Think like the person paying for it
From 2018 to 2021 I co-owned a food and beverage business in Dhaka, alongside my agency career. It changed how I judge marketing, mostly by removing the option of pretending.
In an agency, a campaign that underperforms becomes a slide in the next review. In your own business, it becomes a number in the bank account you check before paying staff. Same campaign, very different feeling.
Co-owning Humble Crumble taught me more about marketing than any single job, because it collapsed the distance between the decision and the consequence. Here’s what stuck.
1. Every pound has a job
When the budget is yours, you stop asking “what could we do with this?” and start asking “what will this bring back?” That isn’t stinginess. It’s clarity. We cut our external marketing spend by doing communications and content ourselves, not because outsourcing is wrong, but because we could get the same result closer to the customer for less.
I carry that into every role now. In my current job, bringing selected creative and landing-page production in-house cut agency spend and sped campaigns up. It wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It was a question every owner asks: is this the best use of the money?
2. The customer who comes back is worth more than the customer you haven’t met
For a local food business, repeat visits are the business. A first visit is a trial. Our most effective marketing was our customers themselves: we built our social media around the photos and posts they shared, which worked like word of mouth because it was word of mouth. Repeat footfall grew, and it grew cheaply.
Acquisition gets the applause. Retention pays the bills.
Plenty of marketing plans are built entirely around new audiences. I understand why, because growth needs new people. But if the experience doesn’t bring people back, you’re filling a bucket with a hole in it.
3. Operations is marketing, whether marketing likes it or not
A brilliant campaign can’t survive a slow queue, an out-of-stock favourite or a rude moment at the counter. As an owner you see this immediately, because you’re dealing with both. It made me much more interested in the whole customer journey, not just the part marketing usually controls.
It’s also why I like working closely with the teams who handle what happens after the click: admissions, sales, customer service. That’s where marketing promises are kept or broken.
4. Timing and nerve matter
When COVID-19 arrived, our student customers vanished from campus, and we had no proper way to deliver a milkshake. So we bought the equipment to package and deliver properly. That decision gave us something unexpected: data. Delivery showed that about 30% of our customers lived in one residential area, nowhere near the universities.
So in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, we opened a second location there. Rents were lower than they would ever normally be, and our customers had effectively told us where to go. It wasn’t a textbook decision. It was a judgement call made with incomplete information, which is what most real business decisions are. But it was a judgement call built on evidence.
5. Brilliant ideas don’t get a free pass
Budgets, customers and deadlines don’t always care how brilliant an idea looks in a presentation. I still love a bold creative idea. I just love it more when it works for the business. Running my own business made me ask, every time: what does success look like, how will we know, and what will we stop doing if it doesn’t work?
What this means in practice
I bring an owner’s instincts to every role: careful with spend, curious about operations, and focused on outcomes rather than activity. I’m comfortable talking about margin and payback in the same meeting as creative. And I have a lot of respect for anyone who has to make the numbers work at the end of the month.