I had a conversation with two brothers who run an events catering business. It has stuck with me, because it's the clearest example I've come across of a problem almost every founder-led business runs into at some point.
They'd spent around £3,500 with a marketing company over a few months. Cold email, lead nurture, the usual. At the end of it, they had, in their words, nothing to show for it. Not a single lead. And they were, understandably, furious. So furious that they'd decided to stop trusting agencies altogether and build the whole thing in-house instead.
What struck me wasn't that the campaign failed. Campaigns fail. It was why it failed, and why the lesson they took from it was the wrong one.
"Nothing to show for it"
That phrase came up again and again in our conversation. "What are we left with at the end of it?" They'd handed over money, activity had supposedly happened somewhere in the background, and nothing came back. No leads, no assets they could see, no understanding of what had even been done. Just an invoice and a sense of having been had.
And here's the thing. They were right to be angry, but they'd diagnosed the wrong culprit. They blamed agencies as a category. The real problem was more specific, and it's one you can fall into whether you outsource your marketing or do it yourself.
They were paying for activity without any of the things that make activity work.
Activity is not the same as results
This is the trap. It's easy to measure activity: emails sent, posts published, money spent. It feels like progress. But activity only turns into results when a few things underneath it are right, and those things are invisible and unglamorous, so they get skipped.
The brothers' campaign almost certainly sent the emails. The activity happened. But did anyone get the messaging right, the actual words, the offer, the reason a busy prospect would care? Were they reaching the right people, a properly defined audience, not just a bought list? Was the technical setup sound, so the emails even landed in inboxes rather than spam folders?
When I looked at their own setup later, the email configuration alone had errors significant enough that a chunk of their messages probably never reached anyone at all. They'd been sending into the void and counting it as activity.
That's the pattern. Money goes in, activity comes out, and because the foundations underneath (message, audience, setup) were never built, nothing converts. The spend wasn't wasted because marketing doesn't work. It was wasted because the activity had nothing solid underneath it.
Why "more leads" is the wrong goal
The brothers wanted leads. Of course they did. But leads, on their own, are just the top of a funnel, and a lead that arrives before any trust exists usually goes nowhere.
There's a stat I come back to: only around 5% of your market is actually ready to buy at any given moment. The other 95% aren't bad prospects, they're just not in-market today. A single blast of cold activity is a bet that you'll catch that tiny 5% at the exact right second. Mostly you don't, which is why pure volume campaigns produce such thin results and feel like shouting into a void.
What actually converts is being in front of the right people consistently, building enough recognition and trust that when their moment comes, you're the obvious call. That requires a strategy: a clear message, the right channels, a reason to be remembered. The brothers had none of that. They had activity. So they got the predictable result of activity without strategy: nothing.
This is why "just get me more leads" is the wrong goal. More leads on top of broken foundations just means more money wasted, faster.
The right lesson from a failed campaign
The brothers concluded that agencies are the problem and they should do it all themselves. I understand the instinct, but it's the wrong lesson, and it'll likely lead them straight into the same wall, because the gap was never who pressed the buttons. It was that nobody had built the strategy underneath.
Doing it in-house with no message, no defined audience, and a broken email setup produces exactly the same nothing. You've just changed who to be annoyed at. The real lesson from a campaign that produced nothing is to ask what was missing underneath the activity.
Was the messaging actually compelling, or generic? Was the audience genuinely the right people, or a list? Was the technical foundation sound, or quietly broken? Was there any mechanism to build trust over time, or just a one-shot blast at strangers? And, bluntly, was there real demand for the offer in the first place, framed in a way that made people feel they needed it now?
Those questions tell you why the spend didn't work. "Agencies are bad" doesn't.
What working marketing spend actually needs
Before you spend another pound, in-house or outsourced, the foundations have to exist. A sharp message that makes the right person care. A clearly defined audience, not a scattergun. A technical setup that means your outreach actually arrives. The right channels for where your buyers genuinely are. And some way of staying visible over time, so you're not betting everything on catching that 5% in a single moment.
Get those right and modest spend can work hard. Skip them and unlimited spend produces what the brothers got: a pile of activity, an empty pipeline, and nothing to show for it.
Marketing spend doesn't fail because marketing doesn't work. It fails because the spend is poured on top of foundations that were never built. Fix the foundations first. Then, and only then, turn the spending up.
Does your marketing have the foundations to convert spend into results?
The Marketing Scorecard scores your setup out of 100 in about ten minutes, and shows you exactly what's missing underneath the activity.