Ten years in, this was the year everything clicked

Hey there,

Every December, I try to block off one quiet hour between client calls, kids’ concerts, and the scramble to wrap up planning. Not to recap our year, but to think about yours.

Because when I look back on 2025, the common thread across every client wasn’t just big goals. It was this: you were navigating real pressure, real stakes, and real turning points. And you chose clarity as your way through.

This was the year the work clicked because you were ready for it.

Though, it wasn’t just inside our projects — even the Forbes team reached out this year to talk about the biggest risks companies are navigating. It confirmed what we saw every day: leaders aren’t short on ambition; they’re short on clarity that can hold under pressure.

1. You pushed through inflection points. We built the story that helped you move cleanly.

This year was full of leaders sitting in the hard, high-leverage moments: acquisitions, restructures, new categories, new GTM motions, and the familiar “we’ve outgrown our story” realization.

A few examples of the shifts we saw you drive:

• Rebuilding Firstsource’s story around outcomes — part of the lift behind their stock surge, larger deals, and stronger market presence.

  

• Helping IDC move a 60-year legacy into a new era with sharper language and a clearer market signal.

  

• Bringing Sitecore’s story to life in work that’s now showing up in United Airlines seatbacks (a unique for us, and very fun milestone).

  

• Guiding a half dozen other teams as they brought newly merged companies, new leaders, and new priorities into one shared direction.

All year long, we sat with clients who were willing to tell the truth about who they are, what they do best, and what had to change. That honesty is what moved the business forward — not the deck, not the guidelines, not the campaign.

You did the hard part. We just helped you make the tough decisions and crafted the language to hold it all together.

2. Your teams needed more than strategy. They needed systems that help them work smarter.

A pattern surfaced across almost every client this year: the brand work landed, but day-to-day operations weren’t keeping pace.

So we expanded the Villain model to bridge that gap.

Not to become an AI shop, but to help your teams work in ways that support the strategy, not compete with it. We brought on a team of AI engineers and strategists to lead the work for us and for you.

This looked like:

• Turning complex meetings into clear follow-through

• Cutting manual work with simple systems

• Mapping gaps across content, messaging, and customer journeys

• Giving leaders visibility into what’s working (and what’s not, probably most important)

If 2025 taught me anything, it’s this: a sharp story only scales when a team can move at the same pace.

Some clients could. Many many couldn’t. And that’s OK. It meant we needed to do some operational work to deliver on the brand. We found that often, those ops shifts are when the value really started to become meaningful and measurable.

3. Villain grew because your problems got more complex, and you trusted us with them. (Thank you!)

For the second year in a row, we doubled revenue. Our margins went down because we invested more in that growth. We’re in a different stage than most of you. But the more meaningful part?

That meant you could bring us in on deeper, harder problems.

We added the right executive-level strategists, writers, analysts, and creatives — all handpicked to meet the level of complexity you’re operating in. Still no junior bench or extra layers (that’s why we’re investing in the custom development of tools). Just people who know how to move a company from “almost there” to “damn, that landed.”

And on a personal note, doing this while juggling sports drop-offs and school pick-ups made the work feel even more grounded. If you read my Mother.ly piece over the summer, you know that evolution was a big one.

4. What we’re carrying into 2026 because it came directly from our work with you:

• Your market speaks first. If you don’t feed your story back into your system consistently, someone else will write it for you. Just look at HubSpot. The market called them a CRM before they did, and once they owned the story, adoption followed.

• Strategy and story are the two levers that actually move revenue. Everything else supports those engines. ServiceNow proved this when a tighter, clearer narrative unlocked enterprise growth far faster than any campaign could. Owning “workflows” is seemingly as unsexy as it gets, and yet…

• Teams getting real value from AI aren’t loud about it. They’re focused on one small improvement at a time, and those improvements stack. Microsoft’s own teams did this quietly, automating meeting follow-through long before talking publicly about anything bigger. Proving it matters.

• Category leadership is a practice. Your customers decide it long before your competitors do. Figma is the perfect example here. Product teams crowned them the leader before the company itself ever said it out loud.

• Brave leaders make momentum possible. Every shift we celebrated this year started with someone saying, “Let’s stop dancing around this and fix it.” Salesforce’s narrative reset worked only because leadership was willing to scrap what wasn’t working and rebuild with clarity.

Thank you for this year. Truly.

To every client who brought us into the big rooms — the chaotic ones, the high-pressure ones, the “we cannot get this wrong” ones — thank you for trusting us.

To the Villain team — I get to work with the sharpest thinkers I know, and I don’t take that lightly. Thank you for making me look brilliant, the toughest feat all year! 🙂

And to those of you heading into a major shift next year: if 2026 is the moment you need a tighter story, a clearer path, or a system that helps your team move with more confidence, we’re here.

We’re gearing up for a big 2026 ourselves. A few major new clients, some category-shaping work already underway, and yes… a little Villain evolution of our own. Stay tuned.

Here’s to another year of sharp words, brave decisions, and brands that act like the companies behind them.

— Lauryn

P.S. If you want to talk in early January about a challenge keeping you up at night, reply with 2026 and we’ll set up time.