https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnorJcY_ZAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnorJcY_ZAM
Posts
I can tell where a $500K marketing program is bleeding money in about 60 minutes. Here is the exact sequence I run.
Screenshot When a business is spending half a million dollars a year on marketing and revenue stays flat, people start to panic. The CEO gets angry. The VP of Marketing starts looking over their shoulder. The agency starts throwing around complex charts and giant decks full of fancy numbers. I have seen this movie dozens of times over my 40 years in the business. And every single time, the problem isn't that marketing is magic—it's that the system has a leak. You don't need a three-month audit to find a leak. You don't need a 50-page presentation. I can usually find where a $500K marketing budget is bleeding cash in about 60 minutes. Here is the exact sequence I run to spot the problem. Step 1: The 10-Minute Traffic Reality Check (Minutes 0–10) I start by looking at where the money goes out versus where the traffic comes in. Most big budgets blow huge amounts of cash on paid ads, social media campaigns, and fancy trade shows. But when I look at the actual numbers, I of...
Email Isn't Dead.
A Better Way to Think About Growth Email Isn’t Dead. It’s Still One of the Best Tools You Own. A more human take on why owned communication still matters when everything else feels noisy and unpredictable. I used to think the same thing when I first started looking at how communication systems actually work. It’s easy to get pulled toward the loudest channel in the room, especially when it looks like everyone else is running there too. I chased those newer platforms for a while because it felt like that was where the action was. But once I started testing what was really driving results, the picture changed. The quieter systems were often the ones doing the real work in the background. That made me start asking a different question: why do we keep giving up stable systems for ones we can’t really control? Maybe we’ve been thinking about distribution the wrong way. When I look at how conversions happen, I pay close attention to ownership and control. Social platforms can feel a bit like...
A few months ago, my phone rang. On the line was the CEO of a mid-market manufacturing company. You could hear the frustration in his voice before he even finished introducing himself. He was paying a top-tier marketing agency a six-figure annual retainer. Every single month, the agency sent over polished slide decks showing great progress. "Impressions are up 40%!" "Clicks are higher than industry average!" "Engagement is looking fantastic!" There was just one tiny problem: the company's revenue had been completely flat for 18 months. He was tired of paying for excuses and fancy charts that didn't turn into signed contracts. He asked me to come in, look at the entire operation, and tell him what was going on. I sat down in his office at 9:00 AM. By 11:30 AM—well before lunch—we had identified the exact bottleneck that was killing his growth. Here is what happened, and why this same story plays out in so many companies.
The Trap of "Pretty...