The subscription creep

Open your business bank statement and look for the subscriptions. Not the big obvious ones, the small monthly charges from tools with names you half-remember signing up for. A scheduler here, an email platform there, a social tool, a forms add-on, a thing someone set up two years ago that you are fairly sure you have not opened since. Individually they look trivial. Together they are one of the most wasteful lines in a typical small business, and almost nobody sits down and audits them.

This is not an argument for the cheapest possible stack, or for doing everything by hand to save a few dollars. Good tools earn their keep. The right one can save you hours a week, and hours are worth more than the subscription. So the goal is not to be a tightwad about software. The goal is to stop paying for the specific kinds of waste that pile up almost invisibly: overlap, unused features, and tools you do not actually own.

The goal is not the cheapest stack of tools. It is the smallest one that does the job, owned by you.

How the bill creeps up

Nobody decides to overspend on tools. It happens one reasonable step at a time. A free trial converts quietly into a paid plan. A feature you needed once nudges you up to a higher tier you never come back down from. A provider or agency sets you up on the platforms they prefer, which are rarely the ones easiest for you to leave. And the oldest trap of all: you adopt a new tool to do a job, and never get around to cancelling the old one that did the same job. Six months later you are paying twice for one outcome and have forgotten why.

The four ways you’re probably overpaying

• Overlap. Two or three tools quietly doing the same job, because each was added before the last was retired.
• Unused tiers. Paying for a premium or enterprise plan for one feature you touch twice a year, or capacity you will never reach.
• Tools you do not own. Subscriptions sitting in someone else’s account, so your data and your work walk out the door the day you part ways.
• Quiet creep. Per-seat or usage charges that grew month by month without anyone ever deciding they should.

The third one is the most dangerous, and the least noticed. A tool you pay for but do not own is not really a tool, it is a tether. It is the same trap as letting someone else handle everything: convenient today, expensive the moment you want to leave.

What to use instead

The fix is rarely a clever new product. It is fewer tools, doing more, owned by you. Start by leaning on the genuinely good things that are free or already paid for: your Google Business Profile, the forms and email capture your website can already do, a single email tool rather than three half-used ones. Consolidate wherever two tools overlap, and downgrade the tiers you have outgrown the need for. Above all, choose tools you could leave tomorrow with everything intact: your customer list, your data and your accounts in your name, not someone else’s. The test of a healthy stack is simple. You could explain the whole thing on one page, and walk away from any single piece of it without losing what matters.

This is exactly the work we do when we set a business up: move you off the pricey, overlapping subscriptions onto a lean setup you actually own and control. Done properly, it often pays for itself, because the monthly waste it removes outlasts the one-off cost of fixing it.

Common questions about your tools

Toby Davis

Co-founder of My Marketing Solved. Toby writes about how small businesses can get found and keep customers, without the louder-is-better playbook that keeps owners busy and broke.

More about how we work

General marketing commentary, not advice tailored to your specific business.

Spend last, not first

Ads are the reflex answer to a quiet month. Sales are down, so you boost a post or start a campaign, and for a while the dashboard fills with activity that feels like progress. Sometimes it works. Often it just turns a slow month into an expensive slow month. The uncomfortable truth is that paid advertising is the last thing most small businesses should reach for, not the first, and the reason is simple: ads do not fix a marketing problem. They amplify whatever you already have.

None of which is an argument against ads. They work. They are fast, they scale, and they are measurable in a way almost nothing else is. For a business with a proven offer and a working path from click to paying customer, paid advertising is one of the most reliable growth levers there is. The problem is never the ads themselves. It is reaching for them before the thing that turns attention into money actually works.

Think of an ad as a magnifier held over your existing business. If your offer is clear, your page does its job and your follow-up is sharp, the magnifier shows more of something good, and you scale it. If your offer is muddy, your page says nothing and enquiries fall into a void, the magnifier shows more of that, faster, and you pay for every click that leads nowhere. You are not buying customers. You are buying strangers and pouring them into a bucket you have not checked for holes.

Ads do not fix a leaky bucket. They fill it faster, and charge you for every drop that runs out.

The checklist before you pay for traffic

Run through these honestly before a single dollar goes to a platform. Every one of them is cheaper to fix than it is to pay around.

• Is your offer clear enough that a stranger understands it in one line?
• Does the page you would send them to actually say something and give one clear next step?
• Can you capture an enquiry and follow it up reliably, or does it quietly disappear?
• Have you used the free channels first: your Google Business Profile, your existing customer list, and referrals?
• Can you measure what a click turns into, so you will actually know whether it worked?

If any of those is a no, you have found something worth more than an ad budget. A business that fixes its offer, its page and its follow-up first, and only then turns on paid traffic, gets dramatically more out of the same money, because every click now lands somewhere that works.

When ads are the right first move

There are real exceptions, and it is worth being clear about them. If your offer is already proven, people buy when they find you, and you simply need more of them in front of it, then ads are exactly the right lever and waiting is just timidity. If you are time-sensitive, a launch, an event, a season with a hard deadline, paid reach can buy attention faster than anything you can build. And if you genuinely do not know whether there is demand for something new, a small, careful test can answer that question quicker than months of guessing. The common thread is that in each case the thing the ad points at already works, or the spend exists to learn something specific. That is paid traffic doing its job. It is the unthinking boost on a quiet Tuesday that burns money.

This is the order we work in for a reason. The unglamorous fixes come first, the ones that cost time rather than money, and the paid spend comes once there is something worth amplifying. It is the whole idea behind starting with a clear, honest look at your marketing rather than a campaign: find the holes before you pay to pour customers in.

Common questions about spending on ads

Toby Davis

Co-founder of My Marketing Solved. Toby writes about how small businesses can get found and keep customers, without the louder-is-better playbook that keeps owners busy and broke.

More about how we work

General marketing commentary, not advice tailored to your specific business.

Fix, don’t rebuild

When a small business decides its marketing is not working, the website is usually first in the firing line. It looks dated. It does not bring in enquiries. So the conclusion forms quickly and confidently: we need a new website. It is an expensive conclusion, a slow one, and most of the time it is the wrong one. The trouble with the average small business website is not how it looks. It is that it does not actually say anything.

To be fair, a rebuild is sometimes the right call, and we will come to when. But notice why the instinct is so strong. A new website feels like a fresh start. It is tangible, it photographs well, and it lets you believe the problem has been dealt with. It is also, conveniently, one of the largest single projects a marketing provider can sell you. None of that makes it the thing your business actually needs. A great many businesses spend five figures and three months replacing a site that was never the reason the phone was quiet.

Here is what is usually wrong instead. A visitor lands on the homepage and cannot tell, within a few seconds, who you help, what you do, or what makes you the right choice. The headline is a slogan rather than a sentence. The page is a tour of your company instead of an answer to the visitor’s question. There is no obvious next step. The site is not ugly, exactly. It is just silent. And a silent website does not get rescued by a redesign, because the redesign keeps the silence and simply makes it prettier.

A pretty website that says nothing will always lose to a plain one that says exactly the right thing.

What to fix first

Almost all of this is editing, not rebuilding, and most of it is free. Start at the top of the homepage and make it plainly state who you help and what you do, in the words a customer would use, not the words your industry uses. Give the page one obvious next step, a single clear action like call, enquire or book, rather than five competing buttons. Add the proof a wary stranger needs: real reviews, real results, the names of people you have helped. Strip the jargon and the throat-clearing. Then make sure the thing loads quickly and works properly on a phone, because that is where most of your visitors actually are. This is the work that moves enquiries, and it is the work that being the obvious answer when someone looks depends on.

When a rebuild is the right call

Sometimes it genuinely is, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. If you cannot edit your own site because the person who built it has vanished, that is a real problem. If it runs on a platform that is no longer supported, breaks constantly, or has security issues, replacing it is sensible. If it simply does not work on a phone in 2026, that is not a cosmetic gripe, it is costing you customers daily. And if your business has genuinely changed, a new audience, a new offer, a new name, the old site may no longer be fixable into shape. The honest rule is this: rebuild when the foundation is broken, not when the words are weak. Weak words are a far cheaper fix.

This is also why, when we work with a business, our instinct is to make what you have work harder before we ever talk about replacing it, and where new tools are needed, to set you up on ones you own rather than a big build that benefits us more than you. The cheapest win is almost always the one already sitting on your screen, waiting to be told what to say.

Common questions about your website

Toby Davis

Co-founder of My Marketing Solved. Toby writes about how small businesses can get found and keep customers, without the louder-is-better playbook that keeps owners busy and broke.

More about how we work

General marketing commentary, not advice tailored to your specific business.

Built to leave

There is a sentence that turns up in almost every marketing pitch, and it is built to make you relax. We will handle everything. You just run your business and leave the marketing to us. It sounds like a weight lifted, which is exactly why it works. It is also, for a lot of small businesses, the most expensive thing they will ever agree to, not because of the monthly fee, but because of what quietly comes attached to it.

Let us be fair to it first, because the sentence is not all bad. Delegation is not the enemy. No owner should be doing everything themselves, and there is genuine value in handing specialised work to people who are faster and better at it than you are. If you are losing your evenings to ad settings you do not understand, paying someone to take that off your plate can be one of the smartest moves you make. The problem is not getting help. The problem is a specific kind of help, the kind designed so that you can never stop needing it.

The difference is hard to see at the start, because at the start they feel identical. Both take the work off your hands. Both come with a friendly account manager and a tidy report. The gap only shows up later, on the day you wonder what would happen if you left. With one kind of help, you would walk away with everything that was built. With the other, you would walk away with nothing, because nothing was ever really yours.

There is a difference between someone who helps you, and someone you cannot afford to leave.

What the sentence really buys

What you are buying with we will handle everything is peace of mind today. What you often pay for it is leverage tomorrow. The costs are quiet and they compound. There is dependency: the longer it runs, the more your marketing lives in someone else’s hands and the harder it is to take back. There is opacity: work happens that you cannot see and cannot judge, so you have no real way of knowing whether you are getting value or just getting invoices. There is ownership: your ad accounts, your analytics, your customer data, your Google listing, all of it sitting in their name rather than yours. And there is capability: every month you do not understand even the basics is a month you cannot make an informed decision about your own business. None of these feel expensive in any single month. They are ruinous over years.

Help, or held?

Healthy help and quiet capture look the same from the outside, so judge them by what happens at the edges. With healthy help, the assets are in your name, you can see what is being done, and if you left tomorrow you would keep everything that was built. The provider makes themselves useful, not indispensable, and is happy for you to understand your own marketing. Capture is the mirror image. The accounts are theirs. The reporting is vague. Leaving means starting from zero, and somehow the conversation always steers away from how anything actually works. The tell is never the monthly service. It is what they do when you ask about leaving.

This is the whole reason we build the way we do. We would rather set your marketing up properly, show you how it runs, and hand you the keys than keep you on a drip. It is less lucrative for us, which is precisely the point. A provider who profits from your dependency has no reason to end it. One who is built to leave has every reason to make you self-sufficient.

What to ask before you hand it over

You do not need to become a marketer to protect yourself. You need five questions, and the willingness to notice whether they are answered plainly or dodged.

• Do I own the accounts and the data, in my name, with my access?
• If I leave, what exactly do I keep?
• What happens to my marketing if I stop paying you?
• Will you show me how it works, or only that it is working?
• Can I cancel without penalty?

A good provider answers all five without flinching, because none of the answers threaten them. If the answers come wrapped in caveats, or you are made to feel difficult for asking, you have your answer about which kind of help you are being offered.

Common questions about handing over your marketing

Toby Davis

Co-founder of My Marketing Solved. Toby writes about how small businesses can get found and keep customers, without the louder-is-better playbook that keeps owners busy and broke.

More about how we work

General marketing commentary, not advice tailored to your specific business.

The quiet asset

Every business has one. A list of people who bought once, or enquired seriously, and then went quiet. Not unhappy, not gone for good, just lapsed. Most owners barely think about them, because they do not feel like an opportunity. They feel like the past. That instinct is expensive. We have argued before that marketing has two jobs, and most businesses only do one. This is the sharpest example of the job that gets skipped: the dormant customer list is, for most small businesses, the single cheapest source of growth available, and the one almost nobody works.

The reason it is cheap is simple. These people have already crossed the hardest line in business, which is trusting you with their money. Re-earning the attention of someone who has paid you before costs a fraction of what it takes to earn it from a stranger who has never heard your name. You are not building trust from zero. You are reminding someone who already has it.

It is worth being honest about the limits, because pretending there are none leads straight to desperation. Some of that list is genuinely gone. People move, their needs change, a few had an experience that means they will not return. Not every lapsed customer is winnable, and treating the list like a guaranteed pot of gold produces exactly the pushy, discount-soaked messages that make people unsubscribe. But here is the thing: because the cost of reaching them is close to nothing, you do not need most of them to come back. Reviving a small fraction of a list you already own will usually beat the same effort and money spent chasing new strangers.

A stranger has to be convinced you exist. A lapsed customer only has to be reminded.

Where your list actually is

The most common objection is that you do not have a list. You almost certainly do, it is just scattered. It is in your past invoices and sales records, your booking or point-of-sale system, the old enquiries sitting in your inbox, the spreadsheet someone started two years ago, the stack of business cards in a drawer. The first task is not clever marketing. It is the dull, valuable work of pulling all of that into one place so you can actually see who you already know. Most owners have never done this, which is exactly why the asset stays invisible.

A word on doing it properly: contacting people you already have a genuine business relationship with is normal and expected, but keep it clean. Do not buy lists or scrape contacts you were never given. Make it easy to opt out, and honour it the moment someone does. The goal is to be welcome in the inbox, not merely legal in it.

What to actually say

This is where most win-back attempts fall over. The default move is the apologetic discount: we miss you, here is ten per cent off. It feels active, but it does two unhelpful things. It leads with a price cut to people who were happy to pay full price, and it quietly trains your customers to wait for the next discount before they buy. There is a better opening. The first message to a dormant customer should help them, not sell to them. A genuinely useful update, a new thing that solves a problem you know they have, a straight answer to a question people in their position always ask. Earn the second open before you ask for anything.

How often, and for how long

One message is not a strategy. The owner who emailed their list once, saw little, and concluded it does not work has simply mistaken a single attempt for an effort. Reactivation is a rhythm, not an event. A small, regular cadence of useful contact, something like monthly, does the work that a one-off blast never can, because it takes more than one touch to move from forgotten to front of mind. Equally, it is not a daily barrage. The people who unsubscribe in droves are usually on the receiving end of frequency without value. Keep it regular, keep it useful, and let the ones who want to leave go gracefully. A smaller list of people who want to hear from you is worth more than a big one that resents you.

The same list, more value

Your dormant list does more than buy again. The happy ones are also your best source of reviews and referrals, which feed the other job of marketing entirely: being found by new people. The business that shows up as the obvious, well-reviewed choice did not buy that reputation, it asked for it, from exactly these people. So when you reach back out, make it effortless for a satisfied past customer to leave a review or pass your name to someone who needs you. One clear, low-pressure ask and a link that takes two taps. The same list you are reviving to win repeat work is quietly improving how easily strangers find you too.

None of this needs a system to begin. Pull your past customers into one place, write one genuinely useful message, send it, and add an easy path to review or refer. That single afternoon of work is usually the highest-return marketing a small business can do, and it is the first place we look when we sit down with a business, long before anyone reaches for an ad budget.

Common questions about winning back customers

Toby Davis

Co-founder of My Marketing Solved. Toby writes about how small businesses can get found and keep customers, without the louder-is-better playbook that keeps owners busy and broke.

More about how we work

General marketing commentary, not advice tailored to your specific business.

First principles

There is no shortage of marketing advice for small business, and almost all of it is about tactics. Should you be on TikTok. Is email dead. Do you need a podcast, a newsletter, a new website. The fashionable answer changes every year, which is the first clue that it is the wrong place to start. Strip the noise away and marketing only has two jobs: get found by people who do not know you yet, and keep the people who already do. Most struggling marketing budgets are pouring money into the first while quietly ignoring the second.

The first job is acquisition. It is everything aimed at someone who has never heard of you: showing up when they search, being mentioned by a friend, running an ad, ranking for the thing you do. The second job is retention and reactivation. It is everything aimed at someone who already knows you: the customer who bought once and drifted, the list of past enquiries sitting in your inbox, the people who would happily come back if you gave them a reason. One job fills the bucket. The other stops it leaking.

To be fair to the first job, it matters enormously, and it is worth saying so before arguing the other side. A business with no flow of new customers does not have a marketing problem, it has a countdown. You cannot keep customers you never won in the first place, and there are seasons, especially early on, when finding new people is the only thing that counts. Anyone who tells you acquisition does not matter is selling something.

The problem is not that businesses do the first job. It is that they do almost nothing else. The entire budget, the ad spend, the agency retainer, the owner’s nervous energy, all of it points outward at strangers, while the people who trusted you enough to pay once are left to quietly forget you exist. It is widely accepted in marketing that winning a brand-new customer costs several times more than keeping or reviving an existing one. Yet the existing ones are exactly who most businesses spend the least on.

New customers are how you grow. Existing customers are how you profit.

The first job: getting found

Getting found is the job everyone understands, because it is the one that feels like marketing. It is ads and search and being seen. It deserves real attention, and the way it works has shifted: being found now has less to do with being everywhere and more to do with being the obvious answer when someone goes looking. We wrote about that change in how customers find you is changing. The trap is not doing this work. The trap is believing it is the whole game, and grading your marketing only by how many new faces it drags through the door this week.

The second job: keeping and winning back

The second job is quieter and far cheaper, which is precisely why it gets skipped. Somewhere in your business is a list: past customers, old enquiries, people who bought once and were never heard from again. For most small businesses that list is the single most valuable and most neglected asset they own. These are people who have already decided you are worth paying. Reaching them again does not require an ad budget or a clever campaign. It requires a reason to come back and a simple, regular way of staying in front of them: a useful email, a timely reminder, an easy path to leave a review or refer a friend. It is unglamorous work, and it compounds. It is also the first thing we look at when we sit down with a business, before anyone mentions a single ad.

Why the second job gets ignored

If the second job is cheaper and more profitable, why does almost everyone skip it? Part of the answer is honest psychology: a new customer feels like growth, and a returning one feels like luck, even though the returning one is usually worth more. But part of the answer is less comfortable, and it is worth naming. Acquisition is where the marketing industry makes its money. New-customer work is visible, billable and easy to dress up in a dashboard: more ads, more reach, more leads. Retention makes the people selling marketing look less necessary, because a business whose existing customers keep coming back simply needs to buy less attention. An agency paid to manage your ad spend has little reason to help you depend on it less.

There are fair objections. The first is that you do not have much of a list, so this cannot apply to you. In our experience that is almost never true; even a modest list of past customers, contacted well, will out-earn the same money spent chasing strangers. The second is that emailing past customers feels like pestering them. It does, if the message is about you. It does not, if the message is useful to them and arrives when it is welcome. The line between valued and annoying is not frequency, it is usefulness. The third objection is that this is slow. It is. So is acquisition. The difference is that the second job builds something you own rather than something you rent.

What to do this month

You do not need a system to start, you need a list and a reason. Pull together everyone who has bought from you or seriously enquired. Send them one genuinely useful message, not a sales blast, something that helps them whether or not they buy again. Then make it effortless for happy customers to leave a review or send someone your way. That is it. Do that consistently and you will have started doing the half of marketing that most of your competitors never get to.

Common questions about the two jobs

Toby Davis

Co-founder of My Marketing Solved. Toby writes about how small businesses can get found and keep customers, without the louder-is-better playbook that keeps owners busy and broke.

More about how we work

General marketing commentary, not advice tailored to your specific business.

The discovery shift

Ask most marketing agencies how to get more customers and the answer is usually some version of more. More ads, more posts, more reels, a bigger presence across more channels. It is familiar advice because it used to be roughly right. When someone looking for what you sell opened Google and scanned a list of ten links, being visible on that list was most of the job. That world is quietly ending, and the businesses still optimising for it are aiming at a target that has moved.

How customers find you now is a two-step process: they ask someone they trust, or type a question into a search box, and then they verify. Increasingly that search returns a single summarised answer rather than a list, and the business named in that answer is the one that gets the call.

This matters because the decision is often made before anyone contacts you. By the time a prospective customer reaches your website, they have usually already chosen you or ruled you out. If the summarised answer to who does what you do, near you, does not include your name, you are not in a slow lane. You are not in the race at all.

The instinct to be more visible is not wrong, and it is worth saying so plainly. Visibility still matters. A business that is invisible online, with a thin or missing Google listing and a website that loads slowly and says nothing specific, will lose to one that shows up clearly. The agencies pushing presence are right that absence is fatal, and right that the channels have multiplied faster than any owner actually running a business can personally keep up with.

Where the advice holds up best is at the very start. A brand-new business with no footprint does need to build one, and the early gains from simply being present and accurate are real. If you have never claimed your Google listing, or your site has not been touched since 2019, then more is genuinely the right first move.

Where it breaks down is the assumption that getting found is still a volume game. The unit of discovery has changed. It is no longer a ranked list of ten links competing for a click. It is, more and more, a single answer assembled by a machine: a Google AI overview, an assistant summarising the options, a model deciding which one or two businesses are worth naming.

You are no longer trying to appear on a list. You are trying to be the answer.

How do customers actually find you now?

Trace a real path. Someone’s dishwasher floods the kitchen on a Sunday. They ask a neighbour, who mentions a plumber they rate. They do not call straight away. They search the name, glance at the rating, then ask a broader question to be sure, something like an emergency plumber in their suburb. A few years ago that returned ten links. Today it increasingly returns a composed answer that names a couple of options and explains why. The customer chooses from that shortlist. Word of mouth started it, but search and AI finished it.

The shift is not cosmetic, and what earns a place in that answer is not spend. Search systems and AI models assemble their summaries from sources they can read clearly and have reason to trust: a business listing that is complete and consistent, a website that plainly states who you help and what you do, real content that answers the questions customers actually ask, and the same details repeated reliably across the web. They are looking for legible, corroborated trust. They are not counting your ad impressions.

This is why louder marketing does not move the new target. A paid ad can buy a click, but it does not make you the business an assistant recommends when no ad is shown. A burst of reels can lift a follower count without ever being read by the system composing the answer your customer sees. You can be busy across every channel and still be absent from the one place where the decision now gets made.

Why being the obvious answer beats being everywhere

The good news for a small local business is that you are not competing with the whole internet. You are competing to be the clear answer to one narrow, valuable question: who is the business for this area and this problem. That is a winnable contest. It rewards depth over breadth, the business with genuinely useful answers published under its name and a consistent, credible footprint, not the one with the widest scatter of thin activity.

It also rewards patience, because trust of this kind compounds. A single strong month does not change how a system rates you. A year of accurate, useful, consistently published material does. Each helpful page, each corroborating mention, each accurate listing adds to a picture that is hard to fake and harder for a competitor to overtake quickly. The work is slow to start and then difficult to dislodge, which is the shape of an asset worth owning. It is the thinking behind how we work, and the reason we start every business with a clear, honest look at where it actually stands rather than a bigger ad budget.

The obvious objection is that this is overstated, that customers still just ring the business their mate named. Often they do, and word of mouth remains the strongest source of new customers for most small businesses. But notice what happens between the recommendation and the call. The verification step, the quick search to confirm you are real, reputable and nearby, now runs through exactly the surfaces described here. Word of mouth gets you onto the shortlist. The search decides whether you survive it.

The second objection is fairer: this is a long game, and a business with a quiet week needs customers now. True. Paid ads can fill a short-term hole, and there are weeks when that is the right call. The point is not that paid never works. It is that paid rents attention while the work described here builds an asset you own. A business that relies only on rented attention is exposed the moment it stops paying. The aim is to need the rental less over time.

What to do differently this month

Start by seeing what a customer sees. Open a private browser window, ask both a search engine and an AI assistant the question a real customer would ask, the kind of business you run plus your suburb, and look honestly at whether you appear and what is said about you. That five-minute exercise tells you more than most agency reports.

Then fix the legible basics before anything clever. Make your Google Business Profile complete and accurate. Make your website state, in plain language, who you help and what you do. Publish straight answers to the questions customers actually ask, under your own name, consistently, over months rather than weeks. Keep your business name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear. None of this is glamorous, and all of it compounds.

And stop grading your marketing by reach. Impressions, followers and ad clicks measure how loud you are. The thing that now decides whether a customer finds you is whether the systems making the recommendation can read you clearly and have reason to trust you. Become the obvious, credible answer for your area, and being found stops being something you chase every week and starts being something you own.

Common questions about how customers find you

Toby Davis

Co-founder of My Marketing Solved. Toby writes about how small businesses can get found and keep customers, without the louder-is-better playbook that keeps owners busy and broke.

More about how we work

General marketing commentary, not advice tailored to your specific business.