Level 1: Almost all effort focused on immediate pursuit, minimal investment in attraction
Level 2: Majority pursuit with some documentation of successes for future attraction
Level 3: Balanced investment in current pursuit and future attraction
Level 4: Majority investment in attraction systems with targeted pursuit
Level 5: Primarily focused on maintaining and evolving attraction systems

Your Current Level: _______

5. Overall Assessment

Average Score: _______ (Add all levels and divide by 4)

Current Stage: _______________________________

Evolution Focus: _______________________________

Next Actions: