You're Wasting Time on People Who Will Never Buy Your Sh*t

What if your next lease, investor or customer came because you hosted the right conversation?

That idea kept recurring like a drumbeat: host the party, own the room, and the rest will arrive. That’s not marketing jargon. It’s a tactical playbook that reimagines how small business owners, founders and operators find customers in a noisy world.

Publish like a magazine, host like the town favorite

Imagine being the person people talk about at the dinner table because you hosted a meaningful conversation, not because you shouted the loudest. The argument here is simple and strangely liberating: think like a publisher, not a salesperson. Create a podcast, a filmed conversation, or a thematic series tied to your town or industry — and invite local leaders to tell their stories. The payoff isn’t just listeners. It’s credibility, inbound leads and an audience that does some of your selling for you.

What really caught my attention was the Boca Business Podcast idea — hyperlocal, instantly relevant and a direct route to the community that will walk through your doors.

Depth beats width — every time

There’s contagious impatience for vanity metrics: scale, automation, bots and the hollow comfort of follower counts. The counterintuitive advice here is to go narrower and smarter. Follow your target buyers, engage with thoughtful comments, and invest in one-on-one visibility. Leaving a meaningful two-to-three sentence reaction on a creative lead’s post is more likely to create a real connection than blasting thousands with automated likes.

Honestly, I didn’t expect how vehement the push was against automation. But the speaker was right — depth wins the social game.

LinkedIn is the underpriced billboard

Here’s a striking fact: LinkedIn offers the most powerful free organic reach businesses have seen since Facebook’s early days. No brand? No problem. Well-written posts and targeted articles can get you in front of decision makers with far less friction than other platforms. For local property owners and B2B sellers, a narrow LinkedIn ad targeting business owners within a tight radius can move leasing conversations from cold outreach to meetings.

• Use LinkedIn to publish long-form arguments that establish domain credibility.
• Turn customer wins into filmed, conversational creatives — not infomercial testimonials.
• Run highly targeted LinkedIn ads when you want to test market demand quickly.

Make your testimonials feel real — and record them

Commercial-sounding testimonials rarely convince. A better tactic: create experiences where clients speak candidly at dinner or roundtable conversations. Film those moments, chop them up, and use them as authentic creative. The emotional texture of a meal, a toast, or a candid remark gives far more purchase than a polished 30-second endorsement.

The idea unnerved me at first — buy people dinner to get content? But the suggestion is precisely about reciprocity. It farms relationships and creates shareable moments.

Don’t waste time on the unsellable

There’s a brutal but valuable heuristic repeated throughout: stop chasing customers who will never buy. Identify who is likely to adopt your product — often younger decision-makers or family members actually running the business — and focus there. If your sales team spends weeks trying to convince a 63-year-old traditionalist who will never change, that’s time stolen from growth.

That honesty felt sharp and freeing. Some customers are worth firing.

Two-sided marketplaces and tailored content

If you serve both sides of a marketplace, don’t pretend they share the same needs. Caterers and corporate buyers search on different platforms for different signals. Create targeted creative for each cohort: Instagram and community content for service providers, LinkedIn thought leadership for enterprise buyers, and niche podcasts for industry insiders.

There was a practical blueprint for that: host an industry-specific podcast, film it, and use guest audiences to expand reach. The guest promotes it; you capture their network; your funnel scales with intent-driven listeners.

Old industries need modern empathy, not lecture

Construction companies, family wholesale businesses and other old-school sectors aren’t broken — they’re human. Much of the resistance to new tech is emotional. The most effective route is to identify the 28-to-40-year-old decision influencers inside those companies and pitch them differently. Use humor, reenactments, niche content, and community groups on Facebook to penetrate culture rather than overwrite it.

The speaker’s suggestion to make comedic, industry-specific reenactments felt unexpectedly brilliant — a low-cost way to become culturally relevant.

What if content becomes your sales machine?

Content isn’t merely a funnel driver. When made with intent, it becomes a magnet. Host local conversations, film them, use them on LinkedIn, target narrowly, and invest in human post-production to amplify results. The subtle, cumulative effect is brand equity that draws investors and acquisition interest as naturally as customers.

That ending thought stuck with me: when you build a content machine, you aren’t just broadcasting. You’re listening. The act of publishing becomes a method for discovering unexpected opportunities — buyers, partners and even acquirers you hadn’t considered.

Takeaway: publish with curiosity, farm relationships with generosity, and let the right people find you through content that feels human.