I’ll go first.
I ask clients to be honest about numbers that embarrass them, so it’s only fair I start. I spent part of my thirties living at my parents’ house. I say that out loud because I’ve watched a lot of business owners sit on a number they’re ashamed of until it’s too expensive to fix, and you can’t ask someone to put the truth on the table if you won’t.
Background
SEO first. Paid second. Both on purpose.
I came up through SEO, which is a slow, patient discipline that teaches you to care about whether a page actually answers the question. Paid is where I spend most of my time now, and it taught me the opposite lesson: how fast you can find out you were wrong.
Holding both is the whole point. Most people in this industry pick one and then quietly argue the other one doesn’t matter. It’s the same buyer either way.
What I hold to
Four things I won’t move on.
The message is the lever
Targeting and algorithms get the blame because they’re easy to point at. The offer and the copy are what actually move the number, and that copy has to come from real conversations. AI is scraping AI slop at this point. You cannot research your way to a pain point that nobody said out loud.
Paid and organic are one system
Splitting them across siloed teams splits the thinking too. Together they compound; apart they compete for the same budget and blame each other at the end of the quarter.
I sell data, not outcomes
Finding your true cost per lead and cost per sale is the work. Promising that ads alone will make you money isn’t my call to make. That’s the offer’s job, and sometimes the honest answer is that the offer isn’t ready yet.
Vague pain isn’t pain
“Reduces overwhelm.” “Boosts confidence.” Markets reject that language, and they’re right to. Real pain points at a specific moment and a specific fear. If we can’t name it, we haven’t found it yet.
Yield to God, serve the people.
that’s the whole approach
Tell me what’s broken.
Send me the account, the spend and the thing that isn’t working. You’ll get an honest read on whether paid, organic, or the offer itself is the problem, even when the honest read is that you don’t need me.