Why brilliant business owners keep changing direction before their marketing has had chance to work.
There’s a phrase I use regularly with clients:
Get the foundations right and stick with them until you bore yourself silly.
It usually gets a laugh and then comes the awkward moment when people realise I’m serious.
One of the biggest reasons marketing fails isn’t because the strategy was wrong, the website wasn’t good enough or the latest social media algorithm changed. It’s because many businesses never give their marketing long enough to work. Every time, they start with good intentions, throw themselves into a new idea and then abandon it a few weeks later because they didn’t get immediate results. They then move on to the next shiny thing. And the next. And the next. They never build momentum. It’s stop, start, stop, start all the way through. Some do this for years. Bonkers, aye?
The curse of having too many ideas
This is something I see a lot, particularly with small business owners, creative founders, technically minded experts and people with ADHD. They aren’t short of ideas, they’re overflowing with them, so the challenge is in helping them workout which idea deserves their attention right now.
One week they’re launching a new offer. A few weeks later they’re changing their target audience. Then they’re rewriting their website because a competitor has updated theirs. Next, they’re trying a new social media platform because someone told them to. Then they’re changing their branding and message. It goes on…
They wonder why nothing ever seems to gain traction and work.
Creativity is one of their greatest strengths, yet very often becomes one of their biggest challenges, especially when every new idea feels exciting and the current plan starts to feel boring. They drop off before they’ve even had chance to learn whether the original idea would have worked in the first place. They have no patience.
Are you a person with little or no patience and a very creative mind?
The problem isn’t a lack of ideas
Most business owners need a way of organising the ideas they already have. Over the years, I’ve worked with countless business owners who are brilliant at what they do, knowledgeable, passionate, experienced and full of potential, yet their marketing is all over the place. Their offers and messaging keep changing every few weeks. Their priorities shift depending on who they’ve spoken to, what they’ve read online or what a competitor has just posted.
They’re permanently reacting rather than leading. And when you’re always reacting, it’s very difficult to build momentum.
Sometimes the biggest breakthrough isn’t coming up with a new idea, it’s deciding which ideas can wait.
Your customers aren’t thinking about your business as much as you are
Business owners often make decisions based on how they feel. Customers make decisions based on what they understand – there’s a very important difference. By the time you’ve repeated the same message for a few weeks, you can start to bore yourself silly and feel like a stuck record. You then convince yourself that everyone’s heard it. They haven’t. And even if they have, they probably need to hear it another six, seven, eight or nine times before it sticks.
You are the only person that hears your message more than anyone else. You live and breathe it every single day, no one else does. Your website, socials, emails and meetings are all saying the same thing, and they’re supposed to. That consistent focus and repetition is what helps get you firmly into people’s minds. No one will ever hear it as much as you, so it’s perfectly normal to get fed up of listening to yourself, that’s when you can start to stick with the same yet play around with it to keep yourself going energetically.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say:
“I’m sick of talking about that now.”
Meanwhile their audience is still trying to work out what problem they solve.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is creative founders mistaking boredom for failure. Just because you’re bored of hearing your message doesn’t mean your customers are.
Confused businesses create confused customers
One of the biggest red flags I see isn’t inactivity, it’s confusion. Sometimes I come across businesses with fantastic ideas, enormous amounts of expertise and huge potential. Yet nobody can quite work out what they do, who they help or how their services fit together.
The messaging changes constantly, their offers keep evolving and their website is trying to say twenty different things at once to cover every eventuality. There’s no focus or consistency, just a chaos that everyone on the outside can see yet you can’t. They just quietly move on when they see marketing that feels disorganised, they question what working with you and your business would be like…
Will communication be clear?
Will appointments be kept?
Will expectations be managed?
Will they get what they’ve been promised?
Trust isn’t built solely through expertise, it’s built through clarity and consistency too. People don’t buy because your logo looks great, they buy because they understand what you do, who you help and why they should trust you. They know what benefits and outcomes you bring to them.
When things aren’t clear, confusion creeps in and they steer clear. Confused people rarely buy.
Why I work well with creative, technical and ADHD business owners
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that many of the people who struggle most with focus are often the people with the greatest potential. Creative minds see opportunities everywhere. Technically minded people see endless possibilities and improvements. Business owners with ADHD can generate ideas faster than most people can write them down – these are not weaknesses, they’re strengths. The challenge is turning those strengths into progress and that starts with helping people simplify what they already have. Not removing creativity or suppressing ideas, together we create enough structure for those ideas to become useful.
The goal is clarity. Once people become clear on their audience, offer, priorities and goals, everything else becomes easier – better decisions, communication, marketing, use of time and results, the one we all want.
Why I encourage three-month focus periods
I rarely tell clients to commit to something forever, it’s unrealistic, markets change, businesses evolve and customers change.
What I do encourage is a period of focus, usually 3 months is long enough. months of talking to the same audience, communicating the same core message and delivering a consistent experience.
A clear small business marketing strategy isn’t about doing more. It’s about focusing on the right things for long enough to learn what works.
3 months of tracking activity and results. Three months of meaningful learning. That’s long enough to build visibility, gather feedback and understand what’s working without constantly changing direction. Enabling a simple multiplying effect over a 3 month period will get you meaningful feedback, an understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. It’s long enough to make decisions based on evidence rather than emotion.
At the end of that 3 months, we review what happened – what’s working, what’s not, what we’ve learned and what needs improving. This then gives us what we need to move into the next quarter with more confidence and better information. That’s very different from changing direction every few weeks because something new caught our attention.
Focus creates momentum
The businesses that consistently achieve their weekly, monthly and quarterly targets aren’t always the most creative, loudest, or chasing the newest marketing trend. More often, they’re the businesses with strong foundations, a clear plan and the discipline to stick with it long enough to learn what works. They understand that consistency doesn’t mean standing still, it means building momentum through every conversation, piece of content and customer interaction to support the wider goals of the business to end the constant search for the next idea.
Give good ideas enough time to work.
The 90-day focus test
Before you redesign your website, rewrite your services or launch another new offer, spend ten minutes answering these questions:
What is the number one business goal for the next 90 days?
Who are you trying to reach?
What is the core message you want them to remember?
Which one or two marketing channels deserve your attention?
What are you going to stop doing for the next 90 days?
If you can answer those questions clearly, you’ve got enough to make meaningful progress. If you can’t, that’s usually where I’d start.
The reality check
Think about the last three months. Have you been consistently communicating the same message to the same audience through the same channels? Or have you spent most of that time tweaking, changing, restarting and reacting to what everyone else is doing?
Creativity creates possibilities.
Focus creates progress.
Get the foundations right.
Create a simple action plan.
Stick with it until you bore yourself silly.
Review the results.
Improve what needs improving.
Then go again.
If you’re struggling to cut through the noise, prioritise your ideas and build a plan you can actually stick to, a Clarity Call could be the first step. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is all it takes to turn confusion into direction and momentum.
