Next time you catch yourself, or hear someone else, say "we tried marketing and it didn't work," here are the three questions you really need to be asking.

If you've let a marketing person go in the last few years, convinced they didn't work out, it's worth asking an uncomfortable question: were they actually the problem, or were they a junior asked to be a director, with no direction, getting overruled, and never really given a chance?

You can have the best website in your sector, the cleverest ad campaign, the slickest funnel. If you don't know what a customer costs you to acquire and what one is worth, you're flying blind, and no amount of clever fixes the fact that you can't tell whether any of it is working.

Google's I/O 2026 announcement confirms one billion monthly AI searches. Here's why small business owners need to structure their websites for AI citation, not just keyword ranking.

Just make something special to show them first.

After years of tracking every KPI under the sun, I archived the spreadsheet and committed to just three numbers. One for customers, one for recurring revenue, one for everything else. Here's why less measurement led to better decisions, and the simple framework I use each week.

A Google Business Profile is the highest-return thing a micro-business owner can do this week. It's free, it takes 20 minutes, and for most owners it brings in more enquiries than the website itself. Here's the proper guide to setting yours up.

The homepage gets the visit, but the About page gets the decision. By the time someone clicks About, they're past curiosity and into evaluation. Here's why most micro-business About pages are quietly losing customers, and how to fix yours this afternoon.

AI Overviews now appear on 40% of Google searches and click-through rates have collapsed. The internet your customers use isn't the one your website was built for. Here's the strategic and practical playbook for what a small business website actually needs to do now.

Micro-business owners are getting more sophisticated. They're moving from "throw money at the symptom" to "fix the underlying business." Here are the four signals I'm seeing in real time, and what they add up to.

Most micro-business owners haven't looked at their own website with fresh eyes in months. Meanwhile, it's been quietly underperforming. Here's a 30-minute audit you can do this afternoon, with five practical fixes most owners can implement themselves this week.

Most successful businesses start with a DIY website, and that's the right call. But DIY is a phase, not a destination. Here are the five signs you've reached the end of it, plus an honest look at what a professional website actually costs to bring in.

Every SME owner I speak to is under-pricing. Most of them know it. Most of them are scared to do anything about it. Here's the truth nobody mentions: you lose fewer customers than you think, and the ones you lose are usually the ones you should have lost.

A small business website is a product, not a project. The build is one side of the coin. The ongoing work is the other. Most owners pay for one and wonder why they don't get the other. Here's the mental model that fixes it.

If you run a small business and you write your own sales emails, this one’s for you. It’s a tiny change, it costs nothing, and in my experience it’s one of the highest-impact tweaks you can make to your outreach.

If your website traffic has moved noticeably over the last three weeks, you are not imagining it. Google began rolling out its March 2026 Core Update on 27 March. This article breaks down what actually happened, what it means for small and owner-managed businesses, and the practical steps to take next.

Every SME owner is quietly waiting for something. The big client. The breakthrough. The lucky break. The honest truth is that almost none of those things arrive. The business you've got is the business you build, week by week, with the work in front of you.

A few years ago my wife decided to take her equine massage practice seriously. The conversation that followed happened, naturally, at our kitchen table. What she built next is a case study in why niche wins, why teaching beats selling, and why some YouTube channels are better off un-monetised.

Just launched is a new website for Madresfield Club, the social club in Madresfield Village near Malvern.