For Once, Justin Oberman and I agree On Something

Wall Street spent last week in a panic because artificial intelligence isn't paying off fast enough.

Nvidia's stock whipsawed. Analysts wrung their hands over whether AI spending was "generating enough revenue or profit to justify the massive infrastructure investment." Investors who'd bet billions on revolutionary technology were suddenly terrified that their returns might take (brace yourselves) more than eighteen months to materialize.

Meanwhile, I've been reading this week's Torah portion, in which Jacob works fourteen years for a woman.

Seven years for Rachel, whom he loved. Then Laban switches daughters on him, and he works another seven for the one he actually wanted. Fourteen years of labor for a single outcome.

The text says the first seven years "seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her."

I am a fractional CFO. My job is to look at spreadsheets and tell business owners uncomfortable truths about cash flow. I am not, by training or temperament, a romantic. But I recognize a marketing lesson when I see one.

Here it is:

The returns you can see immediately are never the returns that matter.

Jacob could have demanded Rachel after year one. He could have renegotiated after year three. He could have walked away after Laban's deception and sued for breach of contract. Any modern business consultant would have advised him to do exactly that.

Instead, he worked another seven years. Because he understood something that Wall Street apparently doesn't: Some things are worth the wait, and the waiting itself is part of the value.

Your marketing works the same way.

Every business owner I advise wants to know when their marketing investment will "pay off." They want metrics. They want attribution. They want to trace every dollar spent to a dollar earned, preferably within the same fiscal quarter.

This is reasonable. It is also almost entirely wrong.

Jacob left Laban wealthy. Not because of any single transaction, but because he'd spent twenty years building something that couldn't be taken from him: relationships, reputation, and, crucially, the speckled sheep everyone else had overlooked.

That's the other lesson from Vayetzei. While everyone else fought over the solid-colored livestock, Jacob focused on the spotted and speckled ones. The ones nobody wanted. The ones that didn't fit the standard categories.

Your market has speckled sheep too. Customers nobody's fighting over. Messages nobody's sending. Positions nobody's claiming.

The panic over AI returns will pass. Some investors will bail out early and regret it. Others will stay the course and build something that lasts.

Jacob knew which kind he was. Do you?