When I was 18, I sailed across the Atlantic in the Tall Ships Race. Four weeks at sea. By the time we reached Bermuda, we knew every inch of that boat. We stepped off, walked away from it for the first time in a month and turned round to look. My crewmate said, “Huh. I’d forgotten it was red.”
That story came up when I joined Chris Adams on his podcast, Muhami Matters. Chris advises founder-led law firms and professional services businesses. I work mostly with engineering and technical businesses. Different worlds, same problem: brilliant experts who become business owners, then find it very hard to see their business the way a buyer sees it.
Rather than a straight interview, we compared notes. A few things stood out.
Selling gets easier when you’re talking to the right people. Most experts hate the idea of being a salesperson. Chris’s point was that if you know exactly who you’re for, the conversations stop feeling like selling. You’re just talking about the thing you do every day, with people who need it.
Marketing is anything that makes it easier for people to buy. Is a nurture email marketing or sales? What about a chatbot that books a call? I’m not precious about the labels. What matters is profit, and making it easy for the right people to say yes.
Bigger isn’t always better. I once started building an agency. I could have carried on. But I was spending my days selling marketing, not doing it, and I realised the vision had come from other people, not from me.
Marketing isn’t one thing that either works or doesn’t. If you build a car and it won’t start, you don’t scrap the car. You check whether the key’s connected to the starter motor. “We tried social media and it didn’t work” deserves the same treatment.
We also covered marketing in regulated industries, making complex expertise easy to understand, and how to spot when you need an outside view. There’s also a surprisingly good networking question involving cheese.
Watch the full conversation
Jump to a section
- 01:48 From mechanical engineering to marketing
- 05:57 Why selling feels uncomfortable for specialists
- 08:26 Networking and starting better conversations
- 11:24 What marketing actually means
- 29:36 Why bigger is not always better
- 37:03 Making complex expertise easy to understand
- 40:49 Seeing the business from the buyer’s perspective
- 50:30 Knowing when to seek external support
- 54:44 The Marketing Machine: engineering a marketing system
Thanks to Chris for having me. You can find more from him at cjaconsult.com and muhami.ae.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your own boat, book a clarity call. The step-by-step version is in my book, The Marketing Machine.
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