So Here’s My Story

I didn’t start out wanting to be a marketing consultant.

I was a radio guy. Morning show host, program director, sales manager - twenty-five years behind the mic and a few more behind the desk.

But I kept noticing something. Local businesses would come in, buy a schedule of commercials, run them for a few weeks, and then disappear. Some came back. Too many didn't.

Some advertisers got no results at all. Others had great successes. That meant the Medium wasn't the problem. It had to be the message.

So I started reading. Everything I could find on marketing, persuasion, psychology, positioning. I studied the clients who succeeded and the ones who didn't. I looked for patterns.

What I found was this: most small business marketing advice is either too vague to be useful ("just be authentic!") or too complicated to actually implement ("first, build a fourteen-step funnel...").

What was missing was a framework. Something simple enough to remember, but complete enough to actually work.

That's what the A.I.M. Framework is. It's the system I wish I'd had thirty years ago - and the one I use with every client today.

It's built around three questions:

Authority: Why should they listen to you?
Interest: Why should they care right now?
Reputation: What should we say to people who don't need us... yet?

Answer those three questions well, and you don't need to out-spend your competition. You just need to out-think them.

I've spent the last fifteen years refining this framework with clients in dozens of industries. Now I'm putting it all into a book - because I think more business owners deserve to know how this actually works.