In 2010 I was doing print sales in a white shirt for a small digital printing company my dad had bought out of somebody else’s garage and moved into his own. It came with old established agency style clients with extremely high service expectations, the kind who want it printed and on an urgent courier across town the same day. There were a lot of printers around Auckland with fancier machines than ours, so really we could only compete on service or location. The average job was something like $130 with average payment terms, most customers on account, and some of the big customers had like awful terms, and everything was always in a rush. Trying to get new customers for the printing business was really quite hard.
The offer in that shop was the same sheet through the same sort of machine as the shop down the road, and the traffic was whoever happened to be nearby or was already on account with us. Neither of those moves when you push on it. I pushed anyway, because effort was the only thing in the building that felt like mine, and a lever with no travel is hard: you can lean your whole weight on it and it stays where it is.
What is the difference between a hobby and a business? Money. When you exchange something for money, you have a business. If you swap a product for cash you’ve got a business. If you swap 3 hours of work for a PayPal deposit you’ve got a business. I wrote that on the front page of a website years later, because every part bolted on afterwards is somebody adding a step to the swap and charging for the step.
At AUT I learned frameworks, and the biggest lesson of the lot was that there are frameworks to understand things. Traditional marketing was taught using the 4 P’s. Product, price, place, promotion. For an owner with a machine to feed, two is more honest. Fold product and price into each other and you get an offer. Fold place and promotion into each other and you get traffic. When the money isn’t coming in, one of the two has stopped, and the first job is working out which.
Long before the degree I had been handed the two levers with the words scraped off. A lot of the people who ran the church I grew up in owned businesses, and a couple of the older ones were very transparent with me. They would tell me what their margins were at their business. They told me how much they paid for coffee, how many coffees an hour they could make. They bought a cafe, set it up, sold it, sometimes bought it back, and I think they sold something like 11 cafes while I was at church, which was eight years. Nobody in those conversations said the word marketing. Everything they told me was one of two numbers, or the margin between them: what a coffee cost against what it sold for, which is the offer, and cups an hour, which is people walking through the door.
My own version of the pub with a sign out front was a lawn round. A round, when I came to sell one, was only ever the two things stapled together, the customers and what they paid, and nobody buying one ever asked what my marketing was.
Traffic plus Offer clicked, when I stopped thinking about digital marketing or capitalism. Traffic + Offer is humanity trading with one another, it works in medieval pubs with a sign, and it works on Facebook. When the jobs stop coming, though, nobody says the offer is the same as the shop down the road. They say they need marketing, and there is an industry waiting to sell it under whatever name is current. I am a digital marketer. Although this is bullshit. I’m a marketer. Which is still bullshit. I do business for people and for myself. And that’s what you’ll do if you start a business.
In March 2024 I sat down to write about the scammy end of my own trade and wrote the pitch I would write if I was a shameless hack. Personally I like to focus on profit margin, but I have a soft spot for m.e.r, so I gave it the launch it deserved. Introducing M.E.R. Are you using it? New growth formula for ecommerce. Market leaders are beating you into bankruptcy using the Marketing Efficiency Ratio, you can’t afford to be left behind making dumb decisions from dumb data. Sigh. MER is total net profit over total marketing spend, and is it new? No. It’s literally a variation of a P/E ratio in every stock market listing everywhere. 90s MBA would refer to using operating margin as a better kpi goal. Every era renames the same KPI, and I wrote that launch copy in the time it takes a kettle to boil, because a renamed number is easy to make and easy to invoice, and people like me are good at making them. When a company scales its spend by 200% to grow by 200% it has to scale the whole company to match, new team to do the extra work, new team to manage the new team, and new team to manage them: team leader, manager, department lead, channel lead, product lead, vice president of my uncle.
The front page of the website I eventually built says traffic + offer, nothing else matters, and underneath: This site may be of interest to you or it may not be. I’m not going to persuade you. But, welcome. Seven things you don’t need: a funnel, a website, multiple social media platforms, $1000, business cards, a flash logo, a coach, or guru. Five things you do need: an online presence in one place, a professional email address, a product or service to offer, people in the world somewhere who want the above product, service or offer, and a willingness to sell the above product or offer. Did you see the 5 things you do need and notice that most of them are related to business not marketing. Marketing and definitely advertising don’t exist in a vacuum outside of your business. Marketing can’t create a business from nothing. The top line is the half that fits on a T-shirt. The line underneath is the half the print shop needed, because the offer lever there was the whole company, the machine, the sheet, the price, and no marketing done from the outside could move it.
People say prostitution is the oldest profession, I call bullshit on that and say sales is the oldest profession. I mean even if the first transaction ever was a prostitute they had to sell themselves first. They had to find someone (traffic) then flirt with them (offer) then after getting interest sell them. Did they use tinder or only fans? No, they talked to their customers. The platforms turn over every few years and the job titles with them, and the two things underneath have not changed. Strip the titles off and every business that has ever worked was an offer in front of traffic, and when yours stops working it is one of the two, and anyone selling you a third thing is selling decoration, built on top of the first two and engineered to look like it was always there.
The print shop had both levers and stood still. Some of the businesses I built after it had a real offer and real traffic and died anyway, with my own money in them. If it’s really this simple, two levers, a swap, money as the definition, then why do honest offers still die?
