I used to think marketing was all fluff. Then I applied my engineering training to it.
If you'd asked me 20 years ago what I thought of marketing, I'd have said it was smoke and mirrors. Fluffy, vague, riddled with guesswork, and very much not my thing. I'd just finished a Mechanical Engineering degree and was working in a robotics company developing snake-like robotic arms (as you do). Engineering made sense to me. Marketing? Not so much.
And yet... here we are.
Over the years, I’ve gradually realised that good marketing isn’t fluffy at all. It’s structured. It’s measurable. It’s process-driven. It’s basically engineering with a slightly more colourful wardrobe.
The penny started to drop when I was working with a client who was being painfully vague about their target audience. I was trying to explain why being specific is so important and I blurted out, "It’s like the difference between having a proper specification for a design project and scribbling on the back of a napkin."
That analogy hit home - for both of us. And it kept coming back.
Soon after, I was working on another client engagement and realised that we were essentially prototyping: testing and measuring small amounts of marketing before scaling up. Just like you'd prototype a product before investing in full-blown manufacturing.
That’s when it clicked.
Almost everything I was doing in marketing followed the same logical, iterative process I’d learned in engineering. Define the problem. Identify the constraints. Brainstorm possible solutions. Prototype. Test. Measure. Improve.
I mentioned this to a coach I know, and she said, "Funny you say that - that's exactly what we did when we developed our new service offering. But I’d never thought of it as an engineering process."
Exactly.
When you don’t have a process, marketing feels like swimming in a stormy sea. You get pulled around by industry trends, shiny new tactics, and persuasive salespeople who insist that this is the one thing you need to fix everything. Without a structure, everything feels unpredictable and risky.
But when you apply a clear, structured, engineering-style process, the whole experience changes. You can:
Suddenly, marketing stops being a gamble. It becomes a system. A machine.
And once you've got a machine that works, you can keep improving it. You can scale. You can stop worrying whether your next campaign will work and start knowing it will.
That’s why I wrote my book The Marketing Machine. It’s not a fluffy textbook. It’s a practical guide to engineering your marketing - using principles you probably already understand. Because if you can run a business (even if it's not as technical as designing robots!), you can absolutely design a marketing system that works.
You don’t need more guesswork. You need a process.
And that’s exactly what this book gives you.
Get yourself a copy here and start building your own marketing machine: