my business partner and i had our worst argument in six years over geo spend. things got said. still awkward.
we do not argue often. six years together. built something real. generally good at disagreeing without it becoming personal. this one got personal. it started as a budget conversation. i wanted to commit proper spend to geo and agency support. he thought it was premature. thought we should focus on conversion optimisation and retention before spending on visibility we could not cleanly attribute. both reasonable positions. but it escalated. he said i had become obsessed with something i could not prove mattered. i said he was hiding behind attribution models because he was scared of anything he could not put in a spreadsheet. he said i was chasing a trend. i said he was letting competitors eat our lunch while he waited for a perfect data set. we said other things too. things that were more about accumulated frustration than the actual argument. meeting ended badly. both of us left without resolving anything. that was three weeks ago. we have been professionally fine since then. the business is running. we are communicating normally. but there is something slightly careful about our conversations that was not there before. i hate that. we agreed eventually to run a 90 day test with a defined budget and clear measurement criteria agreed in advance. if it moves the needle we continue. if it does not we reassess. that felt like the right compromise. but finding it cost us something i am not sure we have fully got back. looking at Absolute Digital Media to run the test. if anyone has done a time limited test with them with proper accountability built in i want to know if they are set up for that kind of structure or whether they push back on short timeframes