Knowing Your Business Has Value Is One Thing. Helping Others See It Is Another.
Does this sound familiar?
You’ve tried this. You’ve tried that. You’ve probably watched a dozen videos telling you what you should be doing differently. You’re posting, tweaking your website, maybe even paying for ads. And you’re still wondering why it feels like you’re working so hard for so little movement.
You know there’s value in what you offer. The customers who know you see it. So why is it so hard to help everyone else recognize it?
I know that feeling. Not just because I’ve spent more than 30 years in sales, marketing, and business development. I’ve actually been wrestling with it myself.
So grab a cup of coffee. I want to tell you a few stories. Fair warning: I have a tendency to wander down rabbit holes. Sometimes that’s where the interesting stuff is.
Reef tanks, of all things
I have a degree in Marine Biology. Which might seem about as far removed from marketing as you can get.
Years ago, we kept saltwater reef aquariums. Not just fish. Hard and soft corals, live sand, protein skimmers, algae scrubbers…the whole setup. Keeping a reef healthy meant paying attention to a lot of interconnected things.
When the fish started acting differently or the corals weren’t opening like they normally did, there wasn’t one obvious button to push. Was the pH off? Had the salinity changed? What about water hardness? What had changed recently, and what might that change have affected?
You noticed a symptom, then started looking at the environment around it.
Funny enough, I hadn’t really connected those years of reef-keeping detective work to what I do today until I started writing this story. We haven’t kept a saltwater tank in more than 20 years. Apparently, the habit of watching for interconnected clues stuck around.
That realization surprised me this week. And it made me wonder how many other pieces of my working life fit together in ways I hadn’t noticed.
Following what was possible
In 2005, I started Child Smart ID. I’d considered buying a franchise, but my sister-in-law encouraged me to look into doing it independently instead. Good advice. Going that route meant I could choose software that let me create my own designs rather than be locked into one product and a small territory.
At first, I made child identification cards and a few custom business IDs. I had to figure out everything a small-business owner figures out: marketing, sales, customer service, scheduling, billing, and how to make the numbers work. Some days, all of that before lunch.
The child ID side also taught me something interesting about reaching the right people. Often I wasn’t going directly to parents. I was working through preschools or events where parents would already be gathering. The path to the customer mattered as much as the card itself.
Then, around 2007, I met Howard. Texas had changed its law enforcement ID requirements, and the plastic cards I could produce were an opportunity for a department that needed something more sophisticated than paper badges sealed in laminate. We worked through a custom design, and I arranged to photograph and fingerprint the staff once it was approved.
I hadn’t gone looking for law enforcement work. A conversation revealed a problem, and I realized the tools I already had could help solve it. More departments followed. Over the years, when Howard moved to another department, he often called me again. We’ve kept in touch ever since, through other projects and a few unexpected turns. That relationship has lasted nearly 20 years.
Child Smart ID eventually became a side business. I couldn’t make the full-time economics work, and I was reluctant to hand off the sensitive information I was entrusted with. Still, I kept taking on work when it made sense. I liked seeing what else was possible.
A ticket to the moon
Later, in business development at DataBank, I found myself talking with executives about business process optimization and automation. I was learning a new industry, including some pretty complex oil-and-gas workflows, and I wasn’t about to pretend I knew everything.
That turned out to be helpful.
I asked questions. Lots of them. If someone used a term I didn’t understand, I asked them to explain it in plain English. I needed to understand the actual bottleneck so I could explain it to the people on my team who might be able to help. Occasionally, in the process of explaining it to me, the prospect recognized something they hadn’t connected before.
When someone interrupted my outreach with, “What are you selling?” I had a reply that usually caught them off guard.
“I’m not selling anything. I’m trying to find out whether you even have a problem we might be able to solve. It would be like selling you a ticket to the moon without asking whether you wanted to go.”
That wasn’t a clever line designed to trick someone into a sales pitch. I genuinely didn’t want to recommend something they didn’t need.
One executive at a midstream oil-and-gas company responded to my LinkedIn outreach and told me he appreciated that I’d contacted him that way. If I’d called him like everyone else, he said, he wouldn’t have answered. That felt like a little validation for an approach I was largely figuring out as I went.
Then I handed him off to a sales rep, and things went sideways. He contacted me afterward because the interaction had made him feel like his business wasn’t important. That was a problem. I talked with my manager about reassigning the account and asked to be present when we introduced his new team. So I traveled from Dallas to Houston for the lunch.
We ultimately won his business. But I still think about how easily we could have lost it. Building trust is one thing. Making sure that trust survives the next interaction is another.
When the experience is the marketing
At Rise Broadband, I moved into an entirely different world: line-of-sight internet, then fiber service in new communities. There were technical details to explain, packages to compare, launch dates to watch, and prices that sometimes changed after people had already heard something different.
I managed local Facebook pages as part of the sales organization, and people could message me directly. I answered questions, explained options, shared updates when I had them, and tried to be honest when I didn’t. Over time, prospective customers knew there was an actual person they could reach.
The graphics and messages mattered, sure. But they weren’t the whole experience. People were deciding whether to trust a company with a service they depended on, often while construction dates and details were still moving targets.
I saw how personal that could get when one customer switched to our fixed wireless service while waiting for fiber. Based on the original maps, her home was expected to be included. The switch saved her money in the meantime and seemed like a sensible bridge. Then the fiber build happened, and her property was no longer inside the service footprint.
I explored whether there was a way to get fiber to her anyway. The additional construction would have cost her several thousand dollars. She couldn’t do that. I had to tell her the answer was no.
She stayed with the wireless service, but that doesn’t erase the disappointment. I still remember having to deliver that news because I knew how much she’d been looking forward to fiber. Sometimes doing your best for a customer doesn’t mean you can make the outcome right.
Eventually, someone higher up noticed the results from my local work and moved me into a broader marketing role. The intention was to bring some of what had worked into a larger operation. But the direct, ongoing customer relationship I’d built didn’t translate into standardized emails, chats, and creative. I could see that the missing ingredient wasn’t another graphic or a slightly better line of copy.
I don’t think there was one simple villain in that story. Different departments, systems, priorities, and financial realities were involved. But I came away even more convinced that what happens around a product is always connected to marketing. Often it’s the part people remember.
Trying to explain my own value
In July 2025, I was laid off. I did the job applications and updated the résumé, because I needed to. But my heart wasn’t exactly racing to climb back into corporate life.
I’d registered Make It Memorable as a DBA in 2023 and built a WordPress site, but it had been more of a someday project than a clearly defined business. I could design graphics, write copy, manage social media, and build campaigns. But AI was changing that landscape quickly. I started asking myself a tougher question: What do I actually bring that goes beyond producing the marketing pieces?
Ironically, AI became part of how I worked that out. I wanted a thinking partner, not a substitute for my voice. I started paying more attention to business-owner discussions on Reddit and Threads, especially the words people used to describe being stuck. I looked at the websites they shared. I asked questions. Sometimes I noticed gaps that others were jumping past because they were already recommending tactics farther down the line.
By February, Clarity Catcher™ began taking shape. I was recognizing recurring patterns and different ways founders experience being stuck. I could see connections, but describing what I was seeing to someone else was a different animal.
Then this summer, while revisiting the Make It Memorable Operating System, I somehow ended up writing a book. That wasn’t the plan. LOL. And as I’ve been editing it, reading feedback, and thinking back through my career, more pieces have been falling into place.
Including the reef tanks. I didn’t even see that connection until I typed it out this morning.
I’m still putting the pieces together. That feels important to say. I’m not looking back at a perfectly planned path that led neatly to this point. I’m looking at a whole lot of experiences that are starting to make more sense beside each other.
What a conversation with me looks like
These days, if someone reaches out about a Clarity Call, I usually start by looking around. Their website. Their social pages. Their Google Business Profile, when they have one. I’m trying to get a feel for who they are, what they offer, and what someone new to the business might experience.
Then we talk.
I may have questions in front of me, but I’m not very good at sticking rigidly to a script. Someone will mention something that sounds unrelated, and I’ll mentally set it aside like a breadcrumb. A little later they’ll say something else, and I’ll think, Aha. Maybe those two things connect.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes I need to keep listening. That’s why I like conversations that leave room to wander a little, even if 30 minutes occasionally feels much too short.
I don’t want to walk into someone’s business, list everything they’ve done wrong, and call it expertise. Most of the founders I talk to are already working incredibly hard. They’re trying things. They’re spending time and money. They may be wondering whether any of it is making a difference.
There may be plenty that’s already working. There may also be a gap between what they know about their business and what a new visitor can understand. And sometimes the thing that looks like a marketing problem starts somewhere else entirely.
That’s what I want to understand before I recommend anything. Not just what appears wrong, but how the pieces fit together.
One more cup of coffee?
Here’s the sentence I keep coming back to as I write this:
Knowing the value of what you do and communicating that value so someone else recognizes it are two different things.
I’ve spent much of my career helping people make sense of complicated decisions, yet it has taken me a surprisingly long time to put words around my own value. So when a founder tells me they’ve been trying everything and still can’t figure out what’s missing, I get it.
Maybe we won’t solve everything in one conversation. Maybe we’ll discover that the first problem to address isn’t the one you expected. Or maybe you’ll hear yourself explain something about your business and realize, halfway through, that you’ve just found a missing piece.
If any of this sounds familiar, bring your coffee and let’s talk. The first 30-minute Clarity Call is free. No need to have it all figured out before we start.
That’s kind of the point.