Hello and welcome back. Episode thirteen. This one came out of a meeting where Mel said something that stuck with me, so much so that I am giving her a rare compliment, which she has informed me is her allocation for the quarter. The line was this: most businesses are not failing because the market dried up. They are failing because they keep changing what they are. The problem is not opportunity. The problem is clarity.

What clarity actually means

Clarity is knowing exactly what you do, and not constantly shifting what you offer or who you offer it to. Entrepreneurs are often the worst at this. We have all stood at a barbecue next to the bloke launching his fifth business in five years while his partner quietly despairs. The people who make real money tend to do one thing exceptionally well, and only then invest the proceeds elsewhere.

When that clarity is missing, marketing is the first thing to suffer, because we see it before anyone else. The scope creeps, the message to market keeps changing, the target audience keeps changing, and nothing stays consistent long enough to hold. As Mel points out, a customer cannot refer you confidently if you are not still doing in two years what you did for them today, and your Google reviews stop making sense if each one describes a different business.

The plumber who could not pick a lane

Consider a plumbing client we ran a pilot with a few years back, two blokes and two vans, who wanted to service everything from Joondalup down to Mandurah and be the biggest name in Perth. The pilot worked. The leads came in. But the economics did not, because two people driving from Rockingham to Mandurah for individual jobs will never be profitable. As Mel puts it, “If your back end doesn’t match your front end, you’re selling something your operations team can’t deliver.”

We mapped out an alternative: be the local legend. Own one region, consolidate the work, cut the driving, target the advertising tightly, and grow profitably from there. It worked for four to six months and you could see the net profit. Then the ego to be number one in Google took over, the brand chopped and changed every three months, and the profit evaporated. The service never changed. It was always plumbing. He just could not decide whether he was the biggest company in Perth or the reliable local guy, and that indecision was fatal.

Refining versus resetting

There is a clean rule worth remembering. You can vary your product if the audience stays the same, or change your audience if the product stays the same. Changing both at once is where businesses come undone.

A good example of doing it right: a solar and battery installer adding EV charging packages. Same customers, same electricians, same core promise of making a home work better from the sun. That is a natural add-on with a database already waiting to hear about it. Brilliant.

Now the cautionary version. We worked with a highly regarded WA installer who was the authorised reseller of a globally known brand, with five-star reviews and leads pouring in off the back of the manufacturer’s marketing. Three years in, frustrated with margin, the owner decided to start importing and manufacturing a rival product from overseas and selling direct to builders. Suddenly, a brilliant installer was a manufacturer worrying about shipping, customs and ports, and could not take the phone call from a customer whose skylight installer had not shown up because they were chasing a delayed container. The manufacturer found out, pulled the exclusive reseller badge, handed it to a competitor, and the leads dried up. As the book title Mel quotes puts it, bigger is not better, better is better. Revenue is not king. Profit and cash are. That business, sadly, is no longer trading.

Why this episode is worth a listen

This is the episode for anyone with a notebook full of new ideas and a nagging sense they should pick one. Mel and Mon dig into the hedgehog principle, the three overlapping questions of what you are passionate about, what you can be best in the world at, and what actually makes money, and why passion and profitability so often contradict each other. There is a genuinely useful exercise for finding your brand promise: if you were a superhero, what evil would you rid the world of? Mel’s answer, for the record, is bad marketing agencies. It is part business theory, part hard-won war stories, and entirely practical.

So check your ego, look back over the last four years, and ask honestly whether your core has compounded and improved or whether you have been chasing butterflies around a field. The businesses that win are not doing a million things. They are laser-focused on what they do better than anyone else, they can articulate it, and they get one per cent better at it every day. Know what that is, and keep making it better. That is how you raise the bar.

Got a burning question you want the answer to? Stuck on some marketing jargon? Unsure how AI fits into the future of your business? Just want a straight answer to a question no one’s ever explained properly? Send it our way. We’ll pick the best ones to unpack in future episodes.