Coaching Marketing Perspectives

There’s a question that turns up in nearly every first conversation I have with a business owner, and it always arrives in the same plain clothes: how much? How much for a website, how much for SEO, how much for the whole humming machine.

The Doctor of Marketing

Why diagnosis has to come before the cure — a conversation on the Get Coached podcast

And my answer, depending on the day and the dose of caffeine, is another question dressed as a riddle — how much is a piece of string? How much is a car? It depends entirely on how far you mean to drive it. I once knew a man who bought a used motorcycle for fifty dollars, and it lasted just long enough for the seller to get out of town — about two days. Cheap is rarely cheap. It only postpones the bill.

When Chris Ippolito had me on his Get Coached podcast — a show where he documents his own road from employee to entrepreneur and brings the coaches helping him along for the ride — that riddle is more or less where we began. The hour that followed circled a single idea I’ve spent more than twenty years learning the hard way: strategy and outcomes come before tools, every single time, and the moment you forget it is the moment the work stops working.

Diagnose Before You Prescribe

Think of me as the doctor of marketing. A doctor cannot cure what he has not diagnosed, and he cannot diagnose without asking the unglamorous questions first — where does it hurt, how long has it ached, what have you already tried, who else is involved, what happens if we do nothing. Marketing is no different. Before I will say a word about how to get you anywhere, I need to know where you are and where you’re trying to go. You’re standing at point A. You want more customers, more clients, more patients, more orders — point B. The whole of my job is the territory between those two letters: what are you genuinely willing and able to do to cross it?

Most of the time the honest answer and the wished-for answer don’t match, and that gap is the real work. So I don’t start with the website or the ad budget. I start with your goals and why they carry weight for you, and only then do I whittle the vague wish — “I want more coaching clients” — down to something a marketer can actually act on. What kind of clients? What’s your niche, your local competition, your unique selling proposition among the ten million other coaches out there? You can’t solve a problem until you know what caused it. That back-and-forth, that patient Socratic questioning, is not a preamble to the help. It is the help.

Why I Stopped Saying “Digital Marketing”

Here is something I learned by repetition, the way you learn anything that stings. Tell a room full of business owners that you do digital marketing and watch their minds reach instantly for tools — Wix, Weebly, a free template, “oh, I read somewhere you don’t even need SEO.” They’ve armored themselves against a sales pitch before you’ve said a useful word. So now I introduce myself differently. I’m a business growth expert, and I help people grow their business — and if that’s of interest, let’s talk. The tools I might eventually use are as irrelevant to that first conversation as the brand of mesh a surgeon plans to use is to the terrified patient on the table.

I know that patient intimately, because I’ve been him. Waiting on a hernia operation, I sat across from a fine surgeon — number one in Google, which is precisely how I’d found him — and the moment he began explaining the tendons and the mesh and the mechanics of the thing, I went lightheaded, my eyes rolling up into my head like poached eggs. I had to excuse myself, splash water on my face, and walk it off. I didn’t want the how. I wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me what to do. Clients are no different. Bury them in the how-to and you don’t educate them, you overwhelm them — and an overwhelmed person doesn’t buy, they flee.

The Lesson an Artist Taught Me

Years ago, freelancing between agency stints, I took on a painter who wanted to sell her work online. The paintings were genuinely beautiful, she gave me a realistic budget, and we had a couple of good conversations mapping the scope. Then, mid-project, the temper arrived from nowhere — why was I working on a schedule, why all these questions. When I gently said I keep agendas and timelines because I have other clients and other responsibilities, she came apart, and admitted she’d been off the medication she was supposed to be taking. I wished her well and told her, sincerely, that I didn’t think we were a good fit. For my honesty I received several hundred emails, each one a small bouquet of expletives, which I forwarded to the proper authorities.

That was God’s own way of teaching me a rule I’ve never broken since: screen the people you talk to, and build rapport, before you agree to carry their burden. Nearly every nightmare in my career traced back to the same root — saying yes to someone I hadn’t taken the time to know. It’s not their fault; it’s mine, for skipping the diagnosis. The questions a client sometimes finds silly are the very ones that protect us both.

What One Client Is Worth

The reason “how much is a website” is the wrong opening question is that it has no answer until we know what a single new client is worth to you. To a salon it might be modest. To a divorce attorney working with high-end clientele it could be a hundred thousand dollars. To a patent attorney, thirty grand and up. Once an owner truly sees that one new client a month would dwarf whatever they’d spend to attract them, the conversation changes shape entirely. The fixation on lowest possible price gives way to the only question that ever mattered: what’s the return, and is it worth the investment?

Build the Castle, Then the Foundation

None of this is about working harder. Plenty of marketing gurus will tell you the secret is to work hard, trust your gut, and work hard again, and for most people in most situations that’s simply not true. It’s about setting methodical, deliberate goals — the difference between a technical wrestler and a big strong man with no training. The technician takes the bigger opponent apart like a surgeon, because he knows exactly which part to reach for. Brute effort loses to a plan every time.

Henry David Thoreau wrote a line I return to constantly: build your castles in the air, for that is where they should be — now put the foundations under them. Dream the ambitious dream, by all means, but understand that nothing worth anything is immediate. Passive income, affiliate riches, overnight success — those arrive only after the brand, the business, and the foundation are already built. The judges on Shark Tank didn’t get there over a weekend; it took them decades. The castle is allowed to float. The foundation is not optional.

If You Take One Thing From This

Clarify your expectations before anything else. Define, as clearly as a human being can, what success actually means to you — picture the ideal client, name what they’d pay you to break even and then to profit, and decide what you’re honestly willing to trade to get there. Then, when you’re ready, work with an experienced professional who isn’t afraid to show you references, testimonials, and case studies. It doesn’t have to be me. But it should be someone who knows what they’re doing and can prove it — and who, like any good doctor, will insist on the diagnosis before reaching for the cure.

You can hear the whole conversation with Chris here: