Facebook ads for a DJ and events company

Three businesses to run and no time left for marketing updates. Five marketers did not work out. Now the only reason he calls is to raise the budget.

Mike, DJ companies. Recorded August 2024.

Mike owns two DJ companies — one high-end, one mainstream — plus a third business. He used to do all the marketing himself, and by his own account did it well: deep in analytics, keeping up with trends, watching seminars.

What ended that was scale. Running three businesses does not leave room to keep pace with platform updates, analytics migrations and policy changes. Marketing became the thing that got attention when nothing else was on fire, which is not a strategy.

He had hired five marketers before this, and none of them worked out. That is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over — a run of bad hires is the norm in this industry, and it makes owners reasonably suspicious of the next one.

The arrangement now is genuinely hands-off. On the recording he notes we had not spoken in about four months, and the only reason he initiates contact is to increase the budget because the results justify it.

That is what management should look like for an owner-operator. Not more meetings and dashboards, but an account that runs, reports, and does not require the owner to become an expert in a platform that changes monthly.

His advice to anyone deciding is unsentimental: it is a risk, take it, and judge it on thirty days of results rather than on the pitch.

In Mike’s words