Our Blogs

Ask a business owner what makes her different and you will usually get a list of things she is good at. Attention to detail. Great communication. Genuine care about results. Years of experience in the field. All of it probably true. None of it differentiating, because...

There is an email most people have drafted at some point and never sent. It opens with admiration, explains that you have been following someone's work for a while, and ends by asking whether they would be willing to mentor you. It almost never works, and the reasons...

Open your analytics and find the article that gets the most traffic. Now ask yourself, honestly, how many clients that piece has actually produced. For a lot of small businesses the answer is none at all, and the piece has been running for two years. Meanwhile...

Spend a week researching marketing frameworks and you will turn up dozens of them. Funnels with different numbers of stages, acronyms built from different words, models named after their creators, systems promising a fundamentally new way to think about growth that...

Fractional CMO is a title that arrived quickly, spread faster, and now means several different things depending entirely on who is using it. Sometimes it describes genuine part-time marketing leadership: someone senior who owns the strategy, manages whoever is...

Try to find out what a marketing strategist actually charges and you will mostly find pages that politely decline to say. Every engagement is different. Pricing depends on scope. Book a call to discuss investment. All of which is technically true and none of which...

There is a point in the life of a handmade business where the marketplace stops being the thing that made you and starts being the thing that limits you. It usually arrives without announcing itself. Sales are steady, the shop has good reviews, and something has...

There is an entire category of business support aimed at women running their own companies, and a great deal of it is genuinely excellent. There is also a great deal of it that is priced like strategy and delivers something considerably closer to encouragement. Both...

Every explanation of a marketing funnel describes the parts. Attraction, capture, nurture, conversion, arranged in a diagram with arrows. What none of them describe is what it feels like to build one, which is a different question and the one that actually determines...

People apologize on discovery calls. Not for anything they have done to me, but for the state of their own business, and the pattern is consistent enough that I have started noticing which apologies come up most. I know my website is embarrassing. I have not posted in...

Open a dozen consultant websites in a row and a pattern shows up almost immediately. Years of experience. Industries served. Companies worked with, usually rendered as a row of logos. Certifications. A photograph taken in front of a window. Somewhere in the middle, a...

The advice is correct and it arrives late for most people. Branding before website, positioning before design, know who you are before you build the thing that says it. Fine. Except you already built the website. You paid someone real money 18 months ago, it looks...

Most therapists and coaches did not get into this work because they wanted to think about lead generation. The training was clinical or relational, the draw was the work itself, and marketing arrived later as an unwelcome administrative requirement that nobody...

Someone asks what you do. You are at a dinner, or standing around at school pickup, or at a networking thing you almost skipped, and there are maybe 8 seconds before the conversation moves on. What comes out is usually some version of, well, it depends, followed by a...

Ask three agencies to quote you on SEO and you will get three numbers with almost nothing in common. One comes in low enough to feel suspicious, one lands in the middle with a long list of deliverables, and one is priced like a car. All three will describe what they...

Done-for-you is a genuinely appealing phrase when you are the person currently doing it all. It suggests that content becomes somebody else's problem, and that after a kickoff call it simply appears, sounding like you, doing its job, requiring nothing further. That...

In 2020 a lot of people started sourdough, and a lot of people threw out a perfectly good starter on day 4. A starter takes 7 to 10 days of feeding before it does anything worth looking at. For most of that stretch it sits there smelling odd and showing no activity,...

Every service business hits the same wall eventually, and it tends to arrive at the point where the calendar is completely full and the revenue still is not what it should be. The advice you get at that point is automation. Tools, workflows, sequences, something that...

There is a stretch in every client relationship that happens before the relationship exists. Someone has decided she has a problem and has not decided what to do about it. She is reading, asking around, comparing, and putting it off. Most businesses have no idea this...

Free consultation is a phrase that has been through a lot. It once meant a genuine conversation and now, often enough, it means a scheduled sales presentation with a friendly opening. Which puts you in an awkward spot when you actually want help. You know you need...