Stop Doing Random Acts of Marketing

You have probably done this already

You hired someone for SEO. Maybe someone else for ads. There was a website rebuild at some point, and a stretch of posting on social media that quietly stopped.

Each piece was reasonable on its own. None of them were connected to each other, and none of them were connected to a plan. So a year goes by, the results are hard to see, and you switch providers and start again — which is how most owners end up three marketers deep with nothing compounding.

Here is the part nobody says out loud: most marketing companies prescribe whatever they happen to sell. An SEO company will find that you need SEO. An ads agency will find that you need ads. It is not usually dishonest. It is that when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

You cannot fix a problem you have not diagnosed. So that is where I start — and I charge for it, because it is the most valuable part of the work.

What Strategy First actually is

A 30 to 45 day engagement, with three or four working sessions, that ends with a written plan for the next 90 days. It is not a report you receive and file. It is a process we run together, and by the end of it I know your business well enough to be useful to you for years.

What this looked like for a roofing company

In January 2025 Tim Mallory, who owns Advantage Roofing in Cincinnati, downloaded a website wireframe from my site, filled it in for his own homepage, and emailed me asking what came next.

On the call I asked whether he had invested in SEO. He had spent thousands, over years, with several different providers, and was fairly sure none of it had worked. His plan was to stop and try something else.

Instead we ran a diagnosis. What it found was not what either of us expected: his SEO was working. Advantage Roofing was pulling more traffic than any other roofer in the Cincinnati area. But the homepage was bouncing 98% of the people it brought in — because the first thing on the homepage was a form offering a shingle upgrade, aimed at someone who had already decided, shown to people who had not yet worked out whether this company could help them.

Then we mapped the customer journey and found the shape of the business: excellent at repeat and refer — the way they treat existing customers is genuinely unusual — and almost nothing at know and like. Plenty of people arrived. Almost nobody arrived already knowing who they were.

Estimate requests doubled in the first month after the new homepage went up. So everything built afterwards was aimed at those two stages. A homepage rewritten around the homeowner instead of the company. A presence on Facebook and LinkedIn. Neighbourhood campaigns around booked inspections. Email and text nurture. Ads written to real homeowner fears rather than to shingle brands.

“If you’re a business owner like I was — struggling and throwing money at marketers with no results — take a look at Tim Yates. He really cares about your business. He flipped my marketing on its head, and it works.” — Tim Mallory, CEO, Advantage Roofing

Read the full case study, including Tim telling it himself on video.

What happens after the plan

Three things, and all of them are fine by me.

You run it yourself. You have the playbook and the order of operations. Plenty of owners take it from there, and that is a good outcome — you paid for a plan and you got one.

You hire someone for a piece of it. Your own team, another agency, or me. One defined job with a beginning and an end.

Or we keep working together. Some clients do, months down the road, once the plan is underway and we both know how the other one works. That is a conversation for later, not something you have to think about now. If you want to read ahead, it’s here.

What it costs

Who this works for — and who it doesn’t

It works well for owner-led businesses somewhere between $1M and $10M, usually with a team of five to fifteen, where the owner is still the person who decides. Service businesses and the trades especially — roofing, home services, contractors, professional services — because the customer journey there is long, local and heavily referral-driven, which is exactly where the gaps hide.

It works whether or not you enjoy marketing. One of my clients thinks like a marketer and we develop strategy together. Another wants to do his own job and let me handle the rest. Both are good.

It does not work when every decision needs sign-off.

Early in my StoryBrand years I worked with a cleaning company whose owner said he trusted me and plainly did not. Every recommendation was second-guessed. Every call felt like I was a step away from being accused of something. The day I had enough work to end that relationship was one of the best days I have had in business.

I do not need to be left alone — I never want to surprise a client, so you will always hear what I am planning before I do it. But if you need to approve every post and every page before it goes out, the thing you are paying me for cannot happen, and we will both be frustrated.

It also does not work when the answers are already decided. I have worked with people who held very strong opinions about what does and does not work in marketing, formed some years ago, and were not open to revisiting them. There is no version of a diagnosis that helps if the diagnosis is not allowed to say anything new.

Common questions