A single idea can open in countless directions. Points of View is a series gathering perspectives around a concept, with each participant choosing their own journey through questions, answers, and the imagination and marvels in between.
This edition explores leverage — including what it looks like to harness it vs. building your own — and how leverage takes shape across systems, relationships, and ideas to create effects that compound over time.
Here, we spoke to Will Leatherman, the founder of Catalyst, a content and go-to-market studio that helps B2B companies turn their internal knowledge into repeatable engines for growth. His work sits across founder insight, AI-enabled systems, and commercial outcomes: finding the judgment that cannot be easily replicated, then building the structure that allows it to travel further.
In this conversation, he shares how to recognize leverage before it becomes obvious, why specific knowledge is its real starting point, and the difference between an advantage that multiplies and one that can disappear overnight.
How do you know leverage when you see it?
Results come from two things: how much work you put in, and how much that work multiplies. Almost everyone pushes on the first one. More hours, more calls, more meetings. Leverage is the second number, the multiplier, and it’s the only one with no ceiling.
So I look for one thing: output that has come unhooked from someone’s time. One founder I work with spent a few months building a self-serve version of his product. Customers could find it, sign up, learn it, and upgrade on their own, with no salesperson in the loop. Once it worked, he stopped touching it. New revenue kept arriving every morning while his team built the next thing.
That’s the signal, when the link between effort and results breaks in your favor. People miss it early because it’s quiet for a long time before it’s obvious.
Is leverage something you create, or something you uncover?
AI changed the math here. The generic version of any expertise is free and instant now. The only thing left with real value is the specific knowledge a machine was never trained on, because one person lived it. You got it from your own obsessions and your own scars.
I worked with a founder whose edge was pricing. He could look at a deal and know within minutes exactly how much the customer would pay. He had built that instinct over hundreds of negotiations and could barely explain it. That founder’s pricing instinct lived only in his head, which meant the company priced well only when he was in the room. We turned it into a model the whole team could run — the same judgment, now working in 100 places at once.
The only thing left with real value is specific knowledge ... from your own obsessions and your own scars.
How does trust become leverage?
[It] removes friction. Every serious deal carries the cost of making sure the other side is real and will do what was promised. When someone takes you at your word, all of that disappears. I once watched a deal close in three weeks that normally takes six months, and the only difference was a single introduction from someone the buyer already trusted.
Every promise you keep raises the size of the promise the other side will make back, until one day you can ask for things that would have been unthinkable at the start and people say yes on your word alone. That is your reputation working as capital.
What makes leverage fragile?
A durable advantage is one nobody can take from you. The fragile ones all share a single feature: a third party sits between you and the thing that makes you money, and that party can step away whenever it likes.
A company I know got most of its customers through one acquisition channel. The economics were beautiful, and other founders studied how they did it. Then the channel changed its rules, and most of those customers stopped coming within a week. They had done everything right — but they’d also built on land they were renting, and the owner rezoned it.
What enables leverage to compound versus being just a temporary advantage?
The clearest version I see is how proof builds on itself. A company delivers a strong result for one customer, that result becomes the story that wins the next, and the new customer becomes the proof that wins two more. Same work, but every year it pays more, because the track record is doing the selling. A temporary advantage — a price promotion, a viral moment, a lucky quarter — pays once, and then you earn it again from zero.
What do people mistake for leverage that isn’t really it?
A large number of users, followers, or downloads looks like power, so people chase it for years. [But] attention and trust are two separate assets, and only one of them converts. A company can have two million app downloads and almost nobody who’s willing to pay. Another company has 300 customers who renew every year and send their friends.
A small group of the right people who trust you enough to act is slow to build and almost impossible to copy. That is exactly what makes it leverage.
