A thousand miles to ask one question

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Morning — here's this week:

— Why I did a thousand miles instead of three video calls

— The question almost nobody can answer about their own marketing

— One thing worth doing before Friday

A thousand miles. That's how far I've driven recently, going to see customers.

Boston in Lincolnshire one day. Bradford another day, and Stafford another. A fair bit of the M5 and most of the A1.

People ask why I don't just do a video call. Fair question — it would have taken an afternoon instead of most of a week, and nobody would have minded.

But you don't learn the same things on a call.

On a call, you get the agenda. You go through the numbers, everyone's polite, and forty minutes later you've covered what was on the list and nothing that wasn't.

Sit in someone's business, meeting the team, seeing what they've actually built — you get the rest of it. The thing they mention on the way to the kettle. The job that went wrong in July that never made it into an email. The bloke they're worried about losing.

And you get a much better sense of what they actually need to move the business forward, rather than whatever happened to fit neatly into the plan you turned up with.

Here's the bit I keep thinking about.

One thing came up in every single conversation, in different words.

Not one of them said they wanted more leads.

One wanted bigger jobs, not more of them. One wanted to stop working Saturdays. One wanted the business to be able to run for a fortnight without him in it.

Every one of them had a real answer. And every one of them was, on paper, buying "marketing".

Which is worth thinking about, because those are two very different things to be paying for.

This one takes a while to surface, because it doesn't sound like a marketing problem.

"We've got plenty on. It's just... not the stuff I want to be doing."

Small jobs when you'd rather have big ones. Price-sensitive customers when you'd rather have the ones who don't ask. Work that keeps the lights on and never quite moves you forward.

And the enquiries keep coming, so nobody looks at it too hard.

Here's what's usually happened.

At some point the business decided it needed more. More enquiries, more traffic, more visibility. Perfectly sensible — that's what everyone says they want, and it's what most marketing is set up to deliver.

But "more" isn't a goal. It's a stand-in for one.

And when you don't tell your marketing what you're actually after, it defaults to volume. Volume is the easiest thing to produce and the easiest thing to report on. So you get more of the work that's easiest to attract — which is nearly always the cheapest, smallest, most competitive end of what you do.

You asked for more. You got more. It just wasn't more of the thing you wanted.

There's a version of this problem that's about SEO, and it's the one everyone talks about.

But the version that matters more right now is simpler.

Your marketing will give you whatever you asked for. The trouble is most people have never actually asked.

If nobody has written down the kind of work you want, in specifics — the job type, the value, the sort of customer — then every decision downstream gets made on volume, because volume is the only instruction it was given.

That's why the honest version of a marketing conversation doesn't start with channels or websites or rankings. It starts with: what does a good year look like, and what would have to be true for that to happen?

That's a five-minute question. Almost nobody has answered it out loud.

And it's the reason I'd rather spend a day in the car than forty minutes on a call — because that question gets a very different answer in someone's office than it does on a screen with the next meeting waiting.

Ten minutes. Do it before Friday.

Think of the single best customer you had in the last twelve months. Not the biggest — the best. The one where the job was the right size, the money was right, they were straightforward, and you'd take ten more tomorrow.

Write down three things:

Now open your website and have an honest look.

If someone exactly like that landed on it today — would anything on there be speaking to them? Or is the whole thing pitched at everybody, which in practice means the cheapest end?

That gap is your answer. And it's a much cheaper thing to fix than most people expect, because it's usually not a matter of doing more. It's a matter of pointing what you've already got at something specific.

This week's prompt: work backwards from the work you actually want to the marketing that would bring it.

P.S. Whenever it's useful, three ways I can help:

— Score your website in 2 minutes. We built it for trades, but it works for any service business that relies on enquiries.

— Watch: what AI search means for your business. 12 minutes on where your next enquiries are actually going to come from.

— Stuck with your marketing? Book a 15-minute call, and we'll diagnose the problem and the opportunities.