One of my long-time referral partners recently went out of business. She was a PR professional, with a great network of long-standing relationships and a number of past clients who loved working with her. But after the pandemic, when the market and people's buying habits shifted drastically, she found herself with fewer and fewer opportunities.

Pretty soon, her last client had wrapped up their engagement, and with nothing new in her pipeline, she decided to retire.

I remember talking to her a number of years before the pandemic, when I was building my first agency, asking her what she did to get new clients. Her response? "I've worked with so many people over the years, that the referrals just keep coming". She never advertised, virtually never did any PR for herself, and didn't work to differentiate her services. She strictly relied on her reputation and the fact that people knew that she delivered good work.

She had had a great career, and was fairly well set for retirement, but this is a cautionary tale because she didn't actually want to retire. I've heard a similar refrain from many independent consultants and founders of boutique firms.

Many of them are comforted by the illusion of word-of-mouth. They convince themselves that if they just keep doing great work, the pipeline will fill itself.

But the truth is word-of-mouth doesn’t scale on its own. Without marketing and business development it’s unpredictable, passive, and dependent on external variables you don’t control.

Lie: Traditional Referrals are Predictable

Referrals are great, until they aren't. Most of us, when we were first starting out, were able to grow our business quickly on the backs of consistent referrals. And this is completely normal for the first phase or two of growth. But it isn't sustainable.

What happens when your champion leaves, or worse yet, gets laid off? Hopefully you have done all the right work to get in deep with the broader leadership team and multiple business units (if you serve enterprise clients). And hopefully this champion quickly lands a new role where they are able to bring you in. But you can't build a business on hope.

Most firms primarily rely on client referrals, but these are often the hardest referrals to get, and they come in waves and aren't terribly predictable, per the example above. On top of that, without consistent effort and careful curation, the referrals often come from misaligned clients and partners.

When I launched my first agency, we used to consistently get referrals from a local PR firm (not the one I mentioned at the beginning) but they were terrible referrals, and after a while we stopped responding to them. The father of one of our friends owned that PR firm, and for some reason he believed us to be small potatoes, and referred accordingly. Even after we tried to guide him on the type of work we did, by sending him case studies, he still sent us low quality referrals.

I don't believe these referrals were malicious - he had no reason to purposefully undermine what we were trying to build - but our reputation simply wasn't enough for him to go on.

Relationships alone don't scale unless you operationalize how people hear about, talk about, and why they trust your firm.

This is where marketing comes in. You use marketing to scale referrals. It's not about ditching relationships. It's about amplifying them.

Lie: People Care About Our Awards and Testimonials

Sorry, but they don't. That Inc. 5000 award? Nobody cares. Best Places to Work? Nobody cares about that one either. The testimonials you have listed on your homepage? Nope. Your Clutch reviews? Maybe, but not without context.

And that's the rub - context matters. There are no amount of awards, testimonials, case studies, and reviews that will get someone to buy your services unless they believe that you are the best at understanding their problem. And the best way to do that is to get them to think differently about their problem - to reframe it in a way that helps them make sense of it like they were never able to before. That requires frameworks, methodologies, mental models, etc.

This IP is what gives context to your awards, testimonials, and case studies. Having this IP allows for all of these things to provide proof of the value of the IP, and the assets to evangelize the IP effectively.

Which brings us to...

Lie: Markeing Is Just Promotion

How many times have you heard someone say that Tesla is so successful without spending any money on marketing? To the uninitiated this might seem like crazy, but true claim because has anyone every seen a Tesla ad? No.

The common misconception is that Marketing = promotion, branding, or ads. This is why many believe that Tesla doesn't do marketing, and why many consulting founders believe that they have been successful without doing any marketing.

Yet anyone who took a foundational Marketing 101 course in college will have heard about the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Yet most people equate marketing to the last P - Promotion, and forget about the other 3 Ps

• Product → Your IP: proprietary frameworks, methodologies, and diagnostic tools.
• Price → Strategic pricing reflects perceived value of your IP.
• Place → Where and how you show up (content, events, partner ecosystems) to evangelize your IP.

So while you may think that your service offering is the product. It's actually the thinking behind the service delivery - your IP - that's the real product. And that product needs to be priced, placed, and promoted appropriately so that you can effectively drive growth.

This means that any time one of your SMEs speaks at a conference, that's marketing. Any time you develop a new service line, that's marketing. Any time you optimize your methodology or framework, that's marketing. And yes, anytime you promote your frameworks, methodologies, or services, that's also marketing.

Marketing isn’t about shouting louder—it’s about making your expertise easier to find, trust, and refer.

The Hidden Cost of No Marketing

Without marketing, you become vulnerable to:

• Feast-or-famine cycles
• Being invisible to ideal clients who aren’t already in your network
• Lower pricing power due to a weak perceived position

Great work that no one knows about - or at least not enough of the right people know about - doesn’t grow a firm. Referrals are not a growth strategy. They're a starting point. Marketing is how you turn the whispers of your best clients into a clear signal to your ideal audience.

If your work is truly great, then you owe it to yourself - and your team - to market it well.