The best marketing advice never reaches small businesses.

The business owners I work with keep asking me one question: is my marketing working, or am I throwing money away? When I left a job running marketing for a company listed on the stock market, I started advising small businesses: a home services company, a local shop, an online store. Inside three months the same question had come up with nearly all of them. They could already hire somebody to run ads or rebuild a website, and they already had the tools, four or five of them, none of which talked to each other. What was hard to come by was somebody to tell them which of it was worth doing, and which of it to stop.

That’s a judgment question, and it has only ever been available by hiring somebody. An employee, a consultant, an agency — by the hour, by the month, or on the payroll. What you’re really paying for is judgment that took decades to build, and it doesn’t come separately from the person who has it. Ten to thirty thousand dollars a month, so only companies that could afford that ever had it. For twenty-five years, I was one of the people they bought it from.

I started building that judgment at Procter & Gamble, the company that invented brand management. I was certified there as a Master Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma, its highest level. What it trains you to do is find what is really causing a problem, and cut what isn’t earning its keep. In practice that meant looking at three hundred problems in one business and finding the handful causing most of the rest. A small business’s marketing is the same problem: plenty going on, and no way to tell which part of it is working.

I spent the rest of my career doing exactly that for marketing, for brands like Google, Nike and Coca-Cola. I worked from inside the firms those brands call when a decision is too big to get wrong, deciding what mattered in their marketing and what did not. Some of the best of it was work for small business owners themselves: what Google should offer them, what American Express should build for them, a marketing kit SC Johnson made for small cleaning and services firms. That work stayed with me, and eventually I left to build something for business owners myself — a marketplace that more than 35,000 small businesses used. That’s where I found out what it’s like to be the one making payroll, too.

Then I stopped advising and went to run marketing myself. I became Chief Marketing Officer of a business about the size of the ones I built Frank for, and I found what anyone in that job finds: a hundred things you could do, everybody asking for one more, and no reliable way to know which few actually mattered. There was no marketing department when I arrived, so I built a small one and hired the agencies that worked alongside it.

That job is where I stopped understanding the problem and started living it. I’d felt a version of this as a founder, and I’d watched it from the advisor’s side of the table for years. This time it was mine. What I wanted from anybody advising me was simple — tell me which few things matter, and which I can let go of. Nobody was selling that. So I left to go and do exactly that, with business owners.

Then I found out I couldn’t serve them at a price they could pay. Doing it properly takes hours, and my hours already had buyers who could pay far more for them. That is why the businesses that need it most are the ones least able to buy it.

So I spent two years taking my judgment apart and building it into Frank. It’s my own small business now. I wrote down what I read first, what I rule out, what I’d fix and in what order, until all of it could work without me in the room. It does the reading; the judgment is still mine. Every week it tells you the few things worth your time, and what to skip. When Frank gets something wrong, I go back and fix what produced it, and every week after that is better for the correction.

Most of the people you have paid for marketing were hired for a piece of it. The ads, the site, the posts — each answers for their own piece and no further. So the question you actually have, which of it matters and which of it to stop, usually belongs to nobody. And anyone who could have answered it was selling the doing, which makes cutting back a hard thing to recommend.

Frank is that same judgment, for the businesses it never used to reach. It doesn’t run your ads, post for you, or bill you by the hour. Nothing it recommends puts money in my pocket, so telling you to stop spending on something is as easy to say as telling you to start. Which is why I read your business before you pay me anything. You see the real thing and decide for yourself, and that is how most members find me.

For the same reason, I’d rather say Frank is wrong for you than let you find that out later. It is built for businesses between roughly $500,000 and $5 million in sales. Below that there usually isn’t enough of a track record yet — not enough customers, reviews or search history to read anything reliable from the outside. And it doesn’t do the work. Frank tells you what to do and how, and the doing stays with you, your team, or whoever you hire.

Promising results is why business owners stop trusting marketers in the first place. So I don’t. What I promise instead is that you’ll know where your marketing stands, what the few things worth doing are, what to skip, and why those are the right ones for your business. Judge that the way you’d judge any advisor — on whether it’s right, and whether it’s specific to you. If something here doesn’t answer your question, email me. I’m the one who answers.

Jose