Billboards or Bust

A few weeks ago, I was on a call with Julie*, a founder I genuinely admire.

Her firm is doing well — really well. Strong relationships. Right-fit clients. A team that's small by design, not by accident. The kind of business that a lot of people say they want to build but very few actually do.

And she was wrestling with whether to let her marketing hire go — the one she had hoped would “foster relationships.” A few months in and the marketing manager’s ideas sounded good, in a textbook sort of way: “Let’s sponsor little league baseball.” “How about a billboard for I-71?” “We need to produce and post five content pieces a week for LinkedIn.”

None of them felt particularly relevant to a business owner who recognized that the biggest opportunities came from her presence in the room, her ability to offer real solutions to clients, and an emphasis on the long game.

There are two very different versions of success for a firm like hers.

The Wall Street Journal version — 100 new clients a year, an aggressive pipeline, a full sales and marketing apparatus — is real and valid. It works. But it requires a completely different kind of business than the one she was building.

Winning eight right-fit clients a year, keeping the team nimble, and doing work you're genuinely proud of is also a version of success. A meaningful and highly successful one, at that.

The trouble starts when you force marketing built for the first to fit a business like the second.

A billboard makes perfect sense in one of those businesses.

It has almost no place in the other.

What struck me about our conversation wasn't that the marketing ideas were inherently bad. It was that nearly all of them were designed to create visibility when the business was already growing through relationships.

She was already in the rooms where trust was being built. She was hearing clients' challenges firsthand and recognizing the problems her firm was especially well equipped to solve. The question wasn't how to replace that with marketing. It was how marketing could support what was already working.

That doesn't mean a relationship-led firm can't get marketing support. It means the support needs to match the business you're building.

For a firm like Julie’s, that may look less like handing someone a content calendar and asking them to create demand, and more like having someone pay attention to the trust the business is already earning — the client conversations, the recurring questions, the stories that explain why people choose you — and help carry those things forward.

It's something closer to story stewardship — someone who understands where your narrative is strongest, where it needs sharpening, and how to make sure you're showing up consistently in the right places when you can't be in the room yourself.

The challenge isn't finding better marketing tactics for your business. It’s matching the marketing to the business you want to build.

A billboard isn't a bad idea for a business chasing reach.

It's just not the right idea for a business built for relationships.

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*Name changed to protect privacy.