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Join for freePosted: Thu 27th Aug 2026
When business growth slows, it's easy to assume you need more marketing, but the real issue may be how your business is designed.
In this session, Mark Elliott shares how to identify what's really holding your business back, recognise when it's time to rethink the way you work, and make the changes that help your marketing deliver better results.
Why marketing often gets blamed for problems it can't solve
The signs that your business has outgrown the way it works
What to redesign before you invest in more marketing
Mark helps solo business owners overcome the challenges of starting a business.
With more than 15 years of experience, he uses tools such as the Lean Canvas, Customer Factory, and RAISE goals to turn learning into action that sticks.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I'm very pleased to introduce Mark Elliott, who is a leadership coach. In this session, Mark will discuss what to redesign before you invest in any more marketing.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat or in the Q&A box, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. As always, the session will be recorded, and we will send the recording with further follow-up resources later today. Over to you, Mark.
Mark Elliott: Hi. Thanks, Beth, and hello and welcome to everybody here. It's always funny how, when we want to grow our business or improve things, we always turn back immediately to marketing and sales activity. That's the thing we think we need to be doing.
But I want to ask you a question: what happens if it isn't marketing that will lead you to growth? What happens if your marketing is doing a reasonable job, doing what it's meant to, but it's not actually designed for the state of the business now?
So I want a bit of interaction here. I was wondering which of these statements feels most familiar to you. Is it that marketing isn't creating business, or that you're not converting the inquiries you already have?
I've just had a client session where that was the issue. Or it might be that you're not sure which part of your marketing you should accelerate. I'm wondering which of these is most resonant for you.
If you want to put a number in the chat, that would be great. For those of you who may not be looking at your screen, the options are: doing more marketing but not creating more business; getting inquiries but not converting them; not being sure which marketing activity works; attracting customers who aren't the right fit; staying busy without the growth you'd hoped for; or worrying that more customers would create more problems than they're worth.
I see plenty of twos and threes coming through in the chat, about getting inquiries but not enough of them turning into customers. Some of you are also indicating that you're not sure which marketing activity is actually working for you.
But I also want to throw another one in here: what happens when your business doesn't fit the life you want? For those with twos and threes – people getting inquiries but not enough to convert, or those unsure which marketing activity is working – perhaps you've reached a transition point in the way you've designed your marketing.
And it's not a failure. I'm not saying you're not putting the effort in – what I am saying is that it may be a transition point for you to redesign what you're doing.
This means changing from what you've built within your company – version one of your company – and moving it somewhere else. So what is version one? Version one is how you got here: hustle.
You found the customers you found, said yes to opportunities, and made the business happen, and some of that involved marketing activity. You created assets: you opened up LinkedIn, Instagram, maybe a Substack.
But eventually, your business can end up being a collection of products or services delivered to whoever happens to be there – an almost accidental way of forming a business. There's no judgment from me if that's the way it worked for you; I built a couple of businesses that way myself.
I remember once teaching students about entrepreneurship at a particular university. It wasn't part of their core curriculum, but an extracurricular activity, and the business grew because different parts of the university asked me to do more and more work.
But when I wanted to make something of that – to make it bigger and take it out to other universities – I got work just through what felt like happenstance. Only when I uncovered why universities might hire me, and which parts of the university were most profitable and had the budget, was I able to use my time effectively and build the business I wanted.
So when I talk about version one, I'm not looking down on it or judging it – this is simply how we start a business. When we come to version two, the thing we need to do is be intentional about it.
We need to be intentional about the marketing we choose – it's not just about doubling our efforts, doubling the number of posts, or building another marketing channel. It's about being intentional with the data we already have from the business, and intentional about what kind of company we want to grow into.
The business and marketing activities that got you here won't necessarily take you where you want to go. It's not that your marketing is broken – it's that you and your business have outgrown what's there.
I'm not saying you don't have a problem with your marketing – you might. And I'm not saying that putting more effort in won't result in more business.
But before you overhaul your marketing, before you double your effort expecting double your profit, now is the time to look at whether marketing is really the key to what you want this business to become. Is it that you have a marketing design problem, or a business design problem?
Who knows? Let's have a think about what needs redesigning in your business – it's relatively easy for somebody like me to look at your symptoms and make suggestions about what needs changing.
It might be that you have plenty of inquiries but very few clients, as some of you have said. Some of that may be about redesigning who you think your target customer is, and what they're actually in the market for.
It might be that people are interested in making inquiries but don't actually buy. That could be something to do with your offer, your pricing, or your marketing and onboarding – the way your service is presented to them.
If your revenue is growing but your actual profit isn't, that might again be to do with your pricing, your delivery, or your cash flow. And if you're constantly busy and more effort just means more customers, you may need to look at redesigning your delivery or how you manage your focus among customers.
If you need a constant stream of new customers in your acquisition funnel, then looking at how that funnel brings people on board may be what's needed. Or it may be fundamentally your business model, one that isn't taking advantage of your customer relationships – so it's not your marketing at all, but something deeper about the business.
It may also be a mismatch between what you built this business for – to use and share your expertise, to bring income into the family – and how you believe that's meant to happen. Looking at how you define success for yourself can help you make it happen, not just by increasing your marketing.
What do I mean by that? I thought it would be useful to talk about three actual clients and what they did.
The first is Lisa, who runs corporate events. When she came to me, she wanted new marketing, new channels – she wanted to make things happen.
But when we looked at her business, what we understood was that Lisa is unique in corporate events. The way she runs and assigns these events is absolutely key to her success with ongoing, big-budget clients.
So with Lisa, we redesigned how she marketed by developing rich, memorable experiences of what her events would be like. We played to Lisa's strengths, which allowed her to get more clients through a more solid pipeline using minimal marketing. This was without radically changing what Lisa did – we simply made the most of the funnel she'd already built.
The second client is Tony, in business transformation. Tony was busy all the time, so we looked at which clients he really wanted to serve, which were most profitable, and how those profitable clients found him.
What we uncovered was that Tony didn't need more marketing, but more focused marketing on the clients he wanted to serve – building the right relationships in the right places. By focusing his marketing efforts on a smaller number of activities, Tony was able to grow the business, become more profitable, and hit his growth targets. In fact, Tony was one of those people able to grow revenue tenfold in a relatively short period of time.
The third client is Joanna, who had what was essentially a hobby business running history walks. She loved doing it, and money flowed from it naturally.
Joanna came to me wanting to make more money, but what we did was uncover what she actually wanted from the business. That included an income stream from her hobby, which she knew was possible, but also fundamental pieces of joy and flow – making things happen without the marketing getting in the way.
By identifying how Joanna wanted to work, and who she wanted to work with, she was able to take advantage of opportunities she created for herself and cherry-pick the marketing that suited her. Despite being a hobby business, Joanna achieved another tenfold increase in revenue – just from redesigning the business, not the marketing.
What I want you to take from these three different businesses – hopefully some of them resonated with you – is that there's one real principle at play. In each case, the business redesign was intentional.
It wasn't just an incremental movement of what they were already doing, made bigger. It was making things happen in the way they actually wanted.
How can you make this happen for yourself? I want to bring you back to the question: why are you here?
Think about it both ways – what if it isn't marketing, but what if it is? What problems would you still have if your marketing was so successful that you doubled your business overnight?
Why am I asking you these questions? Because if you did have better marketing, would the business cope? Would you even want that?
If you know what's getting in your way and what's working, great. But if you don't, think about what you know needs to change in your business now, and whether it's something that needs redesigning rather than just improving.
As a coach, I find my clients generally know the answers already. So ask yourself: have you intuitively got a decision you've been putting off, because implementing it would be tough?
What is that decision you know you need to make? Be honest and truthful with yourself.
Is version two of your business worth building? What do you really want from your business moving forward – if you're going to spend the next five to 10 years in it, what do you really want from that business?
This is an exercise I run as standard with my clients: score, from one to seven, how important these things are to you. Sometimes it's the first time people have been able to be reflective and honest about things such as the impact they want to create with their business – that fundamental 'why', to borrow from Simon Sinek.
It might be that you want the respect of your peers, or recognition. I specialise in working with people in the second half of their life, so legacy is often something they're thinking about – what they want to change in the world, and what they want to leave behind in business.
Scoring each of these elements can help you understand the size and shape of the company you want, and what's important to you. If you want the fuller exercise, follow the QR code for a downloadable version, along with some other exercises.
We have here a three-part redesign framework. The first is clarifying what's working and what's not in your business – for you, that may mean building boundaries around your time and the effort you put into marketing.
The second is simplifying what you do – when we keep building on what we've built, it can become overly complicated. Understanding the narrative from a customer's perspective – what we do for them, how we serve them, and what happens next – is key to serving them simply, profitably, and repeatably.
That way, when it comes to multiplying our actions through best-practice marketing and customer onboarding, it will actually work. So the framework is clarify, simplify, multiply – the triple action I recommend to help you understand what needs to change in the business as a whole, and whether it's the marketing that's at fault or something else at play.
Gosh, how time flies – I've been talking a lot, with little time for reflection. But I wonder if anybody has any questions on their mind.
I can see a question from Sarah: how do I make people believe they need me? I get so many inquiries, but not all convert.
As an accountant, it might be worthwhile to listen to those inquiries to understand what the underlying problems are. If we can respond to people's issues by showing resonance – telling them we understand their problem – we build trust and take them on the journey to how we can help resolve those issues.
When you're faced with a lot of inquiries, it may help to provide a mechanism for people to read and engage more – your website or social media strategy, for example – to hook people in and then lead them to a clear next step. That might mean building an onboarding strategy.
What's the first, simple thing people can experience in working with you? Do they need to commit to a full year, or can they sample what you do first?
If you have inquiries, are you able to speak to those people? If you have an audience flow – people looking at your content – are they actually your customers, and are they the people you want to serve? Do they have the authority to make that choice, or are they building a business case to introduce you to others in their company?
So, Sarah, it might be customer acquisition, proposition, or the way you're handling inquiries – any of which may need a redesign. For anyone unsure which part of their marketing is working, look at how you can measure where your inquiries come from.
Your website provider is almost certainly able to tell you the source of each inquiry – if it comes in online, you can usually see which website it came from, or whether it was direct. And when you talk to people, ask them simply and consistently: how did you hear about us?
It's the most informative element of any marketer's inbound traceability, because the answer is what your customer credits with bringing them to talk to you. Ask them, and let them choose when they book a time to talk – give them a simple choice: this, that, or the other.
Also pay attention to your website stats, through Google Analytics or your website provider, including whether a more sophisticated route – such as ChatGPT, Bing, or Gemini – led someone through an informed decision-making process to speak to you. Build pieces into your marketing, and into how you receive and serve customers, so you can identify what they're doing.
Goodness, I think we're coming to the end of our time. I don't know if anybody else has any more questions they'd like to ask.
Beth: We've got one in from the Q&A about how to prioritise what to do. This person isn't having much success with any of their business development. So what can they prioritise here?
Mark: There's a difference between what to prioritise and not having much success. When we have no success, there's a temptation to spray and pray – to try many things and hope something sticks.
The key to success with anything we're trying may be to pay attention to the small signs we're getting in whichever direction we're trying – whether that's networking, posting on LinkedIn, or using our existing email list. Unless you pay attention to the results and gather evidence, you'll never know if it's working until you get a customer, and even then, that customer may need something before they buy.
For my higher-value programmes, I know I'm going to need to speak to people rather than have them simply start paying me, because it may be a large commitment for them to make. So I need to break down my sales process to allow them to take the next step towards working with me. That means being able to receive feedback from their actions and availability, so you can track whether what you're doing is actually working.
Beth: Absolutely, that's great, thank you. Mark, if you wouldn't mind just one more question – I know we're slightly over – what marketing metrics can help reveal that the real problem lies outside of marketing?
Mark: What a big question. Marketing metrics can reveal what the marketing channel itself is doing, and you may have an expectation of next steps.
But if your ICP – your ideal customer profile – and your understanding of their problem is misplaced, then knowing where the drop-off happens in your marketing channel will only get you so far. It can tell you that people read a piece of content but don't take your call to action, and that may fundamentally be because they're not your customer.
The metrics of a marketing channel are more likely to tell you about the success of that channel alone. If it's performing well but people still aren't taking the smallest action you're calling for, then your marketing metric is telling you the marketing is working, but your sales channel or customer onboarding is where it's actually failing.
I use different models – for example, the customer factory model – to understand whether we're getting referrals, how we can encourage more of them or repeat business, and how well our customer acquisition process is working. Your marketing metrics measure your marketing, and your business metrics should measure your business.
Separating your marketing metrics from your existing customers, and understanding more about which type of individual, company, or business sits within your marketing metric, is where you need to focus. I'm sure there are marketing experts here who'd give you their own model too, but it's such a broad question that it's genuinely difficult to answer in full.
Beth: Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of the session, so to everyone on the call, thank you for joining.
If you want to connect with Mark, or if you have any more questions, I've popped his Enterprise Nation profile and LinkedIn in the chat – please do feel free to connect with him. Thank you so much, Mark, for hosting this great Lunch and Learn with us.
Mark: Thank you. And for one last thing – I'd love your feedback. How did you find out about this session, and what was interesting?
If you can spare me two minutes, I'd love to understand more about my marketing and my presentation, and how it helps you. If you could follow the QR code and answer three simple questions, that would be brilliant – thank you.
Beth: Absolutely, we'll leave it up for a few more seconds so people have time to share their feedback. Thank you so much again, and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day. See you soon – thank you, bye.
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