The dry-erase marker made a sound like a fingernail on a chalkboard, a high-pitched screech that felt like it was peeling back the enamel on my teeth. I watched as the consultant-a man who looked like he’d never spent a day in the sun and subsisted entirely on cold brew and venture capital dreams-drew another jagged arrow on the whiteboard. He labeled the box at the top ‘TOFU.’ He didn’t mean the fermented soy curd. He meant Top of Funnel. He followed it with MOFU and BOFU, and then a series of concentric circles that looked suspiciously like a diagram of Dante’s Inferno. In the middle of it all sat Sarah. Sarah makes lavender soap. It is good soap. It smells like the hills of Provence and leaves your skin feeling like you’ve been kissed by a cloud. But looking at that whiteboard, Sarah looked like she was witnessing a slow-motion car crash involving her entire life’s work.

This is the marketing-industrial complex at work: it thrives by pathologizing simplicity. It convinces a person who makes soap that their human instinct to just talk to people is naive, outdated, and frankly, a bit embarrassing.

I’ve been there. Not with soap, but with a flat-pack bookshelf I tried to assemble last Tuesday. I had 41 different types of screws laid out on the floor like some sort of metal graveyard. I had the Allen key. I had the Swedish instructions that were mostly just drawings of a man looking confused. And then, about two hours in, I realized the ‘E’ bolt was missing. It wasn’t in the box. It wasn’t under the rug. It simply didn’t exist. My marketing strategy for my own projects often feels like that bookshelf. I spend 51 hours building the frame, polishing the wood, and setting up the shelves, only to realize I’m missing the one piece that actually holds the weight: the courage to ask for money. We build these complex funnels because they act as a buffer. If I’m busy adjusting the ‘pixel optimization’ for 11 different ad sets, I don’t have to face the terrifying reality of a customer looking me in the eye and saying, ‘No, I don’t want what you’re selling.’

[Complexity is a sophisticated form of procrastination.]

The Sand Sculptor’s Truth

Cora B. understands something that most of us have forgotten under the weight of 101 different marketing ‘hacks.’ She understands that marketing is just a bridge between a problem and a solution. But the industry wants you to believe that the bridge needs a toll booth, a gift shop, a lounge for VIP members, and a complex series of sensors that track how fast people are walking across. They want you to believe that if you aren’t using a CRM that costs $211 a month, you aren’t a real business owner. It’s a lie. It’s a beautiful, expensive, data-driven lie that keeps you from actually talking to the people you serve.

I watched the consultant draw a 1-pixel line connecting Sarah’s Instagram bio to a landing page that had 11 different ‘conversion triggers.’ Sarah asked a question, her voice small. “Can’t I just go to the local farmer’s market and give out samples?” The consultant smiled the way a parent smiles at a child who thinks the moon is made of cheese. “That’s not scalable, Sarah,” he said. “We need to build a machine.”

I’ve made the mistake of overcomplicating things more times than I can count. I once spent 21 days designing a logo for a project that didn’t even have a name yet. I thought that if the logo was perfect, the fear of failure would disappear. It didn’t. It just gave me a very pretty shield to hide behind. Your marketing strategy is likely the same. If it involves more than three steps to get from ‘Hello’ to ‘Here is the product,’ you aren’t building a business; you’re building an obstacle course. You’re hoping that by the time the customer gets to the end, they’ll be too tired to negotiate.

When the noise gets too loud, you have to find someone who doesn’t speak in riddles. You need a partner who sees the 11 missing pieces of your strategy and just hands you the right screwdriver. That’s why people end up looking for things like website packages because at some point, you just want the shelf to stand up. You want a digital presence that doesn’t feel like a physics exam. You want someone to tell you that it’s okay to just sell the soap.

[The bravest thing you can do in business is be obvious.]

I think back to my bookshelf. After four hours of swearing and searching for the ‘E’ bolt, I did something radical. I went to the hardware store. I bought a standard screw that looked about right. I came home, drove it into the wood, and the whole thing stopped wobbling. It wasn’t the ‘official’ part. It didn’t match the diagram. But it worked. The shelf is currently holding 51 books and a very heavy ceramic cat. It’s not perfect, but it’s functional.

Marketing is exactly like that. You don’t need the ‘official’ 231-page strategy manual from a guru who lives in a rented mansion in Malibu. You need the ‘E’ bolt. Usually, the ‘E’ bolt is just a clear website, a way to take payment, and the willingness to tell 11 people a day that you exist. We make it complex because complexity feels like work. Simplicity feels like a risk. If you keep it simple and you fail, you have nothing to blame but yourself. If you make it complex and you fail, you can blame the algorithm, or the pixel, or the ‘TOFU’ strategy.

Cora B. doesn’t blame the tide when her sand castles melt. She knows the tide is coming. She just makes sure she’s built something worth looking at before the water hits. She’s not trying to ‘capture’ the audience; she’s trying to enchant them. There is a massive difference between a funnel and an invitation. A funnel is something you fall into. An invitation is something you accept. Most small businesses don’t need a better funnel; they need to send better invitations.

We are currently living in an era where we have more tools than ever to reach people, and yet we’ve never been further apart. We hide behind automation because we’ve been told that ‘human’ doesn’t scale. But I’ve found that 1 real conversation is worth 1001 automated emails. Sarah eventually fired the consultant. She took the $151 she would have spent on the next ‘scaling’ course and bought a high-quality wooden sign for her booth at the market. She stopped worrying about the ‘BOFU’ and started worrying about the lather.

Her website is simple now. It doesn’t have pop-ups that jump out like hungry ghosts. It doesn’t have ‘limited time offers’ that never actually expire. It just has pictures of soap and a button that says ‘Buy.’ Last I heard, she had 31 wholesale orders and a waiting list that stretches into next month. She didn’t scale her machine; she scaled her truth.

If you find yourself staring at a whiteboard covered in boxes and arrows, feeling that familiar knot of panic in your stomach, take a breath. Look at the 41 tabs open on your browser. Close them. All of them. Ask yourself one question: If I couldn’t use any jargon today, how would I tell someone I can help them? The answer to that question isn’t a strategy. It’s a conversation. And conversations don’t need pixels. They just need you to show up, without the missing pieces, and offer the soap. Does that feel too simple? Good. That’s how you know it’s working.