The Hard Truth I Tell My Clients About Their Business
Why throwing money at ads won't fix your broken business model - and what you should fix first before spending a dime on marketing.
Hey marketer! 👋🏻
I’ve experienced this countless times, especially during COVID. Someone comes to me: “I urgently need an e-shop for masks!” or “For sanitizers!” or whatever was scarce at the moment. We built it, loaded products, created beautiful design. And then suddenly: “Okay, now how do we get customers?”
Until that moment, they hadn’t thought about marketing channels at all. No idea, no plan. They just built thUděláme to jinak. Neříkejme tam to sdělení, ať se ho dozví až v tom článku. Ať je tam jenom to, že ten člověk vlastně nebude vidět, jakou radu já dávám klientům e shop and waited for people to come. As if opening doors was enough to make crowds rush in.
The Restaurant Reality Check
It reminds me of Gordon Ramsay in Kitchen Nightmares. Remember? How he showed those restaurants that the problem wasn’t marketing, but fundamentals? When he brought them a full house with his name and they couldn’t handle the service, it revealed where the real problem was. The kitchen didn’t work, they weren’t prepared for the rush, they had no supply chain sorted. Marketing wouldn’t help them - it would only expose all their weaknesses at once.
Imagine a coffee shop in a beautiful location, great coffee, amazing interior. But it’s off the beaten path, no parking nearby, no public transport. You can invest millions in advertising, but people simply won’t get there. The problem isn’t marketing - it’s the concept itself.
The Pattern I See Everywhere
I see it constantly. People build businesses without any idea how to get customers to them. They rely on advertising to solve everything. They don’t handle operations - what happens when customers actually come. They haven’t figured out processes, deliveries, service. And most importantly - they expect marketing to save an offer that nobody actually wants.
Why does this matter?
Because when your numbers are terrible, advertising just amplifies your losses. When you haven’t solved the foundation - operations, processes, margins - no campaign will help you. On the contrary - it will show all weaknesses at once.
“Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.”
– David Ogilvy
Marketing should be an accelerator for a successful business, not resuscitation for a dead horse. As Ogilvy said - you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
So How Do You Do It Right?
First, fix your business core. How you buy, how you sell, at what price, with what margin, how fast you deliver, how you process orders. All this must work like clockwork.
That’s why I go through the order process in detail with clients when building their e-commerce. How will they handle orders, how many people are involved, what steps are there, what situations might arise and how will they respond. I create a mind map where we work through all possibilities and situations that might occur:
What if there’s a complaint?
What if the product isn’t in stock?
What if the supplier doesn’t deliver on time?
What if the customer wants to change the order?
What if the payment doesn’t go through?
Only when we have this figured out can we launch the e-shop without fear of having some scenario uncovered. Because once it takes off - and with advertising, it can take off quickly - there’s no time to fix operations. It must work.
The Three-Step Reality Check
1. Test without advertising. If it doesn’t work organically, among friends, through personal recommendations, it won’t work with advertising either. You must get your first customers without paid promotion. Plus, during those first personal sales, you’ll get invaluable feedback. Immediately. And the more honest, the better.
2. Prepare operations. What happens when you really get 50 orders a day? Can you handle it? Do you have people? Do you have inventory? Do you have processes?
3. Only then tackle marketing. When you know the product works, processes are refined, and you’re ready for the rush.
The Small Bets Approach
I love the small bets approach - gradually testing whether individual mechanisms and marketing channels work. You test with small amounts, learning what catches on. It’s great for launching a business. But careful - this doesn’t conflict with having your foundation thought through and well-built. Small bets don’t mean chaos or unpreparedness. On the contrary - you must be able to function if one of those bets takes off.
Because what if one of those small bets works? What if 100 orders suddenly come in? Are you prepared? Do you have inventory? Do you have people? Do you have processes? If not, a successful campaign will paradoxically hurt you more than help.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Many entrepreneurs believe their problem is insufficient marketing. That paying for advertising will fix everything. But the real problem is often elsewhere:
They offer something no longer in demand
They don’t have competitive prices or terms
They can’t explain their value in 10 seconds
They’re not prepared for real business
And sometimes you need to tell yourself that painful truth - maybe time has moved on and what you offer simply no longer makes sense. You can pay for advertising all you want, but if there’s no demand for your product, it won’t help.
Marketing isn’t a life preserver. It’s an amplifier.
It amplifies both good and bad. If you have a great product, functional processes, and happy customers - marketing will help you grow faster. If you have chaos, bad margins, and dysfunctional operations - marketing will just show you faster where all your problems are.
That’s why I like to start with fundamentals. With project economics, business logic, healthy margins. Only when this works does it make sense to hit the gas.
The Bottom Line
So next time you think “we need more advertising” - stop and ask: Does my business work without it? If not, start there.
The uncomfortable truth? Many projects don’t need better marketing. They need a better business model. And if this applies to you and you don’t recognize it in time, you’ll just burn money on advertising that will forcefully show you all weaknesses at once. Advertising really isn’t a life preserver. It’s an amplifier. And when it amplifies something that doesn’t work, the result will just be a bigger disaster.
I know it’s not pleasant to hear. But it’s better to know now than after you’ve drowned money in campaigns that bring you nothing but problems.
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Looking forward to seeing what campaigns you create!
Jan Barborik
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