Subject: Do you do any marketing?
I used to run qualifying calls for a campaign helping small businesses get started online. Hundreds of them, all sorts: trades, shops, services, the lot.
Every call had the same first question. Do you do any marketing?
Nine times out of ten, the answer was one of two things. Either "we don't have the time", or they were doing it, but half-arsing it. Posting when they remembered. A website nobody had touched since it went up. Something out there, just so there was something out there.
It was never that they didn't care. It always came down to time. Marketing was the job that got done after every other job, which means it mostly didn't get done at all.
That answer, hundreds of times over, is why this letter exists. Not because small business owners are bad at marketing. Because nobody's marketing works when it only gets the scraps of the week.
So here's the question turned round on you: what does your marketing actually get? A planned hour, or whatever's left on a Friday?
If it's the scraps, don't add more channels. Pick the one thing you can do properly in the time you genuinely have, and drop the rest without guilt. Half-arsed everything loses to properly-done anything.
Speak soon, G
Published 7 September 2026. Read the original issue →