Make better decisions — and choose what to fund next.
Your marketing report looks better. The business still needs more of the right work. So what should you fund next?
Second book · Following The Business Command Center
Not the work. The reasoning behind it.
People do competent work with the part they receive, while the business loses sight of why it approved the work in the first place. By the time the results arrive, nobody can say whether they answered the original question — so the next spending decision is made on a number that has been separated from its reason.
In Marketing, Reforged, I examine how to keep that reasoning useful as work passes between people — and how to let their experience change the next decision. Reforging is the argument in the title: examine what the business already has, preserve what still works, repair what fails, and reconsider what it inherited.
Twelve chapters, a conclusion and a working toolkit.
A fictional twenty-two-year-old renovation company runs through the whole book. Its marketing lead, owner, sales manager and agency confront competing priorities, limited staff time, and promising results that cannot tell the whole story.
A short, deliberately unglamorous artefact that keeps a decision's reasoning attached to it as the work changes hands — and gives the next review something to argue with.
Every chapter ends with an exercise that has an output specification and a worked example, so you can apply it to a decision already sitting on your desk.
Anonymised notes from my own career sit alongside the fiction — including the decision to replace popular truck-delivery videos with harder-to-produce equipment content that sales teams later found useful.
The last part deals with what actually constrains the work: money, people and time — and how to weigh one investment against its strongest alternative.
So you always know which one you are reading.
A composite story, clearly labelled as fiction, that lets a whole decision play out across the people it passes through.
Anonymised accounts from real portfolios — what was decided, what happened, and what it cost to find out.
Published research and public examples, named and sourced, where they genuinely support the argument.
A story is never presented as proof, and a citation is never stretched past what it actually shows.
Who need a decision to survive contact with a brief, an agency, a sales team and a report — and to still mean something at the next review.
Who approve the spending, receive the results, and are left to work out whether one caused the other.
The book is still in editing, so this is a working draft rather than a final text. It is the whole first chapter. Turn the pages with the arrows, your keyboard, or a swipe.
At 9:07 on a Monday morning, Greyhaven Kitchens was having its best marketing meeting in months.
Website visits were up 41 percent. Paid-search clicks were up 29 percent. Social engagement had nearly doubled. Priya Nair, Greyhaven’s marketing coordinator, moved to the slide recommending a larger advertising budget.
Mara Ward was looking at the installation schedule beside her laptop.
“How many kitchens did we book?” she asked.
Daniel Ortiz, the sales manager, checked his sheet. “Eleven.”
“Same period last year?”
“Seventeen.”
Priya stopped with the next slide half visible.
Greyhaven had two showrooms, thirty-one employees, and twenty-two years of completed kitchens behind it. Mara’s father had built the business through workmanship and referrals. She had hired managers, improved the operation, and started paying for marketing with an expectation that it would bring more of the work Greyhaven did well.
Revenue had not collapsed. The change was harder to summarize. There were more small jobs, more price comparisons, and more inquiries that never reached a design consultation. Complete renovations, the projects around which the company had organized its people and margins, were becoming a smaller part of the conversation.
Mara turned back to the screen.
“If everything in this report is improving, why is the business getting worse?”
Priya could explain the campaign numbers. Daniel could explain the people his sales team was speaking to. Finance could explain the changing value of the work. Each account described something real. Together, they left Mara unable to decide whether spending more would help.
There was no reason to assume the traffic numbers were wrong. More people had clicked the advertisements. More people had visited the website. The trouble began when those observations became an argument for increasing the budget.
Greyhaven’s ads led with a discount. The website offered “beautiful spaces for every budget.” Its designers opened consultations by discussing a custom renovation. Its project team was proudest of coordinating the work so customers did not have to manage separate trades themselves.
Someone responding to the discount might reasonably expect a quick price for replacement doors. Someone choosing a complete renovation might need reassurance about decisions, disruption, and responsibility. Both could appear in the report as one more inquiry.
“The brief was to get more leads,” Priya said.
“We need more bookings,” Daniel replied.
“From the leads.”
“From the right work, at a time we can do it.”
That qualification had never reached the brief. By the time the agency received a target, the commercial problem had become a volume problem. The report could show that volume improving without revealing whether Greyhaven was getting closer to a healthier schedule.
I call this expensive noise: marketing activity that consumes money and attention while leaving the business unable to explain what it should do next.
You can recognize it without a large advertising account. It appears in the sponsorship renewed because nobody remembers why it began, the newsletter whose only job is to go out, and the website redesigned each time someone new takes charge. Individual pieces may be well made. Their purpose has become difficult to recover.
Before replacing that work, recover the choice it once served and decide whether the reason still holds.
At a heavy-equipment business where I worked, videos of trucks delivering machines had built a social following. Posts attracted interactions, and the company had developed a habit of making and sharing them. There was an audience, a visible response, and a type of content people knew how to produce.
I wanted to change it.
The machines we sold needed to become the subject: what they did on a job and why that work mattered to the person buying them. I moved the content away from the delivery trucks and towards the equipment in use. That meant giving up some of the audience we had already earned.
The numbers dropped. The work increased.
I needed the sales team to help obtain footage of machines working. Follow-up visits were needed to understand the value they provided. We were asking more of people across the business to make content that received fewer impressions. The familiar posts had been easier to produce and easier to celebrate.
This was the decision I had to defend: making our content look less successful by the measures people were used to seeing. It could feel as though I had made it boring. I had disrupted a working routine, lost part of its audience, and replaced it with something harder. Judged by the visible response against the effort, the change was difficult to justify.
Distribution had to change with production. I used targeted Meta and YouTube advertising to put the different machines in front of relevant audiences. Someone considering forestry equipment needed to see that work. Someone interested in road construction needed to see the machines doing those jobs. A smaller audience was only useful if it included people for whom the equipment mattered.
The signs of value came back gradually through the sales team. They reported meeting people who had already seen the machines in action. That gave the conversation a more useful starting point and, in their experience, made selling easier. Over time, the videos became material the team could keep using. More content was generated and used across the company.
I cannot turn those reports into a precise sales increase. What I can describe is the change in use: content that looked weaker in the social feed became a lasting tool in sales conversations.
The lesson needs that distinction. Lower impressions do not prove better marketing, and extra effort does not justify itself. In this case, the later reports and repeated use gave us something the initial engagement numbers could not show. The decision had consequences for who helped create the work, who encountered it, and what the sales team could do with it afterward.
I came to marketing through making things: websites, magazines, newsletters, and event materials. I still care about the craft. As my responsibilities expanded into budgets and teams, I also had to defend choices about what was worth making. Sometimes the difficult part was continuing to examine a decision while its most visible numbers made it look wrong.
Mara’s request for a larger pipeline was understandable. Empty weeks on an installation schedule had consequences. The agency had offered something she could buy now. A campaign had a price, a launch date, and a report she could read afterward.
Looking again at the problem offered a less comfortable purchase: time from people who were already busy and the possibility that the company would have to change more than its advertising.
Owners have another reason to hesitate. Some have paid for strategy that ended in a presentation without changing the work. It is reasonable to distrust another request for discovery when the previous one produced adjectives and a new logo.
The answer is to make the investigation answerable to a decision. Greyhaven did not need to understand every homeowner before deciding whether to approve this particular increase. It needed to establish whether the proposed spending would attract work it could serve profitably, and what evidence was missing from that judgment.
Sometimes the requested tactic survives this examination. A business can understand its buyers, make a credible offer, handle inquiries well, and simply need more people to encounter it. In that situation, additional reach may be the next useful investment. The investigation should be able to confirm that.
Greyhaven had enough contradictory evidence to pause the increase. It did not yet have enough evidence to settle the diagnosis.
Mara closed the budget proposal.
“Bring me the inquiries and the jobs together,” she said. “I want to see what we’re attracting and where it stops.”
Daniel looked at his calendar. “Some of those outcomes are in people’s notes. That isn’t a report I can pull this morning.”
“Who can help you?”
He named a salesperson who had handled several of the recent consultations. Priya would bring the campaign records. They would ask finance to help distinguish the work that looked valuable in a lead report from the work that made sense after design time, materials, and installation were considered.
Priya had a week of content already planned. Mara agreed that some of it would wait. The investigation would not happen invisibly on top of everyone’s existing workload.
“Two weeks,” Mara said. “Then we decide about the increase.”
Daniel still looked uneasy. “If there just aren’t enough people ready to renovate, better records won’t fill the schedule.”
“Then we need to know that too.”
The existing campaigns would continue while the team examined them. Mara was withholding an additional commitment, with a deadline for reconsidering it. There was a cost to waiting, and a cost to buying more inquiries without understanding the ones already arriving.
Priya returned to the opening slide. The green arrows were still there. She added a question beneath them: What kind of work is this bringing us?
For the first time that morning, the next task was clear.
Choose one improving number in your latest marketing report. Write three sentences: this number shows that something specific happened; it leaves this important question unanswered; before we use it to justify more spending, we will check this next piece of evidence.
For Greyhaven, the note reads: More people clicked the paid-search ads. We do not yet know whether those clicks brought more suitable complete-renovation inquiries. Before increasing the budget, Priya and Daniel will compare campaign records with inquiry type and sales progression.
Give your note to the person who receives the result of the marketing work. Ask whether it addresses the problem they are trying to solve. If it does not, you have found the first handoff to examine.
The book is in editing. Ask me to tell you the day it is out.
Working draft. Greyhaven Kitchens is fictional; the book says so where a passage is drawn from my own work instead.
The button opens your email app. Send me a request and I will email you when the book is available.