Nobody Was Building On Both Sides Of The Fence
Twenty-some years marketing small businesses, and the boring fundamentals still beat every shiny object on the table.
I learned marketing resizing balloons.
Party supply company. Hand-coded HTML. A few hundred product images cropped and resized one at a time, at night, for weeks. Balloons, streamers, folding tables, those cheap plastic tablecloths nobody ever buys twice.
It was tedious work and I would not trade it, because somewhere in the middle of it I noticed something that has held up for two decades.
Almost every company building websites had picked a side of the fence.
On one side, the code people. The site loaded fast, the forms fired, the markup was clean. It also had the personality of a parking garage.
On the other side, the design people. Beautiful work. Genuinely beautiful. And it did nothing. No direction, no argument, no reason for a human being to pick up a phone.
Both groups were charging real money to small business owners for half of a website.
Nobody was building on both sides of the fence.
A site should look good. It should work right. But if it doesn’t grow the business, who cares.
That is still the entire job.
The Boat I Didn’t Get On
I come from a commercial fishing family. That was the road in front of me. Boats, weather, four in the morning, a living made with your hands and your back.
I ended up in a technical world instead, and eventually I ended up sitting across the table from contractors.
One of the first was a general contractor building homes. Working on his marketing cracked something open in my head that never closed. Localized search.
Not visibility. Visibility is easy and mostly worthless. I mean making a business findable to the people standing inside the few square miles where that business actually works.
The right company. The right customer. The right patch of ground.
That is the whole game for a local business, and most people marketing to contractors still treat it like an afterthought.
A Thousand Visitors Is Not a Thousand Anything
Here is a conversation I have had more times than I can count.
Contractor pulls up his analytics. “I had a thousand visitors last month. Why didn’t I get a thousand leads?”
I get why that stings. A thousand people is a packed high school gym. It feels like something happened.
But raw traffic tells you almost nothing.
Where did they come from? What page did they land on? Were they even in your service area? Did anybody call? Did anybody fill out the form? Did one single job land on the calendar because of it?
Different questions entirely.
Traffic is the easiest vanity metric in marketing, and a lot of people are counting on you not knowing that.
I would take 300 people who live where you work, searching for the thing you sell, over 3,000 who were never going to hire you under any circumstance. It isn’t close.
And here is the version of this that actually gets under my skin.
The report shows up on the first of the month. Traffic up eighteen percent. Little green arrow. Everybody on the call feels productive.
Meanwhile the owner is sitting there knowing his crews had open days in April, and he cannot make those two facts agree. So he does what good people do. He blames himself. Maybe he’s not closing hard enough. Maybe his pricing is off. Maybe he’s the problem.
He is not the problem. The number is.
The goal was never traffic. The goal is meaningful activity.
Complexity Is a Shield
This is where I think our industry mostly fails on purpose.
We are supposed to be teaching our clients. Almost nobody does.
I have never had any use for the man behind the curtain routine. There are agencies that work very hard to make this sound harder than it is. Jargon. Forty tabs of spreadsheet. Dashboards nobody opens a second time. Acronyms invented last Tuesday.
If the client can’t follow what you’re doing, the client can’t question what you’re doing. That is not a bug in the reporting. That is the reporting.
The opposite is just better business.
Explain it. Show them what matters and why. Walk them through the decision AND the reasoning behind it.
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If an owner is staring at the wrong number, don’t tell him the number looks great. Reframe it. Show him which pages produce phone calls. Show him which services generate real opportunity. Show him what is moving the company and what is just moving.
A client who understands the work is a client who can defend it, fund it, and stick with it through a slow quarter. Everybody wins, including the agency.
Honesty Has a Price Tag and I’ve Paid It
There is a cost to working this way, and I want to be straight about it.
I have had prospects sit down with me, ask what I would do with their marketing, take detailed notes, thank me, and walk the entire strategy straight back to their current agency to have them implement it.
Did that cost me the account? Every time. Being open has bit me in the ass more than once.
I would still do it the same way tomorrow.
If somebody is happy with their current partner and something I said made that relationship work better, fine. I got into this to see businesses succeed. That was true before it was a business model.
You don’t have to fight for every client. Losing one leaves room for the next one, and the next one usually wants the kind of relationship worth having anyway.
You Hired Us. Don’t Disappear.
The biggest misconception about hiring an agency is that the owner now gets to vanish.
I understand the impulse. Most contractors carry the entire company on their back. Payroll, crews, customers, scheduling, material costs, the excavator that died on the worst possible morning, the job that went sideways Tuesday afternoon.
When they finally pay somebody to handle marketing, they want one thing off the pile. Totally fair.
But the ones that work are partnerships, not handoffs.
We bring strategy, technical work, creative, execution. The owner brings something we cannot manufacture: he knows the business.
He knows which services are actually profitable and which ones just keep the trucks busy. He knows the question every homeowner asks before they sign. He knows what the competition does badly. He knows why his crews are better and he can prove it.
That is the raw material. Lumber on the trailer is not a fence yet, and nobody on my team can drive out and cut it for him.
Some of our relationships have run eight and ten years. What those accounts have in common is not budget. It’s that they talk to us. They answer the email. They tell us what’s happening in the field. That is why the work is good.
Nobody Got Into Contracting to Discuss Content Strategy
At Clever Fox we talk about integrity, perseverance, communication, and creativity.
Communication is the hardest of those four and it is not close.
Especially in the trades. Nobody started a fence company because they wanted to argue about publishing cadence. They started it because they could build something, fix something, install something, or solve a problem other people couldn’t.
Marketing feels like a foreign language to a lot of them. Pretending otherwise helps no one.
So the agency walks further. Ask better questions. Translate. Make it easy to answer.
And the owner has to pick up the phone.
That is the whole deal. Both sides walk.
You Cannot Install Passion
I can tell inside of five minutes whether I’m talking to a contractor who loves this work.
The energy shifts. He stops talking about “jobs” and starts talking about a specific gate on a hill where the grade fought him the entire day. He remembers the homeowner’s name. He remembers what she said when she saw it finished.
That matters, and not for sentimental reasons.
Running a small business is brutal. Long days, slow seasons, difficult customers, employee problems, cash flow that goes thin in February. You do not survive that stack for twenty years on strategy.
Marketing can grow a business. SEO makes it findable. Ads create opportunity. Automation buys back hours. AI is going to keep accelerating all of it, and fast.
None of it manufactures passion. That has to already be in the building.
The Boring Stuff Still Wins
The longer I do this, the less impressed I am by trendy tactics.
Tell the truth. Set expectations you can actually hit. Measure what matters and ignore what just feels good. Communicate. Educate. Stay in the conversation. Care about the customer standing in the driveway.
Marketing works best when it supports a good business. It does not replace one. If I have learned anything worth handing to somebody else, that is it.
The technology will keep changing. Platforms will change. Search is changing right now. There will always be a new acronym everybody swears is the whole ballgame.
The companies still standing in ten years will be built on what they were always built on.
Good work. Straight talk. Honesty. Persistence.
And people who still give a damn.
