Nobody needs a jumbo jet to reach the deli

Why would you take a 747 to the deli?

I ask it that way because it's the shortest version of something I watched for years from inside the firms that sell marketing work. The apparatus those firms run is genuinely good, and it is built for a particular kind of problem: a company with fourteen markets, nine product lines, a board that needs convincing, and forty people who all have to end up pointed the same way. In that situation you need the discovery phase, the research, the workshop, the deck that survives a room full of executives, the account team keeping thirty threads straight.

Then that same apparatus gets sold, in a smaller size, to a business doing two million dollars with six employees. And the smaller size still carries its shape: a kickoff, a strategy phase, a monthly report, an account manager between you and whoever is doing the work. You're buying a scaled-down version of coordination machinery for a business that has almost nothing to coordinate.

What you actually needed was for someone with judgment to look at your business and tell you the two things that matter this month. That takes a fraction of the apparatus, and the apparatus is most of the bill.

What the overhead is for

None of this is a scam, which is the part worth being precise about. Every piece of that machinery exists because some client genuinely needed it. The workshop exists because forty people have to agree. The monthly report exists because someone at a big company has to justify the spend to someone above them. The account manager exists because there are thirty threads.

You have none of those problems. You have one decision-maker, which is you, and you can hear the answer directly.

So when the apparatus arrives at your door anyway, it stops being a service and becomes a cost. You pay for coordination you don't need, reporting written for an audience that doesn't exist in your company, and a layer of relationship management standing between you and the thinking you actually wanted.

The test

Next time you're being sold marketing help, add up how much of what's being described is the work and how much is the machinery around the work. Ask what happens in the first thirty days. If most of the answer is process — onboarding, discovery, alignment, a plan for the plan — you're being quoted for a jet, and your errand is four blocks away.

Right-sized help for a business your size looks unglamorous. Someone who knows what they're looking at, a short answer, and the next thing to do. That's the whole flight.