If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by the sheer volume of marketing advice out there, you’re in good company. Every newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel seems to promise that their one tactic is the key to explosive growth. Email marketing! Paid ads! Content creation! Podcast guesting! The list goes on and on.
For Matt, founder of Barrow Studio, a brand identity and strategy agency in Bristol, UK, this overwhelming chorus of advice has led to a common outcome: doing nothing at all. His agency has been coasting on word-of-mouth referrals, but he knows that’s not a sustainable growth strategy. He needs a better approach—but where should he start?
In this episode of Freelance to Founder, we tackle this universal challenge and offer a framework for cutting through the marketing noise.
Key Takeaways from this Episode:
Build your marketing system like a car—you need the right parts in the right order, and not every business needs the same vehicle.
Focus on the intersection of three things: what’s relatively easy, what you’re interested in, and what drives results. That’s your starting point.
Give yourself permission to build a bike before a car. You don’t need to be everywhere—you need to be strategic with your limited resources.
Every Business Needs Its Own Marketing System
Here’s something Clay hasn’t said on the podcast before: every business needs to build its own unique marketing system. Think of marketing like building a car. You need different parts that work together in the right order, communicating with each other to move you forward.
The key insight? Not every business needs the same car. A solo freelancer doesn’t need the same marketing engine as a 50-person agency. Your system should match your business stage, resources, and goals.
The problem most business owners face is that they’re trying to build a Ferrari when they only have the budget and bandwidth for a bicycle. And that’s perfectly okay—as long as you acknowledge it and plan accordingly.
Identify the Holes in Your System
Whether you feel like your marketing is immature or highly developed, every business has at least one hole in their marketing system. The first step isn’t to add more tactics—it’s to identify where the gaps are and patch them up.
This requires asking deeper questions:
– What are you currently doing?
– What’s actually working?
– Where are leads falling through the cracks?
– What’s the biggest bottleneck in your client acquisition process?
Once you identify that primary hole, focus your energy there. You’ll often see immediate results just from fixing that one gap, which then gives you momentum and resources to build out the rest of your system.
The Three-Circle Framework: Easy, Interesting, and Results
When evaluating which marketing tactics to invest in, Preston offers a helpful Venn diagram framework. Imagine three overlapping circles representing:
**Circle 1: Easy or not time-consuming**
**Circle 2: Interesting to you or aligned with your talents**
**Circle 3: Drives measurable results**
The sweet spot is where all three circles overlap. Here’s why all three matter:
If something gets results and is easy but you’re not interested in it, you’ll burn out. Since most agency owners are doing their own marketing, passion matters.
If it’s easy and you’re interested but doesn’t drive results, it’s just an expensive hobby. Marketing exists to bring in business.
If it gets results and you’re interested but requires five hours to produce one piece of content, you’ll also burn out because it’s inefficient for your business stage.
Your core marketing strategy should live at the intersection of these three circles. Start there. As you see results and generate revenue, you can afford to branch out into other areas or hire specialists to handle tactics outside your wheelhouse.
Don’t Fuel a Bike Like It’s a Car
Many business owners make the mistake of trying to pour advertising dollars into a system that isn’t ready for it. In Clay’s metaphor, advertising is the fuel you put in your car—it makes everything go faster.
But if you’ve only built a bike, you can’t pour gasoline into it and expect it to work. Your processes need to be converting first. Organic marketing is like pedaling your bike—you’re moving forward, but slowly. That’s fine when you’re starting out.
Paid advertising accelerates everything, but only if your foundation is solid. If your website doesn’t convert visitors, if your sales calls don’t close deals, if your onboarding process loses clients—throwing ad money at these broken systems will just amplify the problems.
Think in Phases, Not All-or-Nothing
Clay breaks marketing growth into three simple phases:
**Phase 1: Get sales now.** Focus on tactics that can bring in revenue relatively quickly without requiring a huge infrastructure build.
**Phase 2: Build your systems.** Once you have cash flowing, invest in building out your marketing infrastructure—your email sequences, content systems, tracking processes.
**Phase 3: Scale it.** With solid systems in place, now you can scale without burning out or sacrificing service quality.
Most overwhelmed business owners are trying to do all three phases simultaneously. No wonder they feel stuck. Give yourself permission to move through these sequentially.
Marketing Is a Math Problem
Once you strip away the confusion, marketing becomes surprisingly mathematical. If you have a 25% conversion rate on discovery calls, and you want one new client, you need four calls. Want 10 new clients? You need 40 calls.
Work backward from your revenue goals:
– How many clients do you need?
– What’s your conversion rate?
– How many conversations do you need to have?
– What activity will generate those conversations?
If posting on social media eight to 12 times per month generates two qualified leads, and those convert at your normal rate, you can do the math. Want to double your results? Double your activity. Want to cut your timeline in half? Triple your output.
This doesn’t mean marketing is easy, but it does mean it’s predictable. You can test, measure, and adjust based on data rather than gut feelings or the latest guru’s advice.
You Have Permission to Start Small
Perhaps the most liberating message from this episode is simple: you have permission to start small. You don’t need to be on every platform. You don’t need a podcast, a YouTube channel, a TikTok presence, an email list, and a paid advertising campaign all at once.
You need to pick one or two channels that sit at the intersection of easy, interesting, and results-driven. Master those. Get them working. Generate revenue. Then expand.
The gurus telling you that you must be everywhere right now are often selling something. They have teams. They have budgets. They’re further along in their journey than you are. Your job isn’t to copy their entire marketing playbook—it’s to build the right system for your business at your stage.
Take Action Over Perfect Planning
Remember, the value isn’t in having the perfect 50-page marketing plan. The value comes from taking action, tracking what works, and iterating quickly. Most of us don’t have a dedicated marketing person on staff, which means we have to be smart and selective about where we invest our limited time and energy.
Start with your biggest gap. Focus on activities that check all three boxes. Think in phases rather than trying to build everything at once. Track your numbers so marketing becomes a math problem you can solve rather than a mystery you’re guessing at.
Before you know it, you’ll have a marketing engine that consistently brings in clients—one that fits your business, your interests, and your resources. Not someone else’s version of what marketing “should” look like, but what actually works for you.
So stop letting the overwhelming advice paralyze you. Pick your starting point, take action, and adjust as you go. Your future clients are out there waiting—they just need you to show up consistently in the right places.
