I've got, and this shows my age, twenty years of experience in marketing and digital marketing. I started working with web and online before Facebook and Twitter even existed, so it's something much more organic for me than the textbook frameworks. I don't carry the four Ps and the seven Cs around in my head. I've just lived it.

I've had so many great mentors and coaches over the years, and I've learned from so many people, that I really wanted to give back. I don't have my own startup right now, so the way I do that is by helping somebody else's business or entrepreneur or idea. I get to bring as much experience as I have and look at it from the outside, which is often where the difference gets made.

Many times they come with one problem that they think isn't working. It's conversion, it's social media, and so on. But we unlock something much bigger and much deeper that the business actually has to work on. Positioning, usually. I once had a mentee tell me their target was anyone in the manufacturing industry. Well, that's huge. Who is that, who is this anyone? You have to go in there.

Someone will say social media isn't working, so I say let's have a look. What is your messaging, where do people land when they click? Because if that's the issue you can put as much money behind it as you want and it will not convert. It's not that social media is broken, it's your messaging, it's your landing page. The other day someone came in fixated on their CAC and conversion numbers, and I asked, tell me about the customer journey. There were two or three points where people got confused or dropped off. Had they thought about offering PayPal instead of only credit card? That's not a performance problem. It sits before the numbers, and if you fix it you get where you want to go in a much better position.

The key thing I hear over and over is the founder being very proud and only talking about their product. For me the product is just a solution to a problem, so my sentence, the one I repeat, is that no one cares about your product. It's always interesting to watch their face, and then they understand what I mean. It isn't that their product is useless, it's that you have to position it as a solution. They've been so deep in it for so long that no one has ever told them that, and then it clicks.

The example I always give is a headache. If I have a headache and you sell paracetamol, fine, but I could drink water, I could have a massage, I could sleep more, and any of those might solve the same headache. That's the competitive landscape, and it opens their mind. Suddenly they're not selling a pill, they're competing for the outcome the customer actually wants.

I have, and honestly I don't use it enough, because it surprised me how good I felt after the session and I kept thinking, why don't I do this more? The hardest part for me, interestingly, is defining what I want out of the session, because sometimes I just want to absorb and talk to those incredible people. But you do need an objective.

One time I had an idea I didn't know how to productize. I teach this, so I knew the pain point and the need in the market and roughly who it was for, but a need isn't a product or a service yet. So I asked two or three mentors how to turn it into something real, and the different approaches were fascinating. One had a clear step-by-step procedure. Another was big-picture brainstorming, put yourself in the target's shoes. Another showed me a tool. They approached the same problem from completely different perspectives, and that's exactly what I tell my own mentees: go talk to other mentors too. One will resonate, another won't, and in marketing there's no single formula that always works. It's experimentation, and the different perspectives are what make it so enriching.