You don't have a marketing problem. You have an order problem.

In August I asked an AI assistant who a small business in Rochester should call for marketing help.

It named three companies. None of them were mine.

Then it listed what to ask them for: claiming and correcting your Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp and Facebook, plus a citation audit for duplicate listings and wrong phone numbers and addresses.

That is a near-word-for-word description of the service I sell — recommended to be bought from somebody else.

I did not have a marketing problem that day. I had an order problem. I had built the offer before I fixed the surfaces the offer gets found on. And an order problem is invisible in a way a marketing problem isn’t, because everything on your list is still a good idea. Nothing looks wrong. You are just doing it in a sequence that throws money away.

What an order problem actually costs

Here is the whole argument, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion.

Say you launch an ad on a Tuesday. It works — someone taps it, lands on your booking page, and the booking page is broken on their phone.

You did not buy a customer. You bought a person who found out your booking link is broken. The ad performed. The money still left.

That is what every “marketing isn’t working for me” conversation turns out to be about eight times in ten. Not the channel. Not the creative. The order.

So the rule I run on every paid engagement is one line, and it is the first thing on page one of the workbook:

Fix the leaks before you pour in water.

Spend is the last thing you turn on, because spend is the only thing on your list that multiplies whatever is already true about your business — including the broken parts.

Phase 0: the four checks that come before a dollar

This is day zero. Before a campaign, before a post, before a rebrand. It is four checks and most owners can run all four in an afternoon.

1 · Try to book yourself, on a real phone

Not “does the link work.” Does the path work.

Start where a customer starts — a search, not a bookmark. Tap through on a real phone, on cellular, on both iOS and Android if you can get your hands on both. Time it.

The standard: can a stranger book in under two minutes without asking you a question?

If the answer is no, you have found the single most expensive thing on your list, and it is free to fix.

2 · Load your own website and look at the address bar

Eleven seconds. You are looking for one word: not secure. If your browser says it, a share of your visitors are getting a warning screen before they get a sentence of your copy.

While you are there, time the load — with the wifi off. Cellular is the condition your customer is actually on.

3 · Check four listings for contradictions

Google, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps. Four fields each: hours, address, phone, and whether the links still go anywhere.

You are not optimising anything yet. You are looking for disagreement — the places where two surfaces publish different facts about the same business. A customer who reads the wrong one drives to a closed door, and you never find out it happened.

One honest note on duplicates, because this is where a lot of marketing promises get made that the platforms don’t support: where a platform offers a merge, a duplicate can be merged. Where it doesn’t — Apple currently documents no route for merging duplicate pins — the honest job is to claim the correct listing, correct it, report the duplicate, and tell you it is still outstanding rather than calling it done.

4 · Count the customers you already have

Export your customer list. Filter to anyone who has not been in for ninety days or more. Write down the number.

That number is the cheapest revenue available to you, and almost nobody looks at it before going out to buy a stranger’s attention.

My own Phase 0 fails. Here is the report.

It would be easy to write this post as advice. It is fairer as a confession, and the findings are on my own business, from a presence and reputation audit I ran on Zipline Creative in August 2026.

Google reports my phone number field as empty, and my hours as empty. Those are not my conclusions about myself — they are Google’s own prompts on my own owner dashboard: “Add your phone number.” “Tell customers when you’re open — add your business hours.”

The same dashboard told me, verbatim, how long it had been since I added a photo. It was a number in the hundreds of days, and it was Google’s counter, not my estimate.

Three phone numbers for my business are in circulation. Two are published. None of them are monitored. Someone could be dialling a real number for my business right now and reaching nothing.

My domain sends mail from Google Workspace and has no SPF record. Which means the outbound half of my own funnel leaks too — quietly, in a way that never shows up on a dashboard.

So when an AI assistant read the internet and recommended three other firms, it was not making a judgment about the quality of anyone’s work. It was reading the surfaces. On the surfaces, those three look like businesses you can contact, and mine did not.

The offer was built. The order was wrong.

The full sequence — six phases, fourteen days

Here is the order I run for paying clients. I am giving away the order, because the order is not the hard part. Execution is.

Phase 0 · Day 0 — Stop the leaks. The four checks above. What good looks like: a customer can find you, trust the site, and book in two taps — and you know who to win back.

Phase 1 · Days 1–2 — Quick wins and the storefront. One timely campaign to the list you already have, by both SMS and email. Then make every profile look maintained: correct categories, hours, ten or more recent real photos, a fresh post, services listed, identical information everywhere. What good looks like: money moving this week from your existing list, and profiles that look active this month.

Phase 2 · Days 3–4 — Win back the lapsed. Email the 90-day list a real offer with a real expiry. Then personally text your top fifteen to twenty lapsed customers, from a person, not a broadcast. That single move is the highest-converting thing in the whole sprint. What good looks like: a wave of returning customers from people who already know you.

Phase 3 · Days 5–7 — Launch paid and organic. One or two ads at five to ten dollars a day, each focused on one service. Tracking turned on before the first ad runs — that is your attribution, and installing it after the fact means the first week of data is gone. Post one short video of your actual work. Connect with ten to twenty local businesses. What good looks like: ads running with tracking on, and visibility into what converts.

Phase 4 · Days 8–11 — Build the suite. Three to five campaigns across different audiences and offers, search ads for your core “service plus city” terms, three to five local micro-influencer conversations, and a bank of before/after content you can reuse. What good looks like: you are not betting the month on one channel.

Phase 5 · Days 12–14 — Measure, decide, roadmap. Log your numbers at day seven and day fourteen: new bookings, returning bookings, ad click-through, email open rate, spend to date. Respond to every new review within a day. Run a retro. Write your next ninety days. What good looks like: you know your numbers, and the system keeps producing instead of resetting to zero.

Look at where the money is

Phases 0, 1 and 2 — half the sprint — cost nothing but your hands. The paid part does not begin until day five, and it begins at five to ten dollars a day.

That is not frugality. It is the order doing its job. By the time you spend anything, the leak is closed, the storefront is maintained, and your cheapest customers have already been asked. The money then lands on a business that can actually receive it.

Three doors, and which is which

If you want to know where you stand first: the Scorecard is free. Twenty questions across five areas — foundations, attribution, channels, content and systems. Five minutes. I read every submission myself and send back a score out of sixty, your three biggest gaps, and a plain read on where you are, inside one business day. No call, no pitch.

If you want the whole fourteen days written out: the DIY Growth Sprint Workbook is $79. Six phases, day by day, with “what good looks like” at every step, plus the Leak-Fix Checklist, the Campaign Planner, the Results Tracker and the Roadmap Worksheet. It is the sprint I run for clients at $2,000, made self-guided.

If you would rather not run it yourself: I run the 14-Day Growth Sprint for you, fixed scope, $2,000, four slots a month. That one is a conversation before it is a purchase, and it is the least urgent thing on this page.

Start with Phase 0 either way. It is four checks, it costs nothing, and you can do the first one in the next ten minutes on the phone in your hand.

Go try to book yourself.