I’d be thinking about the offer, the pricing, the audience, the marketing, the mechanism, the headlines… pages and pages of “what the avatar looks like”.

This stacked up confusion about what I should do next.

Eventually I’d come face to face with something pretty uncomfortable:

No one was coming to save me.

No boss was going to swoop in, make the decision, fit it together and tell me what to do.

It was my business.

So I had to take action. Try something and see what happened.

Action gives you data.

The data gives you clarity.

And that clarity tells you what action to take next.

Then the process naturally repeats itself: you get more data, more clarity, and you know what to do next.

Suddenly you’re moving.

The way I used to do things, it would take months.

But now, if even a few days pass and I haven’t had a failure or a success, it’s a clue to whether I’m simply thinking too much.

Gotta take action.

Because having something to react to is vital.

I want reality to tell me something.

Without it, we end up with projections on a spreadsheet, a polished avatar document, and half built offers offers you don’t even know if the market wants or not.

Going from barely having your head above water to skipping across the surface can happen surprisingly fast by simply taking an action and adjusting.

You can spend months trying to figure everything out.

Or you can start finding things out in a matter of days.

I think it’s fear.

Fear of finding out that we’ve got another dead end on our hands. Or maybe fear of what people will say when they observe things being done in the wrong order (whatever that is). Or fear of not maximising the opportunity. Any of those three fears can explain it.

We think through every scenario and start solving problems that don’t even exist yet, before we’ve earned the right to do so.

An average plan beats a perfect plan every day of the week.

Because the average plan gets acted on, while the perfect plan never even gets finished.

Your business will shift much faster than you think it will, once you start letting reality participate.

The Inbound Accelerator is coming

Learn about it here →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

• Low ticket or high ticket?

• Mid ticket?

• Group or private?

• Should AI be part of the offer?

• Membership or one-off?

• Ads? Outreach? Inbound?

• Give away free training? Or charge for it?

And I’m sure you’ve heard a very confident person explain exactly what you should do. Without even knowing your business or what you want to do with it.

Awesome, that makes it easy to figure out what to do next then.

Because making decisions while also wondering whether you’ve missed something is mega fun, and super easy. Barely an inconvenience.

The noise is the enemy.

Every week, a portion of my time is spent helping people eliminate competing ideas so they can focus. That’s it.

Options might sound like a lovely idea, but each option decreases our ability to hear what our business is trying to tell us.

What do you actually know?

You know what your customers have asked for.

You know what they’ve paid you for.

You know what kind of work you’re good at.

You know what kind of business you want to spend your time running.

And you have evidence from the things you’ve already tried, but failed.

That’s tons of data to start making decisions from.

If you’re not sure how to make those decisions, or how to read that data, ask someone.

You need a way to look at the information in front of you and decide what makes sense here, in the spot you’re in right now.

Because it’s pretty common for people to spin their wheels for months while trying to figure out the perfect business model. When even an average model will do if you could only turn the noise down.

The Inbound Accelerator is coming

Learn about it here →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

• what AI means to the coaching industry (yet)

• what experts who survive will be doing

• what the next big thing will be

And I’m increasingly suspicious of anyone who does.

There are a lot of very confident people around right now.

Lots of slick punks making fear-money with answers who apparently know what the next six months will look like.

But my ears are mostly shut.

And I’m testing what I’m learning.

It’s way too easy to hear and repeat verbatim.

How do I know if the advice is legit?

When someone declares what will happen, I wanna know what they’re basing that on.

What have they actually seen?

What have they tested themselves?

What do they know vs what are they guessing?

In marketing and biz-op, I find many of the clowns near the top are really good at sounding confident, being charismatic, and exceptional at triggering FOMO.

But that can be devastating to small biz owners.

Because running a business involves an enormous amount of uncertainty.

…You decide with the information you have available at that time

…Something happens.

…You learn something.

…You change your mind.

…Then you make the next decision.

That’s basically it, over and over and over and over, until it looks like you know what you’re doing, money comes in consistently, and people start reaching out for advice.

But a weird thing can happen — advisors can shift from doers to info-summarisers.

The pressure is mad always to have a position, an answer, to always sound certain.

…to slip into guru mode.

I don’t want that.

To do that, or listen to that.

I want

“Here’s what I think is happening. Here’s why. And here’s what I’m still trying to work out.”

Someone who can look at something complicated and help me see what’s actually going on.

Folks who can change their mind as evidence changes.

Who can say “I don’t know” without losing their shit, or wigging out.

I don’t know where all this is heading.

And neither does anyone else.

So I’m going to keep paying attention, keep questioning what I think I know, and keep working out what actually matters.

And I’ll keep sharing what I learn with you here.

The Inbound Accelerator is coming

Join the waitlist →

You’ll get early-bird pricing and the bonuses when it launches.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

She sat in her power chair, the Vice Principal sat next to me, and a printed copy of my end-of-year creative writing piece lay on the desk between us.

“Patrick, did you write this yourself?”

I was as confused by the question as I was hesitant to answer.

Why were they asking? What’s happening here?

Through blurry, tired eyes, I looked, picked it up, thumbed through and nodded.

“Yep, that’s mine. I handed it in first thing this morning.”

They both looked at each other, then both back at me.

“We’re giving you one chance, and one chance only to tell us the truth…”

I laughed, I thought they were joking.

“You can’t be serious…”

But yes, they were.

They were very serious.

I was being accused of plagiarising my end-of-year creative writing task.

Like many Year 12 students, I spent most of my late teens totally confused as to what I would do with my life. This, combined with much more fun things to do at night-time other than sleep, showed up in my lethargic attitude towards my education.

Strangely, however, my peers had nominated me School Captain. Even more strangely, despite my persistent class-skipping and repeated personal requests to step down as captain, the school leadership refused; so I was stuck with it.

I had racked up a… shall we say… “an inconsistent” body of work and grades.

When I tried, I could do well. But I was a mess of a teenager.

Looking back, I feel lucky just to have made it through.

However, on that fateful day, the principal and vice principal were explaining to me why they were marking me down.

The monologue went something like this…

“If we mark this at face value as it is, it will place it amongst the highest in the state. This will absolutely draw attention from the state committee, and that attention will reveal inconsistency in your academic history. That will draw attention to how we manage our school. They’ll do an enquiry, and put everyone under the spotlight.”

Then the gut punch from left field…

“Therefore, we’re marking this down to sit in your average.”

The Vice President had been a kind man to me over the years. He stopped talking and looked me directly in the eyes.

“However, Pat, if this really is your work, and you really wrote this, I want you to know this is what I’d expect to read if I open up a high-end weekend magazine. Your marks will not reflect this. But know that it’s good.”

I left the office shocked and gutted.

What they didn’t know was that I had stayed up all night to write that.

I had poured myself into it.

I dedicated my entire attention to it.

I had started writing at 1 am, totally in terror that I hadn’t even started the most important piece of the year. Of the most important year of my schooling.

I put some Green Day and The Offspring in my CD player.

I booted up Windows 98, grabbed the mouse with the rolly-ball thing in it, and clicked on Word.

I stared at the blank screen.

I found the corner of an idea… and drafted it in one long, continuous flow.

At 5 am I took a short walk through the dark pre-dawn streets to clear my mind. Got back in time to quickly edit and print it before 7 am. I saved a copy to floppy disk, kissed mum goodbye and rode to school on my bike.

At 8 am, I read it again to myself and found some typos. I fixed them, and printed another copy.

At 8:25 am, I handed it in, 5 minutes before the deadline.

And now at lunchtime, I’m being told none of it matters.

The system rejected my work.

And that kinda double-stamped me into a season of existential nihilism.

But that line “However, Pat, if this really is your work…” returned to me eventually, and has stuck with me to this day.

My work wasn’t good enough to count.

But it was good enough for people to think I cheated.

That was a higher compliment than they realised. Than I realised.

It helped me believe I could.

The effect was more long-lasting and impactful to me than those high marks ever would have been.

And this brings me to the AI witch hunt we are currently experiencing.

Look, I’m not interested in the conversation of “should you or shouldn’t you” use AI to write with. I’m sure people had similar conversations when the word processor was invented — moving blocks of text around instead of having to think about them in your head before you typed them on a typewriter must have been sacrilege.

And anyway, everyone has different writing skill levels, and trying to keep up with the demand for content ain’t easy.

So I ain’t judging.

Because ultimately, who bloody cares if you used AI, or if it’s all you?

All that matters is if the work moves people.

The tricky part, AI makes you feel smarter about what you’re doing. But because it’s often obvious to others… it makes people want to stop reading immediately.

And that is devastating to your audience, your business, your bottom line.

If you’ve fed your work into an AI detector, then you know the cheeky smile that fills your face when it’s wrong.

Of course I’ve dabbled with it.

I’m trying to learn how to use it.

But man, AI makes meh content.

And it sucks as a reader when you realise the words you’re using energy to consume were spat out by a dead-eyed LLM.

I ain’t saying not to use it.

But make sure what you’re submitting is bloody interesting, FFS.

Because if you get it wrong, people will absolutely tune out and unsubscribe.

And you’ll be forced to consider again if it’s really worth it after all.

In recalling this fateful experience, I wrote this piece today, a stream of consciousness, as a hat tip. And no — digital AI fingers have not touched a single letter.

The Inbound Accelerator is coming

Join the waitlist →

You’ll get early-bird pricing and the bonuses when it launches.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

You’ve probably thought, “Yeah. This makes sense”, but it feels overwhelming to build an inbound business.

That’s exactly why I made Inbound Accelerator.

To give you the whole picture in one place:

• the big picture

• the step-by-step worksheet

• and roadmap for turning your audience into inbound clients.

No six-week program.

Sit down with it over a weekend. Know exactly what you’re doing by Monday.

If you’ve been watching from the sidelines, have a proper look.

The Inbound Accelerator is coming

Join the waitlist →

You’ll get early-bird pricing and the bonuses when it launches.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

No, you’re not the only one feeling it.

Communicating value feels damn near impossible.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of being ‘told’ what to do via walls of content that speak like know-it-all robots.

Feels like catching rain with a slotted spoon.

• Have I missed something?

• Should I be doing something completely different?

• Is everyone else figuring it out while I’m still trying to work out what the hell is going on?

Things are changing. And it’s uncomfortable.

But I think one of the hardest parts of running a business is figuring out what still matters when you can’t see very far ahead.

I’m unsubscribing a lot.

I’m tired of people who seem to have an answer for everything.

I want “I don’t know. But let’s have a look at what’s actually happening.”

I want “Yeah. I know. This bit is fucking weird.”

I still can’t get my head around why people are pushing this idea of “Turn your course and coaching into a chatbot”.

I don’t trust what the chatbot says.

So how on earth, with any confidence, can I possibly help my clients through a chatbot?

Current AI runs on LLM’s. These are great at finding patterns, etc for everything in the past right up until now. But they cannot, by definition, advise us on what to do from now on. The experience, the hyper-specific industry knowledge, the pushback_, and nuance required to advise another person on their very next move is still currently better done by a human.

I get more insight from coffee with a mentor in a single hour than days spent with a chatbot.

The idea to ‘help my clients’ like this seems completely bonkers. Talk about eroding trust.

I don’t know where all of this is heading.

No one does.

Maybe it’s good that these people out themselves by promising “this is the answer, go this way”. Because the job of identifying who to eliminate from my inputs, they’re basically doing it for me.

I’m going to keep paying attention, keep questioning what I think I know, and keep working out what actually matters.

And if you’ve read this far, you’re already doing the same.

We’re not the only ones figuring it out as we go.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

Which means some of you are about to spend the weekend thinking about your business.

Some are going to try very hard not to think about your business.

And some of you are going to find yourselves three hours into a rabbit hole watching someone else’s YouTube videos about how to fix it.

I’ve done all three.

But with all the change happening right now, here’s something I’ve been mulling over.

I don’t look for advisors for what they know. I’m interested, before anything else, in HOW they think.

I’m not chasing hope. And I don’t want someone to agree with me.

I want to be seen, heard and understood, of course.

But I want to go deep on things that create change. I want people who’ve walked the road already.

I want someone who can help me strip away everything that doesn’t matter until what’s left is bedrock.

We’re surrounded by experts. Info is easy. There are loads of people I don’t agree with. And many know far more about certain things than I do.

But the ones I keep listening to are the people whose way of thinking I respect.

They’re the people who make me stop. Think. Question something I thought I understood. See something I hadn’t seen before. And realise I’ve been worrying about the wrong damn thing.

That’s what I want from the people I learn from. Someone who helps me see what’s actually going on.

This weekend, think about who you’re listening to.

These people have a powerful influence on how you see your business. Because how you see your business is one of the most important things you do.

You’re on the waitlist, right?

The Inbound Accelerator is coming…

If you’re curious, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Join the waitlist →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

AI content is everywhere.

Being worth paying attention to is more important than ever.

AI can be genuinely useful, but it also spits out turd-polished prose.

Makes us feel smarter while looking lazy.

People need a reason to follow.

Where can we find that value strong enough to give people that reason?

There’s a rich resource right under your nose.

Your actual business gives you things AI can’t.

Remember…

• that weird thing your client said last Tuesday, that you know other people are thinking but hadn’t heard it put that way?

• the unpopular opinion you’ve got after being elbows deep in your clients’ problems for the last 3 years?

• that thing you believe that most people in your industry get backwards, and you’re sick of watching people fall prey to?

That’s where interesting content comes from.

And people are squandering all this rich, interesting, human, and unique flavour.

Don’t ask AI to give you something to say — but you can give it something real that happened and ask it to help you arrange your thoughts, find the gold, or patterns your perspective hasn’t allowed you to see.

AI can’t decide what people should hear from you.

That’s what people come to you for.

This will matter more and more each passing day.

Appetite for human ‘things’ is rising. We miss the familiarity and comfort of seeing each other through our words. We want human stories. We see typos and realise “ah, they’re just like me”.

Your perspective is yours. You are interesting to your people. Don’t be overwhelmed by the ensluaght of beige — whatever colour you are, be it, louder and with more confidence than ever.

Oh, and one last thing before this risks morphing into “You’re perfect just the way you are” motivational drivel…

In the age of unlimited content, being bloody interesting becomes a serious competitive advantage.

Is your name on the waitlist yet?

The Inbound Accelerator is coming…

If you’re curious, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Join the waitlist →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

Look carefully, and you’ll see the thread connecting everything

• Each customer makes the next one easier to attract.

• Each article makes the next one easier to write.

• Each conversation makes the next one easier to have.

At least, that’s what should happen.

So here’s a simple test for your marketing.

Think back to six months ago.

Is it easier for the right person to understand what you do today?

• Is it easier to explain your offer?

• Is it easier to know what to write about?

• Is it easier for someone to recognise that you’re the person who can help them?

• Is it easier for the right people to find you?

• Is it easier to turn someone’s interest into a conversation?

• Is it easier to get a “take my money” with new clients?

If you're hearing yes in your mind, you're building things that make the next piece of marketing easier.

But if the answer is no...

And you’re still having to explain what you do from scratch and rely on yourself to go out and find the next customer...

Then you're probably working hard but aren't building much that helps you later.

Because you can get better at marketing without making your business easier to market.

Remember standing an old tractor tyre upright as a kid?

At first you had to try with everything you had just to get it moving.

But a few seconds later, one gentle tap kept it rolling while you ran beside it.

I think marketing should feel like that.

You’re gonna work on some marketing today or tomorrow. When you do, ask yourself

“Will this make my marketing easier six months from now?”

Sometimes the answer will be no.

That’s fine. You still need to publish, make offers, and get leads.

But you should be building things that make the next time you market easier.

Three months from now, you should be able to look back and think:

“Holy moley. This is easier than it used to be.”

That’s what I’m doing with Inbound Accelerator.

Is your name on the waitlist yet?

The Inbound Accelerator is coming…

If you’re curious, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Join the waitlist →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

If your content went viral tomorrow, would your business actually be ready?

One of my clients, Josh, couldn’t get clients.

He’d been doing most things right.

Creating content, running trainings, showing up consistently.

Good news: People liked what he was doing.

The problem: Nothing was turning into business.

So we started looking for the bottleneck.

// ONE

The first thing we found was a questionnaire he’d built.

Almost nobody was using it. The questionnaire itself wasn’t the problem, it was the name he gave it.

See, he’d named it from his perspective.

So, we renamed it from the customer’s perspective.

Suddenly... people started filling it in.

Problem solved? Not even close.

// TWO

People would complete the questionnaire, and Josh would reply with their results, which included an invitation to book a call if they want to learn about working with him.

But nobody booked.

So we changed the way the results were delivered. Instead of simply giving people answers, the results naturally led them towards a conversation.

Suddenly… people started booking calls.

Problem solved? Still no.

// THREE

Now Josh had a sales problem.

People were showing up, Josh would run the call, they’d seem keen — but nobody was buying.

So we rebuilt the sales conversation. Pretty soon he was closing about seven out of every ten people.

Now the whole system worked.

So he went back to doing what he’d been doing all along.

• Publishing content.

• Talking to his audience.

• Making videos.

• Serving clients.

• Hanging with his family.

Then one day... A TikTok video went viral.

Shit blew up. Within days, his inbox filled with questionnaire submissions. The following week filled with appointments. Within a month he’d signed ten new clients into his $5,000 program.

Fifty thousand dollars.

Then we had to turn his marketing off, he was maxed out, calendar full, and we took the next few months to rebuild his fulfilment so he could handle more clients.

Most people hear that story and think “I need a viral video.”

But I don’t.

Because the viral post wasn’t the thing that built the business.

The viral video simply exposed the business we’d already built.

If that video had gone viral six months earlier... almost nobody would’ve become a client.

• The questionnaire would’ve leaked.

• The booking process would’ve leaked.

• The sales conversation would’ve leaked.

The attention would’ve disappeared as quickly as it arrived.

The breakthrough happened weeks before the viral video.

The video simply revealed it.

That story completely changed how I think about marketing.

Whenever someone tells me they need more leads, I quietly ask myself another question.

If your content went viral tomorrow... would your business actually be ready?

Because attention doesn’t build businesses — it exposes them.

Some businesses buckle under the pressure.

Others discover that all that extra attention changed almost nothing.

Inbound Accelerator is for business owners who want every piece of attention to count.

If you’d like to take a look when it opens, join the waitlist.

Join the waitlist →

Join the waitlist →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

...and watched it disappear into silence?

It doesn’t take long before the doubts start.

“Maybe it wasn’t that useful.”

“Maybe nobody cares.”

or worse

“Maybe I’m just not very good at this.”

I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

I think small audiences create terrible feedback.

Imagine you own a café.

Twenty-five people walk past — one comes in.

You wouldn’t redesign the menu because twenty-four strangers kept walking, would you? You’d probably conclude twenty-five people isn’t enough to tell you very much.

Yet that’s exactly what we do with our marketing.

1. We publish one thing.

2. A tiny fraction of our audience sees it.

3. Then we use that tiny sample to decide whether the idea was any good.

That’s a dangerous habit, my friend.

Small audiences make smart business owners doubt themselves.

The problem is...

The person who needed your advice might never have seen it.

They might discover you next Tuesday.

Your audience doesn’t experience your business the way you do.

You remember when you wrote something.

They don’t. They’re discovering your ideas one at a time.

A stranger might find one article today.

Read another tomorrow.

Visit your website on Friday.

Then enquire next week.

To them, it’s one conversation.

But to you, those ideas might have been published six months apart.

That’s why I think business owners lose confidence in good ideas far too early.

Your audience isn’t looking for your latest post.

They’re looking for the answer that helps them move forward.

Owners think their job is to keep inventing brilliant new ideas every week… but it’s not.

The real job is to build a business where your best ideas stay available until the right person needs them.

That’s one of the reasons I’m building Inbound Accelerator.

Not to strap yourself to the content treadmill, but to help you build a business where the right people keep discovering the best work you’ve already done.

If you’d like to take a look when it opens, join the waitlist.

The Inbound Accelerator is coming…

If you’re curious, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Join the waitlist →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

But you’ll never know it.

Someone found you, read something, clicked something else, spent 15 minutes looking around, thought:

“This is interesting.”

And then... nothing.

No enquiry. No sale. No notification. No clue they were ever there.

But something bloody well happened.

An opportunity entered your world.

We think there are only 2 possible outcomes with a new lead.

1. Someone buys.

2. Or nothing happens.

But I argue there’s a third group.

3. The almost-clients.

These are the folks who were genuinely investigating your business. They liked what they found, and got most of their questions answered.

Then for whatever reason, they stopped.

• Life got busy.

• One question stayed unanswered.

• The timing wasn’t quite right.

• The problem wasn’t painful enough... yet.

But just because you never saw any of it doesn’t mean those people aren’t real.

And I think they’re one of the biggest hidden assets in an inbound business.

We understand the “Death by a thousand cuts” principle.

Same thing here, but “Leads lost by a thousand dead-ends”.

Truth is, most businesses only need a handful of new clients for things to be drastically different.

With outbound marketing, when those new clients show up, your work to bring the next ones slows down automatically.

But with inbound marketing, you don’t really slow down. Every dead-end you remove quietly changes the odds. You never know which almost-client becomes next month’s client.

It means most businesses aren’t starting from zero.

If you’re a brand new business, you still have to develop all these things before inbound marketing will start to work for you.

But if you’ve been around for a minute, you’ve already got people entering your world.

The opportunity is helping more of those people find what they’re looking for and reach a decision. They’ve already come most of the distance.

It’s why I’m building Inbound Accelerator, to help people make these adjustments fast.

The Inbound Accelerator is coming…

If you’re curious, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Join the waitlist →

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

Then disappeared down the rabbit hole?

Reading, clicking, watching a video.

Then you look at what they sell. Maybe even scroll back 18 months to see what they were saying before you knew they existed.

We all love a good binge.

But if we’re doing this with a business, it’s not simply entertainment.

You’re trying to reach a decision.

Think about the questions running through your head.

1. At first: “Is this actually relevant to me?”

2. You keep going. “Okay, this person understands the problem.”

3. Another post. “Interesting. I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

4. A video. “So THAT’S why what I’ve been doing isn’t working.”

5. A link. “Okay, what do they actually do?”

6. A client story. “Could this work for someone like me?”

7. Their offer. “How would I work with them?”

Is that stalking session unfolding… randomly? Or is it… part of a plan?

Of course it’s planned. Everything you encounter helps answer another question.

And if enough questions get answered...

DING. You enquire.

This is why people can discover your business on Friday and be talking to you by Monday.

But here’s where I think a lot of inbound marketing falls short.

Someone finds you.

Binges away…

But they hit a dead end.

It’s common, because pretty much everyone is just copying what they see other people doing without really knowing why.

And that’s ok, you’ve gotta start somewhere.

And who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky, right?

Here’s a checklist that doesn’t need luck.

Take a look at your stuff. Objectively. As if you were a complete stranger.

• Maybe your content makes the problem clear but never explains your approach.

• Maybe they love your thinking but can’t work out what you actually sell.

• Maybe your offer sounds interesting, but they can’t find enough evidence.

• Maybe they simply don’t know what to click next.

So they leave.

But that person was an opportunity. They were actively investigating your business… then they ran out of useful places to go.

But there’s hope.

Providing you’ve been marketing for a while, you likely already have many of the answers: posts, client stories, videos, an email that explains your approach perfectly, the offer you’ve rewritten 6 times, the CTAs you know have worked.

Fixing these dead ends drastically changes what happens the very next time the right person finds you.

Which could be happening right now…

If you have the headspace to figure it out, go for it, now you know what to do.

Otherwise, that’s what I’m building the Inbound Accelerator around. To take the marketing you already have, identify gaps, then get the pieces working together so the right people can discover you, understand you and reach their own decision — quickly.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

Not “social media.”

Not “hopefully Substack.”

I mean:

Where are they actually going to come from?

Because this is where marketing gets weird.

You’re probably

• Posting on social.

• Sending emails.

• Making videos.

• Getting referrals.

• Talking to past customers.

• Updating your website.

But find yourself wondering “Why isn’t this producing more leads?”

And we all do it, we conclude we need something else, another platform, better funnel, more followers, new lead magnet.

But take another look at what you’ve already built.

Because you might already have most of the machine sitting in front of you.

The problem is that every part is doing its own little job.

Your social gets engagement.

Your emails educate.

Your YouTube get views.

Your website explains what you do.

Your offer sits there waiting for somebody to find it.

Everything is working just not necessarily together.

And that’s why marketing feels like an enormous amount of work for surprisingly few enquiries.

Here’s the aha moment:

Every marketing activity should have a job in creating, moving or resurfacing an opportunity.

• Social can help the right stranger discover you, and make them realise they’ve misunderstood their problem.

• An email can trigger a 2nd Chance Draw.

• Something you publish on YouTube can resurface a person who nearly bought 6 months ago, and get them back all up in your marketing, devouring your content with fresh eyes.

Done with focus, these aren’t separate marketing activities, they’re parts of the same machine.

This is why I think a lot of business owners are much closer to having an inbound business than they realise.

Audience? Check.

Already publishing? Check.

Old leads, past customers, useful ideas, client results? Check.

A decent offer? Check.

The raw materials are sitting there, they just need focusing.

You’ve seen businesses like this.

You find one post… Click their profile.

Read another… Visit their website.

Watch a video… Click their resource.

And everything seems to be telling you the same story.

So you keep going because they are focused.

People binge, and then reach out. It might look like that lead appeared from nowhere, but when you look underneath... the machine produced it.

That’s what I’m building Inbound Accelerator around.

Taking the marketing you already have, identifying what’s missing, then getting the parts working together to create an inbound business that doesn’t rely on you having to reach out and drag in every opportunity yourself any more.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

“I really want to do this”

But then...

“The timing just isn’t right.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready just yet”

“I’ve got to go hug my dog”

After six months, most of us put them in a box marked: Didn’t buy.

But they’re still out there.

And while you’re trying to get more followers, something important has been happening.

Their life kept moving.

• Maybe the problem got worse.

• Maybe they finally have the money.

• Maybe something happened yesterday that moved this problem straight to the top of their list.

Marketers call what happens next “nurturing.”

I don’t like that word. We’re not warming a human up like a bloody casserole.

Every lead you had that didn’t buy is out there now living their life. And their life is changing.

And every so often (quite frequently if you do this right), something you publish meets one of them at exactly the right moment.

Suddenly a lead you thought was long gone pipes up:

“Actually... I need to know more now.”

I call this the 2nd Chance Draw.

The mistake: Don’t build for 2nd Chance Draw. Instead, do this…

Focus your efforts to help the right people take action, ideally within 2-14 days. That’s the sweet spot for someone to fully realise their problem, why they are still stuck, and why you could very well be their solution. Nail that part of your marketing FIRST.

But then, once that’s done…

If you keep publishing useful, relevant marketing, you’ll get lots of 2nd Chance Draws.

That’s why your existing audience is far more valuable than it looks.

The follower count might be exactly the same as it was six months ago.

But the people aren’t.

Think about it. Some of them are now closer to the problem. Some will understand it better. Some are finally ready to do something about it. And some will have chosen someone else back then and come to regret not going with you in the first place.

So here’s something worth trying today.

Think of 3 people who have shown genuine interest in working with you over the last 12 months but didn’t.

Don’t message them all asking if they’re “still interested.” That’s cap-in-hand shit that will destroy your credibility, attractiveness, and price structure preeeeety quickly.

Instead, ask:

What could I publish that would be genuinely useful to those people today?

Then publish it.

Pro Level: go back through your notes and conversations, look for keywords and insights you might have missed, and focus your efforts on them.

You don’t know who’s still watching from the shadows, waiting for exactly that 2nd chance draw.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

You solve their problem.

They want it fixed.

Could they enquire by Monday morning?

I think they could.

I’ve seen people go from stranger to client in a weekend.

It’s a mistake to put it down to timing.

“They were ready to buy.”

Sure.

But being ready doesn’t explain why they chose you.

Over that weekend, something happened.

They found something in the wild that described their problem exactly as they were experiencing it.

So they followed their nose...

[without you even being aware, mind you]

1. Clicked your profile.

2. Read another post.

3. Watched a video.

4. Found something where you explained why the thing they’d already tried wasn’t working.

5. Then another where you explained what you’d do instead.

6. They looked at your offer.

7. Checked out a client result.

8. By Sunday night, you’re no longer some rando.

Something has changed.

You’re familiar.

They understand their problem differently because of something you taught them.

They’ve seen how you’d approach it.

They’ve seen evidence.

Now they’re questioning, “Can this person help me?”

DING. That’s an enquiry.

We have enormous influence over what happens once one of those people finds us.

“Nurturing” is marketing speak for “2nd chance draw”

If they have to follow you for 12 months and be nurtured to, that’s a slow journey.

The speed comes down to what they need to understand.

They already have the problem… They already want it solved...

Your job is to help them quickly understand the handful of things that move them from “I have this problem” to “This person might be the one I want helping me solve it.”

That exact same journey can happen over a weekend.

We’re not trying to accelerate everybody.

That’s crucial to understand.

The person we’re talking about already has the problem.

They already want it solved.

We’re shortening the time it takes the right person to understand enough to act.

It’s our job to make those messages easy to encounter.

That’s how “Who’s this?” can become “How can I work with you?” in a weekend.

(my record from stranger-to-enrolled is 36 hrs 20 mins)

So here’s an exercise.

Imagine your perfect customer has just found you.

They have 48 hours.

What would they need to understand before they’d feel comfortable enquiring?

Write it down.

For someone considering Inbound Accelerator, for example, I might want them to understand:

• They don’t need more random marketing tactics.

• Inbound takes a different set of skills from manually finding clients.

• They probably already have more of the raw material than they realise.

• Their positioning, content and offer need to reinforce each other.

• And this is something they can deliberately build.

Those aren’t “content ideas” — they’re things my ideal customer needs to understand.

This is what most of inbound marketing is really doing under the hood.

It’s shortening the time it takes someone who already has the problem to understand that you’re a good person to help them solve it.

And you have far more control over that time than you might think.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

It worked for almost any business.

The rule was simple:

Never follow up just to check in.

Every follow-up had to bring value:

• An article.

• A resource.

• A new product that they need to know about because it’s directly in line with what they’re trying to achieve.

• An answer to a question they hadn’t thought to ask.

Now, what that value looks like depends on your business.

But the principle doesn’t.

Essentially, the follow-up must earn itself. The follow-up must be something that made the person genuinely glad you’d reached out. This switches follow-up from an annoyance to something people are grateful for. It has the side benefit of making the process thoroughly more enjoyable for you too; hearing “thank you” rather than “leave me alone” is lovely…

For years, I thought getting better at follow-up was one of the biggest levers in growing a business.

Then all that went out the window.

And we made a ton of money.

I stopped getting through my follow-up list.

No, I didn’t get lazy.

I stopped getting through my follow-up list because I was too busy serving customers.

At first, I thought my follow-up system was falling apart.

Then I realised something every business owner dreams of...

Sales hadn’t slowed down.

They’d accelerated.

That didn’t make sense.

I was doing less follow-up.

But sales were increasing to the point that I wasn’t physically able to get to the pile of follow-up that was getting bigger and bigger by the day...

So if sales were increasing, but follow-up had come to a standstill…

What exactly was replacing it?

…

Marketing.

Someone booked a call and said right up front,

“I’ve already decided I’m going with you. I just want to make sure we’re a fit.”

Follow-up wasn’t suddenly less important. It had simply become less responsible for my sales.

The marketing had taken over.

Not magically — I built it that way.

I’d mapped out the journey and filled it with videos, emails, resources.

Answers to the questions people were asking before they ever reached out.

But I’d been too busy serving people that I hadn’t noticed this wave of leads had been building. I was too busy to follow up, but I’d built all this marketing, so the leads were able to help themselves.

So by the time they reached out... most of the selling had already happened.

That completely changed how I think about follow-up.

I still believe every follow-up should add value.

I still think “just checking in” is a waste of everyone’s time, and will make you depressed and crush your soul.

But these days, I don’t spend much time trying to optimise follow-up.

I’d rather optimise the thing that determines whether follow-up is needed in the first place.

The sharper, more focused, more tailored my marketing became... The less pressure was needed to put on follow-up.

I distinctly remember looking left on my desk at the pile of follow-up I hadn’t done.

Then looking forward at my screen and the marketing work I wanted to create.

It hit me.

Every hour spent following up might win one sale.

But every hour spent improving my marketing could change every sale that came after it.

That very day I stopped trying to become better at follow-up...

And started focusing on building a business that needed less of it.

My days stopped looking like this:

• Follow up.

• Check in.

• Nudge.

• Remind.

• Drag in a sale.

They started looking like this:

• Welcome.

• Onboard.

• Deliver.

• Help.

• Sharpen marketing.

Here’s something I never expected.

The day I couldn’t get through my follow-up list was the day I realised my marketing was finally working.

Now, if you’ve made it this far, I want to share with you the deeper lesson.

This article isn’t actually about follow-up.

It’s about moving the point of sale further upstream.

So instead of the takeaway from this newsletter being:

How do I follow up better?

I instead want you to chew on:

How do I build a business that needs less follow-up?

When you achieve this, you realise your old business relied on sales conversations and follow-up to create demand (repeated effort, incremental payoff).

And instead, your current business relies on marketing to create demand before the conversation even begins (one-time effort, leveraged payoff).

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

Your calendar reminds you.

Clients remind you.

Bills remind you.

Email reminds you.

Deadlines remind you.

Your dog reminds you.

Even your stomach reminds you when it’s time to eat.

But tomorrow?

Nothing.

Tomorrow’s actually quite polite like that.

It will never interrupt you.

It would never be so rude as to demand your attention.

Or tell you that next month’s business is slowly disappearing because you were too busy dealing with today.

By the time tomorrow finally gets your attention...

It has become today.

I think that’s why so many business owners end up trapped.

They know they should build a better business...

They care about their future…

But the work that changes tomorrow never feels urgent.

• Writing the article.

• Recording the video.

• Clarifying your message.

• Making your offer easier to understand.

• Improving the way people discover you.

None of it demands your attention.

It’s just a to-do list that we kinda become numb to.

And the future never sends reminders.

Two different ways of thinking that lead to completely different levels of business:

“What’s the most important thing I could do today?”

V’s

“What can I do today that tomorrow will thank me for?”

The answer is almost never urgent.

But $50 says it’s the thing that makes business easier one, two, six months from now.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

Some days you eat.

Some days you don’t.

Now imagine owning a fish farm.

Most business owners spend their entire career walking down to the river.

Get a client.

Do the work.

Get paid.

Then tomorrow… back to the river.

And while there’s nothing wrong with that, after all, that's how almost every business begins.

The mistake is still being there years later.

I think every business owner has two jobs.

1. Create today’s opportunities.

2. Create tomorrow’s too.

The first pays today’s bills.

The second changes tomorrow.

And that’s the part most owners accidentally skip.

They spend so much time creating today’s opportunities… that tomorrow never changes.

Creating tomorrow’s opportunities might look like:

• answering a question once instead of a hundred times

• making your business easier to understand

• becoming easier to recommend

• helping someone trust you before you ever meet

Here’s the thing.

None of those things get you paid today.

That’s why they’re so easy to postpone.

Until one day...

You wake up and realise yesterday has been doing some of today’s work.

There’s nothing like the feeling of waking up to booked calls with strangers who have already been through your stuff and understand how you think.

There’s nothing like taking a call with someone who already knows your solution is probably going to be right for them.

There’s nothing like going from stranger to client in a few days, with zero outreach.

Every business owner eventually reaches a point where they realise...

There has to be another way.

Not because catching fish stops working.

No, it will always work.

But because they get tired of starting every morning at the river.

Every business owner has two jobs.

Create today’s opportunities.

Create tomorrow’s too.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.

Every week they added another pile.

One day they said:

“I’d love to build a house.”

You’d probably laugh.

“Mate... you’ve already got the bricks.”

I think that’s exactly what a lot of experienced business owners are doing.

They think that building an inbound business (where clients come to you) means starting from scratch.

I don’t.

I think they’ve been collecting the pieces for years.

• Client wins.

• Hard lessons.

• Opinions.

• Stories.

• Frameworks.

• Content.

• Credibility.

None of those are distractions from building an inbound business.

They are the building materials.

It’s true, the long game takes time. But it’s a lie that you’re starting from zero.

You don’t need another five years of collecting.

You need to stop collecting and start building.

Building simply means putting those pieces in the right order so people find you instead of you needing to find them.

That’s why I don’t think inbound is as long a game as people believe.

Not for experienced business owners.

Most of the time has already been spent.

You thought you were accumulating experience.

You were actually accumulating the raw materials for an inbound business.

Experience feels ordinary to the person who lived it.

That’s why business owners undervalue it.

We all do it.

Familiar things rarely feel valuable.

But that’s only until we recognise these “bricks” can build something bigger than the sum of its parts.

• A client transformation is just “that client.”

• A framework is “something I always say.”

• An opinion is “common sense.”

• The audience is “non-responsive”.

• The email list is “dead”.

The value is invisible because you’re too close to it.

That’s why it’s so hard to build an inbound business on your own.

You can’t easily see which parts of your own experience are valuable.

You assume everyone already knows them.

Thanks for reading

See you soon.

Cheers,
Pat

PS: I’m grateful for the free info I had back in the day, and am honoured to pass on my lessons. Hitting ❤️ tells me this was useful.