Blog
What actually works, written plainly.
No listicles and no hot takes. What we run for clients, what it costs, and the things we have stopped doing because they did not work.
Running the business
What to do when the referrals dry up
When referrals slow down, the work almost never got worse. The people who used to send them moved on, got busy, or simply forgot you.
Read itLocal marketing
Should you hire a local marketing agency? Usually it doesn’t matter
We’re a Fort Lauderdale shop, and for most of what we do, being nearby makes no difference at all.
Read itRunning the business
Should you do your own marketing or hire it out?
Doing it yourself is often the right answer. The test isn’t whether you can — it’s whether it will still be happening in month four when you’re busy.
Read itLocal marketing
What to have written before hurricane season, and what never to send
Write it in May. Nobody makes good communication decisions at 2am with a cone of uncertainty on the screen.
Read itRunning the business
Ten questions that tell you if an agency actually does the work
Most sales calls test whether you like the salesperson. These ten questions test whether anyone behind them is going to do the work.
Read itLocal marketing
What’s actually different about marketing a business in South Florida
Four things about this market change the plan: churn, Spanish, storm season, and a calendar that inverts in summer.
Read itAdvertising
Ads or a newsletter? An honest comparison, from people who sell one of them
We sell newsletters, so read this skeptically. Businesses with no list should run ads instead, and we say so on the first call.
Read itRunning the business
How to fire your marketing agency without losing everything
Leaving an agency is easy. Leaving with your domain, your ad account, your Business Profile and your data is the part people get wrong.
Read itLocal marketing
What actually moves local rankings for a service business
Three things drive the map pack, you control one and a half of them, and a business with no storefront starts behind.
Read itAdvertising
What a lead actually costs
Three numbers get called "what a lead costs" and only one of them can tell you whether to keep spending. Here’s the difference and why it matters.
Read itRunning the business
How to set a marketing budget from your own numbers
Percentage-of-revenue rules are somebody else’s arithmetic. Here’s how to build a marketing budget out of what a customer is actually worth to you.
Read itAdvertising
Why your ads aren’t working (it’s usually not the ads)
When a campaign underperforms, the ad is the last thing to look at. Here’s the diagnosis in the order that finds the problem fastest.
Read itLocal marketing
The Google Business Profile checklist almost nobody finishes
It’s free, it takes an afternoon, and most businesses fill in about a third of it and never open it again.
Read itCRM and follow-up
Google reviews without being obnoxious about it
Ask well, answer the bad ones, and stay on the right side of two rules a lot of businesses break without realizing.
Read itAI automation
Do you need a CRM before you buy AI? Usually, yes
This answer slows down our own sale, and it is still the right one: the automation needs somewhere to put what it learns.
Read itAdvertising
Google Ads vs Meta ads: intent versus interruption
The difference isn’t features. Google catches demand that already exists; Meta creates it. Which one fits depends on how your customers decide.
Read itCRM and follow-up
Why you lose customers, and why it is almost never price
Ask an owner why a customer left and they will say price. Ask the customer and they will usually say they just stopped thinking about it.
Read itAI automation
Speed to lead: why minutes decide who gets the job
The gap between an inquiry arriving and a human responding is usually the cheapest thing in the business to fix, and it does not need AI to start.
Read itAdvertising
How much should a small business spend on Google Ads?
Below a certain monthly budget, Google Ads doesn’t buy you customers — it buys you a sample too small to learn from. Here’s how to find your floor.
Read itCRM and follow-up
What a small business CRM actually needs
Four things, and a spreadsheet that gets updated beats an expensive CRM that doesn’t.
Read itAI automation
Five ways an AI automation project goes wrong, from someone who builds them
The honest version: what actually goes wrong on these projects, and the cases where we tell people not to buy anything.
Read itEmail marketing
How to write a subject line that is honest and still gets opened
The tricks that lift open rates are the same tricks that create legal exposure. The good news is that specific and honest beats clever anyway.
Read itCRM and follow-up
Database reactivation: the campaign that mines your old customers
Most businesses are sitting on a list of people who liked them fine and simply stopped coming back. Here is how to go get them.
Read itAI automation
Missed-call text-back is the smallest automation worth building first
The cheapest automation to build, the hardest one to argue with, and the one place a single text message changes the outcome.
Read itEmail marketing
The welcome sequence: the one automation almost nobody has
Somebody just raised their hand. The next four days decide whether they remember you in six months, and most businesses use them to send nothing at all.
Read itCRM and follow-up
How to ask for a referral without making it weird
Referrals are the cheapest revenue any business has, and almost nobody asks for them out loud.
Read itEmail marketing
A campaign and a newsletter are not the same thing
One asks for something. The other just shows up. Treating them as the same channel is the most common reason a list stops responding.
Read itAI automation
What an AI receptionist actually is, and what happens on the call
What actually happens when the AI picks up, where the handoff to a human goes, and the parts nobody selling one wants to explain.
Read itNewsletters
What a digital flipbook newsletter is, and who should skip print
The same four pages as a link you can text, email and post — with clickable content and numbers behind it. And a straight answer on who should not print at all.
Read itEmail marketing
Is cold email legal in the US? Mostly yes, with sharp edges
US law lets you email someone who never asked — but the rules about how you do it are stricter than most people think, and Florida adds a statute with real teeth.
Read itNewsletters
How big does a mailing list need to be before it is worth mailing?
The answer depends entirely on what one new job is worth to you. Here is the arithmetic, and the honest case for not mailing yet.
Read itNewsletters
How to clean a mailing list before you spend a dollar on postage
Every bad address is a fully-loaded piece cost with no chance of arriving. Here is the order we work through a file in before anything goes to the printer.
Read itEmail marketing
SPF, DKIM and DMARC, explained without the jargon
Three DNS records decide whether your email reaches the inbox. Here is what each one does, in plain English, and why they stopped being optional.
Read itNewsletters
Open rates are the wrong metric. Here’s what to watch instead
Open rates stopped meaning what they used to mean in 2021, and they never measured the thing you care about anyway.
Read itNewsletters
First Class or Marketing Mail: the cheaper one is often wrong
Marketing Mail saves real money per piece, and it also throws away the one thing that keeps your mailing list alive. That trade is worth understanding before you pick.
Read itNewsletters
Is print dead? No — but the argument isn’t nostalgia
A printed piece survives on a desk for weeks. An email survives for about four seconds. That difference is the whole argument.
Read itNewsletters
What it actually costs to print and mail a newsletter
Printing, postage, addressing and insertion, line by line, with the 2026 rates and the quantity minimums that decide which end of the range you land on.
Read itNewsletters
Why newsletters stop after month three
It’s never the idea that fails. It’s that the work lands on the one person who has no room for it.
Read itNewsletters
What to actually put in a client newsletter
The mistake nearly everybody makes is writing about the business. Here’s what goes in instead.
Read itNewsletters
How often should you send a newsletter?
Monthly, for almost everyone — and the reason has nothing to do with engagement metrics.
Read itRather we just did it?
Everything on this blog is something we run for clients every month. You spend about twenty minutes on it.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.