Jake Summerhayes

Working with founders and business Leaders to craft powerful and authentic personal brands. 

Why? Because reputation matters. 

- 82% of customers trust a company when their senior management members are active on social media

- Brand messages are shared 24x more on personal accounts compared to company accounts

- Customers are willing to pay 13.5x more for elite industry experts

Yet only 1% of LinkedIn's 700 million users share weekly content. 

Our mission at Kurogo is to solve that.

Kurogo is derived from the Japanese ‘Kuroko’ referring to the black clad stagehands in traditional Japanese theatre.

The convention of wearing black implying the invisibility of the wearer on stage. 

We are your Kurogo. 

Directing, driving and delivering your personal brand from the background. 

Giving you the spotlight to excel in what you do best.

Head Of Client Services

I routinely ask our team members to fuck off.

When they:

- Open client chats while on holiday
- Message me when they’re off
- Refuse to step away while being ill
- Go far beyond the scope when unnecessary
- Don’t take enough breaks
- Log on to do some “quick work” on weekends

I’ve far from mastered work-life balance, but I don’t buy into the hustle culture nonsense for one second.

Client Services Director @ Kurogo | We create thought leaders through Personal Branding

If I should die, make sure not to cancel the standups,
If I should die, finish off my client reports,
If I should die, activate my out of office.

Unable are the loved to die, for the value we build for shareholders is immortality.

Life before Bailey:

- Nail 4 Red Bulls a day
- Logging onto Slack at 9:15am
- Stay up till 1 am watching TikToks

Life after getting him:

- Up at 6am for morning walks
- Client retention is up 23% (coincidence? don’t think so)
- Team love me more when they see him chilling in my office on calls
- I have to get up and go outside multiple times a day to take him on walks
- More LinkedIn clout as a dog parent

If you’re struggling for routine/structure, get a dog 🐶❤️

P.S. Should I start building his personal brand or am I too late already?

"How do I get a job at Kurogo"?

We’re adding a new team member almost every month right now, and I get asked this question every week.

Here’s what you must believe to thrive at Kurogo 👇🏻

- Radical responsibility
If you say you will do something, you do it.
No blaming, no excuses, no “busy week mate”.
You own your work, your learning, and your tasks.
So you gotta pull your weight.

- Constant improvement
You look at your work and ask where you can push more.
You ask for feedback. You take it on the chin.
You give feedback with care.
You care about getting better every week.

- Client obsession
Clients are the lifeblood.
You think about them before you think about yourself.
You go beyond the scope when it is right.
You are more ambitious for their brand than they are.

- Equality
Titles aren't the most impressive thing to us.
Age does not matter.
Great ideas can come from any voice on the call.
You treat everyone with respect.
Above all, you are kind in a hard industry.

- Pride in the basics
You meet deadlines.
You keep your promises.
You communicate clearly and often.
You deliver work accurately the first time.
You take pride in things most people are lazy about.

At Kurogo, the people we hire are the foundation of our success.

I can say with utmost certainty right now that every person on the team is one of the best at what they do. 

Honestly, what more can you want as a leader?

More than half of our hires over the past year have discovered the company through one team member’s personal brand.

And this lad isn’t even a part of our senior team.

Now imagine how much top talent you can attract if everyone from your leadership team were building their personal brands.

If you want the best people to join your business, don’t sleep on EGC (employee-generated content).

Post through personal profile = good 👍
Post only through company profile = waste 👎
Don’t post anything ever = bad 👎👎

Optimise your profile and post = good 👍
Not optimise your profile and post = waste 👎
Not optimise your profile and no post = bad 👎👎

Post well written, formatted content to help people = good 👍
Post unoptimised random content to help people = waste 👎
Post motivational quotes with no value = bad 👎👎

Connect with targeted people and network = good 👍
Connect with random people and no talk = waste 👎
Connect with everyone and pitch = f*cking 👎👎

--

Download our full guide to personal branding (see comments) = good 👍

Kurogo - Personal Branding Agency Branding Agency turned 5 last month, so we asked our team why they love working here, this is what they said 👇🏻❤️

We asked our team what the best part of their job is 

The true cost of not building a personal brand is that:

Reputation compounds, but so does silence.

The market doesn’t reward hidden operators.

It rewards visible thinkers.

You don’t need to be an influencer.
You just need to be findable.

Because when recruiters, founders, or investors look you up and see nothing…

You’ve already lost half the battle.

📷 - me when Sam G. Winsbury asks me to post more InDuStRy InSiGhTs

We’re a team of 21 people in 3 continents.

These 5 tools stop us from going insane having meetings all day ⬇️

1. Slack: every time I have to use Teams I almost cry
2. Loom: NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS A 60 MINS MEETING
3. Fathom: so that I don’t have to rely on my brain to remember stuff
4. Notion: makes complicated shit easier, also makes everything look good
5. Canva: makes creativity easy for artistically challenged people 🙋🏻‍♂️

When your content is so dangerously good, LinkedIn decides to keep it a secret.

We’ve packaged the system we use to build personal brands that actually drive revenue into one  guide:

🚨 How To Become The Authority, Sign More Clients and Grow Your Business In 2026.

Growing a business in 2026 is a bit of a minefield.
What worked a few years ago doesn’t work the same anymore.

Cold outreach gets ignored.
Ads get more expensive.
Buyers take longer to decide.

And the most frustrating bit…
You’ll often see competitors who aren’t even as good doing better than you.

It’s not luck.
The market has changed.
People don’t buy like they did in 2016 anymore.

Back then, it was simple:
Ad → Click → Buy.

Now the journey is messy.

Prospects research you.
Check your profile.
Look at your content.
Ask their network.
Watch you for months before reaching out.

So when you consistently share your thinking, ideas and expertise online:

- Prospects trust you before the first call
- Sales cycles shorten
- Your content becomes a 24/7 salesperson
- Opportunities come to you instead of the other way around

That’s exactly what this guide breaks down.

Inside you’ll find:

→ The 9-step Authority Engine we use with clients
→ How to position yourself so people actually listen
→ The G-A-C content system that drives growth, trust and clients
→ How to social sell without being a LinkedIn knobhead
→ The lead capture and conversion ecosystem that turns attention into revenue

If you’re a founder or marketing leader trying to grow in 2026, this is the system that’s working right now.

To get free access:

1. Like this post
2. Comment “AUTHORITY”
3. Make sure you’re following me so I can share ✅

“I don’t want to be one of those LinkedIn people.” Fair.

But the issue is… 

You’re already being judged.

By:

- Prospective hires.
- Agencies pitching you.
- Founders considering you.
- Recruiters building lists.

And if the only thing they see is:
“Head of Marketing at X” (company name, not platform)

You look like everyone else.

Your thinking is your edge.
But if you never publish it, it has zero market value.

I’m not saying go the random selfies and hustle posts route.

But in 2026, documented perspective matters more than ever, because:

If you don’t shape your narrative, someone else will (usually poorly).

So with that in mind, what impression do you get of me from this work setup?

This is who you’re talking to when you say you’re ‘taking it in-house’ btw

Right here's the truth with LinkedIn content:

Your first two lines decide everything. Fuck them up and your post is invisible.

You can spend an hour on a post.
Pour your soul into it.
Share your best framework.

But if the hook is weak, nobody sees it.
You are shouting into the void.

I like big views.
I love leads more.

We use a simple way to write posts that both grow and sell:

1️⃣ First: find the right angle

Same idea.
Two options:

- “5 tips to write content”
- “How I pulled 100,000 views from one post”

One is homework.
One is clicks 💷

Good angles:

- Create curiosity
- Feel unexpected
- Go against the crowd
- Sound a bit extreme

“Good and bad” dies.
“Best and worst” wins.

2️⃣ Channel your inner psycho editor

You only get one or two lines before the reader has to click “see more”.
Miss that and nothing else matters.

Two ways our elite writing team writes hooks:

- Cliffhangers for stories
- Promising value for how-to posts

Then we stack the posts with:

→ Personal proof
→ Clear payoff
→ Numbers
→ Key pain points of one clear person we're speaking to

“I got 187,392 views with this hook framework. Here is how you steal it.”

That gets clicks from the right people.

3️⃣ Deliver or get called clickbait

Once they click, we owe them.
We keep the body:

- Stupid simple (grade 8 level)
- Full of white space
- Built around a clear process or framework

High perceived value + low effort to read = holy grail.

Your hook wins attention.
Your post's body earns trust.
Both together build authority 🤝🏻

I'm in a generous mood today, so here are 228 of our best hooks:

https://lnkd.in/e5fX5YKT

P.S.

Join our waitlist for free personal branding workshops (no pitches ever, I promise)

https://lnkd.in/exVYf5Pc

If your leaders are invisible online, your company might already be losing the trust game.

Your board think “brand” is logos.
Your execs think “visibility” is speaking at one conference a year.
Your marketing team post safe beige nonsense from the company page.

Meanwhile, your buyers stalk people, not PDFs.

They check who runs the place.
What they believe.
How they think.

82% of customers trust a company more when senior leaders show up on social.

Leaders who:

- Share how they make decisions
- Admit when they got it wrong
- Talk like a human, not a press release

When a CEO posts every week, three things happen:

1. Trust goes up.
People see a real person, not a logo, behind the promise.

2. Influence goes up.
Decision makers think “I know how this person thinks, I can bet on them.”

3. Alignment goes up.
Teams stop guessing the strategy, because they can read it in plain sight.

—

Personal branding for leaders is not vanity.

It is how you export your judgement at scale.

It is how you turn “our values” from poster fluff into visible behaviour.

💬 If you don’t know where to start, grab our free guide from the link in the comments, it’s a new resource we built to help you leverage LinkedIn to scale your business, reputation, and audience.

LinkedIn is a lot like dating.

And there are two types of people on LinkedIn.
(Both are doing it wrong).

- First type:

They propose on the first date.
They connect with you and immediately hit you with:
“Hey mate. Loved your profile. Want to jump on a quick call to discuss how we can 10x synergies?”

Instant ick.

- Second type:

They never propose at all.
They post for months.
They get followers.
They get DMs like “this is really good”.
They get profile views.

And they do absolutely nothing with it because they’re scared of being “salesy”.

So they stay in the talking stage forever. Neither wins.

The sweet spot is what we call hand raises 🙋🏻‍♂️

That’s when someone is basically telling you:
“I’m interested in what you do.”

Examples of hand raises:

• They view your profile
• They like and comment regularly
• They follow you after a strong post
• They join your newsletter
• They DM you with an actual question
• They keep showing up

These are hot prospects.
Not because they’re ready to buy today.

But because you’re already on their radar.
So your job is not to pitch them.

Your job is to start a normal conversation and nudge.

➡️ Here’s the simple play:

1. Spot the hand raise

Profile views. Repeat engagers. New followers.

2. Send a normal message

No pitch. No calendar link. No “just circling back”.
Something like:
“Alright mate. Seen you’ve been engaging on a few posts. What side of marketing are you focused on this year?”

3. Listen, then help

If they mention a problem, you can share something useful.

4. Only then offer a next step

If they keep asking questions, they’re basically inviting it.

—

If you want the full breakdown of how to sell effectively on LinkedIn, we put the blueprint in this ultimate guide. I’ll leave a link to it in the comments for you.

As a kid, I’d watch people on TV and think:

“You’re a doughnut. Who let you on camera?”

What I realise today though, is that this was the OG personal branding.

You were handed visibility and opportunities that others didn’t get because you had the skills, sure, but also a strong brand.

Personal branding isn’t new.
We just gave it a name.

What’s changed is not the concept.
It’s access.

PR used to be for the top 5-10%.
Now, reputation building is democratised because social media exists.

Personal branding isn’t a trend.
It’s a core distribution channel that can’t be ignored anymore.

Leaders are forced to be visible, whether they like it or not, so you might as well control the narrative.

—

We’ve built 350+ personal brands. Join the waitlist to learn all our personal branding knowledge for free (no pitches I promise) 👊🏻

https://lnkd.in/exVYf5Pc

It does my head in how many marketing execs think the problem is still demand gen.

When what they really have is a visibility problem.

If you’re hitting pipeline targets, running paid, got the CRM dialled in.

But no one knows who you are or what you do…

I hate to break it to you mate 😶

When budgets tighten, attention shifts.
Boards don’t double down on anonymous operators.

They double down on visible leaders.

The uncomfortable truth:

If your CEO is invisible, and you’re invisible, your company feels invisible.

Company pages don’t build authority. People do.

And yet most marketing leaders still treat personal branding like a side quest.

Here’s what actually happens when leadership shows up consistently:

✅ Sales cycles shorten.
✅ Inbound quality improves.
✅ Recruitment gets easier.
✅Pricing pressure drops.
✅ Category authority compounds.

This isn’t about ego.

It’s about risk and reputation management (which I know a thing or two about)

Reputation is insurance.

Ignore it now, pay for it later - upto you.

Most founders post for likes. 
Smart founders post for leads.

Here is how I think about content when we build accounts at Kurogo:

This is based on: 

→ building 350 accounts
→ Writing over 40,000 posts 
→ hundreds of millions of views)

Your content has 3 jobs, not 1:

- Growth content → pull new people into your world
- Authority content → prove you are the safe, obvious choice
- Conversion content → move buyers from “interested” to “where do I pay?”

Miss one of these and you’re wasting your time. 

Every post should look like this:

- Hook that stops the scroll
- Clear point of view
- Proof you’re not chatting nonsense
- Takeaway or CTA
- Ideally, a complementary image

Not viral cringe fluff.
Not vague “authentic” nonsense.
Not oversharing for your dopamine fix.

Just ideas/opinions from lived experience.

Hope this helps ✌️

80% of businesses fall into one of two marketing camps. Both are shite.

➡️ Camp 1: No marketing

These are the people who say:
“We just focus on doing great work. It speaks for itself.”

Lovely sentiment.
But in 2026, great work is table stakes.
There are thousands of people doing good work in every industry.
If nobody knows about yours, congratulations.
You’ve become the best-kept secret in your industry.

➡️ Camp 2: Send and spend

These are the people who say:

“Just send more emails.”
“Run more ads.”
“Book more cold calls.”

So they:

- Blast cold emails
- Hammer the phones
- Spend a fortune on ads

And yeah… they convert 0.1% of people.
Which technically works.

But the moment they stop sending or spending, the pipeline disappears overnight.

It’s basically marketing on life support.

—

What if I told you there’s a third option?

➡️ Authority Positioning

Instead of chasing attention every day,
You build a reputation that brings people to you through:

- Content
- Ideas
- Perspective
- Proof

Suddenly, prospects show up already knowing you.
Already trusting you.
Already halfway sold.

We see it every week.
Someone messages our clients saying:
“Been seeing your posts for months. Can we talk?”

That’s not magic.
That’s what happens when trust is built before the sales call.

—

If you want the full breakdown of how this works, we’ve just put it into a step-by-step system called:

💡 The Authority Engine.

It covers:

- Positioning
- Content strategy
- Profile optimisation
- Social selling
- Lead capture

Basically, it teaches you how to stop chasing leads and start attracting them.

I’m not selling you anything, just drop me a DM saying “TAE” and I’ll share free access 😊

📷 - How the team used this exact system to get these insane results for Shan Hanif

Most businesses are hemorrhaging money on "leads" that never buy anything.

I've seen companies spend £50k+ per month and get maybe 2-3 actual customers.

Here's the thing everyone gets wrong:

More leads ≠ More sales

What you actually need are qualified prospects who are ready to buy.

That's what we do at Adbetter.

We don't just drive traffic. We deliver prospects who convert.

How?
→ Every lead goes through 10+ qualification checkpoints
→ Phone verification (because fake numbers waste your time)
→ Multi-step forms that filter out time-wasters
→ Only pay for leads that meet your exact criteria

Results speak louder than promises:
→ One property client sold £125M worth of real estate to our leads
→ 1400% increase in lead volumes while reducing cost-per-lead by 16%
→ 5.8x ROI achieved for cosmetic surgery within 4 months
→ 467% increase in sales volume with 83% lower cost-per-sale

Here's what I've learned after helping clients generate hundreds of millions in revenue from leads we've delivered:

Most agencies optimise for vanity metrics. We optimise for revenue.

Most agencies want to get paid whether they generate quality leads or not. We have skin in the game.

Most agencies deliver leads that look good on paper but never pick up the phone.

The difference?

We only get paid when you get genuine, qualified prospects.

No fluff. No fake numbers. No "leads" that ghost your sales team.

Currently building: Something that's going to solve the biggest problem in lead generation - the broken feedback loop between your ads and your sales team.

Think: Smart forms that qualify prospects → Rich lead data for your sales team → Custom reporting that tracks every lead → Feeding quality signals back to ad platforms so they get smarter.

Can't say much yet, but if you're tired of ad platforms optimising for junk leads, watch this space!

P.S. If you're spending money on ads and not getting the quality of leads you need, message me. I'll tell you exactly what's going wrong (for free).

Tom Richards

Google Ads isn’t a vending machine.

(Despite what some "gurus" might tell you)

You don’t put a coin in today and get a chocolate bar out 5 seconds later.

Here’s the honest timeline we give every single lead gen client at Adbetter:

Days 1–30: We are buying data. It’s going to be inefficient.
Days 30–60: We are refining. Results start to stabilise.
Day 60-90+: Now we talk about profitability.

I know.

It sounds weird for an agency owner to say: “Don’t expect profit for two months.”

But if a 60-day ramp-up period scares you?

You probably shouldn’t be running Google Ads.

The hard truth is that paid ads require financial stability.

You need the runway to absorb that initial inefficiency while the machine learns.

If you’re relying on ads to save a struggling business next week... you’re setting yourself up to fail.

PPC is an accelerator for a working business.

Not a life raft for a broken one.

Stop wasting money on leads that don’t convert | Founder @ Adbetter | Building lead gen software that makes your ads smarter

Real estate lead gen has a dirty secret. The cheapest leads are usually the most expensive.

Sounds backwards? Let me explain 👇 

When we audit property campaigns, the first thing we look at isn't CPL. It's cost per qualified lead. And cost per sale.

Because a $10 lead that never picks up the phone costs you more than just $10.

It costs your broker 5 minutes of dialling. 
It costs them confidence. 
And when they've called 40 duds in a row, it costs you the sale they should have closed on lead 41.

Meta lead forms are the worst offender. Auto-filled details, zero friction, and qualification rates often below 10%.

Our multi-step qualification funnels? We see 40% qualification rates. Because the prospect has already told you their budget, timeline, and what they're looking for.

Your broker picks up the phone with context. 
The conversation is warm. 
Close rates go up.

But the biggest difference is what happens when you can see the full picture.

When your reporting tracks attribution from first click all the way through to sale, the "expensive" $60 leads start looking like bargains.

And the $10 leads that were fluffing your CPL reports? They were never going to buy.

The agencies racing to the bottom on cost per lead are optimising for the wrong metric entirely.

If your campaigns can't tell you which leads turned into revenue, you're not optimising. You're guessing.

Tired of your sales team chasing dead leads? DM me for a free proposal on what we'd change.

Google is pulling one over on you.

And they've hidden the evidence.

If you've seen The Big Short, it's basically the same thing… but with ads.

— banks took the worst mortgages on the market;
— bundled them with slightly better ones;
— and repackaged the whole thing with a shiny new rating.

A pyramid of sh*t dressed up as a solid investment.

Google is doing the same thing with your ad spend.

High-intent search traffic is finite. But there's a ceiling on what Google can charge for it.

So they packaged the good clicks in with the garbage. Display. Gmail. YouTube pre-rolls. Placements you'd never buy individually.

Then wrapped it in one campaign type + slapped "AI-powered" on the label.

That's Performance Max.

But here's the bit nobody's talking about yet:

They're doing it inside your Search campaigns, too. It's called AI Max.

It quietly expands targeting beyond your keywords using "keywordless matching." Your campaign still says "Search" on the tin. But the traffic underneath has changed.

It's like the banks slipping subprime mortgages into a prime tranche without changing the label.

Google will tell you they're being more transparent. Sure, they've given some visibility back to PMax.

But showing you where spend went after the fact isn't the same as letting you choose where it goes.

They're not improving the product.

They're removing your ability to control how your budget is spent.

If you're running PMax and can't see what's actually converting…

You're buying a bundled mortgage and hoping for the best.

—

PS: This clip from The Big Short explains it. Just replace CDO with 'PMax.'

You're training Google to find you worse leads.

And you don't even know it.

You set conversion on "lead." The platform goes hunting and finds the cheapest people who'll fill out a form.

Job done. CPL drops. 
Everyone celebrates.

Except the leads are rubbish.

But you don't send that feedback, so the platform thinks it's winning, and finds more of the same.

Weeks pass. Quality slides. 

By the time you notice, you've trained your own campaign to target tyre-kickers.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most people try to fix this with new creative or different targeting. That's treating symptoms.

The actual fix is boring:

1. Tell the platform which leads converted
2. Send that data back
3. Let it learn what “good” looks like

Otherwise you're rewarding a machine for getting worse.

(and wondering why it keeps getting worse)

Google is marking its own homework. And it's giving itself an A+.

Here's why that matters:

→ You run Google Ads
→ Google tells you which conversions you got
→ Google tells you which keywords drove them 
→ Google tells you what to spend more on.

Who checks if those conversions were any good?
Nobody.

So Google optimises for form fills. You get 200 leads. 
Google says: "Campaign is crushing it."

But your sales team closes 3 of them.

The other 197 were spam, competitors, or people who thought they were signing up for something else.

Google doesn't know that. Google doesn't care.
Its job is to hit the conversion goal you set. It did that. 

Job done, it says.

This is why offline conversion tracking exists.

👉🏻 You tell Google which leads became customers
👉🏻 Google learns what "good" actually looks like
👉🏻 It finds more of those people

Without that feedback loop, you're rewarding a machine for getting worse.

Stop trusting the platform to mark its own work.

We added 5 extra questions to a property client's lead form. Their sales team's close rate doubled.

Sounds counterintuitive. More questions should mean fewer leads, right?

Yes. And that's the point.

Most property lead forms ask for name, email, phone number. Submit.

Your broker gets a notification. 
They call. 

And the first 2 minutes is spent figuring out who this person is, what they want, and whether they can actually afford to invest.

That's not a warm call. That's a cold call with extra steps.

When we build multi-step qualification funnels for property clients, we ask things like budget, timeline, experience level, and location preferences.

Two things happen:

1️⃣ The tyre-kickers drop off before they submit. Your sales team never wastes time on them.
2️⃣ Your brokers get a mini brief on every lead before they pick up the phone. The first call feels like a conversation, not an interrogation.

And here's what most people miss:

That qualification data doesn't just help on the first call. It builds a first-party data set you can use for months of personalised remarketing.

Someone told you their budget is £500k and they're looking at buy-to-let in Manchester? 

You can remarket to them with exactly the right properties, case studies, and content.

The results speak for themselves.

Static forms convert at 2-3%. 
Our multi-step funnels convert at 5-10%, and capture significantly more useful information.

Fewer leads. Better leads. More sales.

Struggling with your real estate lead quality? Drop me a DM and I'll audit your campaigns for free.

How to completely destroy your lead gen campaign.

(a step-by-step guide)

1/ Use Meta lead forms instead of a landing page.

Why bother building a funnel when Meta will auto-fill everything for you?

— Data pulled from profiles last updated in 2019
— Phone numbers that don't work, emails that bounce
— People who didn't even mean to tap the button

Fast, easy (and completely useless).

2/ Ask for name, email, phone number. Nothing else.

Qualifying questions just add friction, right? Keep it simple.

— No idea if they can afford what you're selling
— No idea what they actually want
— Sales team calling 200 leads a month blind

Volume is king. Quality is someone else's problem.

3/ Tell Google to get you the cheapest leads possible.

Set your conversion goal to "lead" and let the algorithm do its thing.

— Google finds the most trigger-happy form fillers on the internet
— CPL looks incredible in the dashboard
— Pipeline looks like a ghost town

The algorithm is doing exactly what you told it to. That's the problem.

4/ Never send sales data back to the ad platform.

Google and Meta have no idea which leads actually bought. Keep it that way.

— Platform keeps optimising for more of the same junk
— Quality drops a little more every week
— A beautiful negative snowball you can't see until it's too late

Why would you tell the algorithm what "good" looks like? That'd be too easy.

5/ Treat every lead that doesn't close in a week as a failure.

Nine-month sales cycle? Doesn't matter. If they haven't bought by Friday, bin them.

— Ignore the nurture sequence entirely
— Let thousands of warm leads sit untouched in your CRM
— Wonder why your cost per customer is through the roof

There's a goldmine sitting in your pipeline. But sure, keep chasing new leads.

6/ Panic. Slash the budget. Start over.

Bad week? Kill the campaign. Torch all the data the algorithm has learned.

— Restart in two months with zero learnings
— Pay to retrain the algorithm from scratch
— Repeat until you're convinced "paid ads don't work for us"

(The competitors who kept spending through the dip are gladly taking your leads now.)

Guaranteed to demolish your cost per customer in 30 days or less 👍

Or, alternatively, you could:
Follow Tom Richards to learn a better way.

But why bother doing that? 😉

Property sales take 9 months. Marketing reports weekly.

See the problem?

Lead comes in. Sales calls. 
"Sorry, not ready to buy yet."

So they’re tagged as cold and forgotten.

Nine months later, they buy. But from someone else.

The CRM is a graveyard with thousands of leads.
(and nobody following up)

Everyone's chasing fresh ones because last week's "didn't convert."

Of course they didn't convert. You gave them a week.

If your nurture doesn't match your sales cycle, you're paying for leads and handing them to competitors.

Most people call this a leads problem. 

But no. It's a patience problem.

"I don't want to annoy them."

I hear this from sales teams all the time.

And honestly? It drives me up the wall.

A user sees your ad. They read your offer. They decide they want it. They manually type in their details and hit submit.

They're not going to be "annoyed" if you call them.

They're waiting for you to help them!

But if you wait 24 hours?

They've forgotten who you are, or worse, they've already bought from the competitor who called them 5 minutes after they clicked.

If you're running lead gen campaigns, you need to be testing your own system.
Become a secret shopper.

Fill out your own form and set a timer.

✅ < 5 mins: You're competing.
❌ > 30 mins: You're losing money.
❌ > 24 hours: You might as well turn the ads off.

It sounds harsh, but the data doesn't lie.

Don't let politeness kill your performance.

Speed isn't pushy - it's professional.

Marketing says the leads are fine. Sales says they're sh*t.

(sales is right)

Marketing sees the dashboard:

— Cost per lead down
— Volume up
— Green arrows everywhere

Sales picks up the phone:

— Tyre-kickers
— Wrong numbers
— Leads say "I never signed up for this"

What happened?

The platform did exactly what you asked. You said get leads. 
It found people who fill out forms.

That's it. Job done as far as Google's concerned.

Now you've got a blame game. Marketing points at sales. Sales points at marketing. 

Meanwhile the actual problem sits untouched.

The algorithm has no idea what a good lead looks like.

You never told it.

Fix that or keep arguing. Your choice.

Steve Jobs called an emergency meeting with Google about a shade of yellow.

(While dying of cancer)

Vic Gundotra (VP at Google) got an urgent Sunday morning call from Jobs.
About a single letter in the Google logo on an iPhone.

The yellow was off. Not wrong, just ‘off’. By a shade.

This was a man running one of the most valuable companies on the planet. 
Battling pancreatic cancer. 

And he's ringing someone about a colour most people would never clock.

I think about this whenever I open a new client's ad account.

Most business owners check two things: "Is it running?" and "Are we getting leads?" Then they move on with their day.

But the shade of yellow in your ad account is:

👉 The campaign Google silently opted into the Search Partners network

👉 The "maximise conversions" bid strategy optimising for your worst lead source

👉 The ad copy asset Google swapped in using AI that tanked your CTR

Nobody sees it. But it's where the budget bleeds.

At Adbetter, that's the job. 
We're the ones on the Sunday phone call about the shade of yellow.

Warren Buffett held onto a bad investment for a decade.

It cost Berkshire Hathaway billions.

In 2015, Buffett helped engineer the merger that created Kraft Heinz. 
By 2019, he admitted publicly: "We overpaid for Kraft."

→ The stock kept falling. 
→ Down 70% from its peak. 
→ $57 billion wiped off the market cap.

He knew it wasn't working. He said it out loud. 
And he still held on for another six years, hoping it would turn around.

Last month, Berkshire finally filed to sell its entire 27% stake.

10 years. 
The smartest investor alive
Watching the numbers get worse
Waiting for a recovery that never came.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps not, to be fair. But there’s a lesson here for everyone.

Avoid the sunk cost fallacy.

→ That campaign you've been "giving one more month" for six months. 
→ The agency you're sticking with instead of switching.
→ The dead strategy you keep defending.

The evidence is right there. But walking away means admitting you were wrong.

Buffett can afford to wait a decade and lose money.

Most businesses can't.

If it's not working, it's not working. 
The sooner you act on that, the less it costs you.

A third of agencies don't survive five years. Yet UK ad spend is on track to hit £50 billion.

More money in the market. Same failure rate.

The money isn't going to agencies selling impressions and reach.

"We'll run your ads" is worthless now.

"We'll generate customers" is the only thing anyone wants to hear.

If you can't connect spend to revenue, you're a cost centre.

And cost centres get cut first.

I've watched it happen first-hand. Agencies reporting hundreds of leads and conversions, but couldn't answer one simple question:

"How much money did this actually make us?"

The agencies growing the most right now are focused on proving results rather than simply spending more. 

Closed-loop tracking. Revenue attribution. Actual ROI.

That's the difference between an agency that survives and one that becomes a statistic.

Can you tell a client exactly what their ad spend generated last quarter? 👇

4 seconds. That's all you get before someone decides you're not worth their time.


I learned that knocking on strangers' doors in Australia, trying to get them to sign up to charity donations.

And in those four seconds, it doesn't matter what you're selling. 
It doesn't matter how good the offer is. 
It doesn't matter how well you know the product.

The only thing that matters is: did you give them a reason to care?

I use that every single day.

— Writing ad copy
— Building landing pages
— Structuring funnels 

Four seconds. That's your window.

If you’re not capturing people’s attention:

Start with those seconds.

I jumped on the Build Your Future podcast with Tom Hoskin this week. 

We talked about why most property developers are measuring the wrong things with their ads.

If you're a developer or broker running paid ads (or thinking about it), here's what we covered:

👉🏻 Why cheap leads are the most expensive mistake you can make
👉🏻 How to use multi-step forms to filter out tyre-kickers before they hit your CRM
👉🏻 Balancing Google and Meta ads (and when to use which)
👉🏻 Why most developers give up on campaigns months before they'd actually pay off
👉🏻 The role of personal branding in building trust with investors
👉🏻 How automation and retargeting keep you front of mind without spending a fortune
👉🏻 Reverse engineering your sales goals to set realistic ad budgets

Give it a listen for insights into how we run things day-to-day at Adbetter.

Link in the comments 🎧

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