Building a Strong Small Business Marketing Foundation

Patrick McFadden • April 25, 2016

You probably don’t need to be told how easy it is for a small business to fail. According to Forbes Magazine , nearly 80 percent of small businesses don’t make it past the first three years. If you own an online business, that number rises to 95 percent.

Don’t get chased away by such staggering statistics, there’s a simple explanation behind them. Starting a business is easier now than it ever was before because of the Internet and technology; now you have the ability to reach customers around the world with a single click.

This means more people are looking to get rich quick instead of taking the time to really build a strong marketing foundation for a business that lasts.

Your marketing strategy is your foundation for the entire small business and just like a house; your small business must be built on a firm foundation.

1) Discover your ideal customer

Everyone knows that you should have a target market before starting a business, launching a campaign, etc., so I won’t waste much time here. What most business owners don’t know is how to discover their ideal customer! Discovering your ideal customer is a foundational element of getting any business on track.

There are countless ways to research your ideal customer and everybody talks about target markets, but on this day you will learn the 4 essential questions for helping you get clearer on this idea.

1. Who will benefit the most from your products or services?

The common answer to this question is “everybody.” If you think every possible human being is your ideal customer chances are you’ll waste your greatest resources time and money.

To answer this question begin building a detailed profile of your current customers. Group your most successful accounts (profitable+refer you).

2. Why do they do business with you?

This question is great for understanding your ideal customer. It can measure how effective your promotion, lead generation and sale process is working.

In order to successfully answer this question you need to “go Oprah” on your most successful accounts. Schedule some time to interview current customers that are the most profitable and also refer business to you.

3. What characteristics do they have in common?

Once you have a profile of your ideal customer, you should start analyzing the common characteristics they share. Start asking yourself some questions about these people: what industry are they in?, where are they located?, what size is their organization?, what do they read?, what do they listen to?, what challenges do they face?, how do they buy?

The answers to the questions above are not always available, but thinking about them in correlation to your ideal customer may allow you to narrow your niche and sell aggressively to it.

4. How can you best service their current and future needs?

Your best prospect is a current customer. Your second best prospect is a past customer. These two target markets already know, like and trust you. When thinking about understanding your ideal customers ponder serving their current and future needs.

This could be considered a customer service question, since winning and keeping customers is the result of effective marketing, but the real opportunity is when you can uncover a unique positioning or an innovation. Push yourself to discover their current and future needs. Ask ideal customers, “what are the top 3 challenges they’re currently facing?”, or “what are current vendors or suppliers doing that they don’t like?”

2) Uncover your unique positioning

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, “Know yourself and your enemy and you shall win 1,000 battles.” In a time where nearly every prospect compares multiple options online before making a purchasing decision, you can’t afford to ignore telling ideal customers how you’re different from your competitors.

One of the biggest challenges that any business faces in the area of marketing and sales is standing out from everyone else that says they do what you do or make what you make or provide what you provide.

The best way to create a competition crushing positioning strategy is to commit to sitting down with a handful of your best clients face to face or over the phone for about fifteen minutes and conduct an service improvement interview of sorts that may lead to some powerful propositions.

From your interviews you should have some key phrases, words, language used to describe your offering to work with to create a (USP) or unique positioning.

Positioning involves planting “seeds of perception” in the minds of prospects and customers, which by the way are already crowded.

Some small business examples are:

  • The Vegan Chef. Take-out meals for vegans—positioned in the minds of vegans wanting take-out meals.
  • 48 Days. Meaningful, purposeful and profitable work in 48 Days—positioned in the minds of job seekers wanting change in 48 Days.
  • First Responder Cleaning. There are very few one-of-a-kind cleaning services. They offer a 30 minute response time.
  • Punctual Plumber. We’re on time —offers to pay customers $5 for every minute they’re late up to $300.
  • Indispensable Marketing. Strategic marketing solutions that are essential for success—positioned as vital and needed marketing help to grow your business.

Here’s another tip when uncovering your unique position:

  1. Be remarkable. What one thing can you say that positions you as the only company in the world (your customers world) that can do it? Go for the edges—the greenest, fastest, best, largest, most convenient, privileged, open sourced, proven, cutting edge, risky, safe, new, classic, and etc.
  2. Make it benefit-oriented.  You know your ideal customer. You know what they want and need. You know what will satisfy them the most and what will keep them coming back to you. What will always keep you at the top of their mind from an awareness point of view? What will always keep you at the top of their wallet from a purchasing point of view?

3) Brand & Messaging

Understanding who your ideal customer and competitors are is one thing. Understanding how to properly connect your ideal customer findings and unique positioning in a succinct manner is another. While you as the owner and chief sales officer may already know how to approach prospective customers in a way that connects to their goals and challenges while differentiating yourself from the competition, do you as the chief marketing officer know how to do the same with your branding?

Take this time to go through all of your touchpoints – which are ways customers and prospects can come into contact with and experience your organization  – and document how you incorporate your unique position into these elements. This will help you immensely when it comes to driving home your message of what makes you different from your competitors.

A Few Touchpoints to Think About

  • Advertising,
  • Public Relations,
  • Networking and Referrals
  • Collateral and Material,
  • Social Media
  • Website or physical location
  • Employees
  • Phone call introduction, on-hold messaging and closing
  • RFP Presentation
  • Billing and Invoices
  • Email signature

Wow, for small business owners this a lot…

Now that you’ve read through the marketing foundation of a small business, you may feel one of two thing: you’re excited to know that you’re on the right track or you may feel overwhelmed and realize you’ve been so caught up in tactical daily marketing execution like building a website, sending email, tweeting, advertising, optimizing a landing page, blogging and so on, that you’ve not taking the time to work on the foundation that’ll grow your business and improve these tactics.

If you need help with figuring out who your ideal customer is, what your unique positioning is, and connecting that to brand building efforts, we can help !

The Missing Layer in AI: Why Judgment, Not Just Data, Will Define the Next Era of Intelligence

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
Everyone is scaling outputs. Almost no one is scaling judgment.

Everyone Talks About AI Judgment. We Built It.

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
Ask anyone in tech where AI is headed, and they’ll tell you: “The next leap is reasoning.” “AI needs judgment.” “We need assistants that think, not just answer.” They’re right. But while everyone’s talking about it, almost no one is actually shipping it. So we did. We built Thinking OS™ —a system that doesn’t just help AI answer questions… It helps AI think like a strategist. It helps AI decide like an operator. It helps teams and platforms scale judgment, n ot just generate output. The Theory Isn’t New. The Implementation Is. The idea of layering strategic thinking and judgment into AI isn’t new in theory. The problem is, no one’s been able to implement it effectively at scale. Let’s look at the current landscape. 1. Big Tech Has the Muscle—But Not the Mind OpenAI / ChatGPT ✅ Strength: Best-in-class language generation ❌ Limitation: No built-in judgment or reasoning. You must provide the structure. Otherwise, it follows instructions, not strategy. Google DeepMind / Gemini ✅ Known for advanced decision-making (e.g., AlphaGo) ❌ But only in structured environments like games—not messy, real-world business scenarios. Anthropic (Claude), Meta (LLaMA), Microsoft Copilot ✅ Great at answering questions and following commands ❌ But they’re assistants, not advisors. They won’t reprioritize. They won’t challenge your assumptions. They don’t ask: “Is this the right move?” These tools are powerful—but they don’t think for outcomes the way a strategist or operator would. 2. Who’s Actually Building the Thinking Layer™? This is where it gets interesting—and thin. Startups and Indie Builders Some small teams are quietly: Creating custom GPTs that mimic how experts reason Layering in business context, priorities, and tradeoffs Embedding decision logic so AI can guide, not just execute But these efforts are: Highly manual Difficult to scale Fragmented and experimental Enterprise Experiments A few companies (Salesforce, HubSpot, and others) are exploring more “judgment-aware” AI copilots. These systems can: Flag inconsistencies Recommend next actions Occasionally surface priorities based on internal logic But most of it is still: In early R&D Custom-coded Unproven beyond narrow use cases That’s Why Thinking OS™ Is Different Instead of waiting for a lab to crack it, we built a modular thinking system that installs like infrastructure. Thinking OS™: Captures how real experts reason Embeds judgment into layers AI can use Deploys into tools like ChatGPT or enterprise systems Helps teams think together, consistently, at scale It’s not another assistant. It’s the missing layer that turns outputs into outcomes. So… Is This a New Innovation? Yes—in practice. Everyone says AI needs judgment. But judgment isn’t an idea. It’s a system. It requires: Persistent memory Contextual awareness Tradeoff evaluation Value-based decisions Strategy that evolves with goals Thinking OS™ delivers that. And unlike the R&D experiments in Big Tech, it’s built for: Operators Consultants Platform founders Growth-stage teams that need to scale decision quality, not just content creation If Someone Told You They’ve Built a Thinking + Judgment Layer™… They’ve built something only a handful of people in the world are even attempting. Because this isn’t just AI that speaks fluently. It’s AI that reasons, reflects , and chooses. And in a world that’s drowning in tools, judgment becomes the differentiator. That’s the OS We Built Thinking OS™ is not a prompt pack. It’s not a dashboard. It’s not a glorified chatbot. It’s a decision architecture you can license, embed, or deploy— To help your team, your platform, or your clients think better at scale. We’ve moved past content. We’re building cognition. Let’s talk.

We Found the Missing Layer AI Has Been Waiting For

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
In every era of innovation, there’s a silent bottleneck—something obvious in hindsight, but elusive until the moment it clicks. In today’s AI-driven world, that bottleneck is clear: AI has speed. It has scale. But it doesn’t have judgment . It doesn’t really think . What’s Actually Missing From AI? When experts talk about the “thinking and judgment layer” as the next leap for AI, they’re calling out a hard truth: Modern AI systems are powerful pattern machines. But they’re missing the human layer—the one that reasons, weighs tradeoffs, and makes strategic decisions in context. Let’s break that down: 1. The Thinking Layer = Reasoning with Purpose This layer doesn’t just process inputs— it structures logic. It’s the ability to: Ask the right questions before acting Break down complexity into solvable parts Adjust direction mid-course when reality changes Think beyond “what was asked” to uncover “what really matters” Today’s AI responds. But it rarely reflects. Unless told exactly what to do, it won’t work through problems the way a strategist or operator would. 2. The Judgment Layer = Decision-Making in the Gray Judgment is the ability to: Prioritize what matters most Choose between imperfect options Make decisions when there’s no clear answer Apply values, experience, and vision—not just data It’s why a founder might not pursue a lucrative deal. Why a marketer might ignore the click-through rate. Why a strategist knows when the timing isn’t right. AI doesn’t do this well. Not yet. Because judgment requires more than data—it requires discernment . Why This Is the Bottleneck Holding Back AI AI can write. It can summarize. It can automate. But it still can’t: Diagnose the real problem behind the question Evaluate tradeoffs like a founder or operator would Recommend a path based on context, constraints, and conviction AI today is still reactive. It follows instructions. But it doesn’t lead. It doesn’t guide. It doesn’t own the outcome. And for those building serious systems—whether you’re running a company, launching a platform, or leading a team—this is the wall you eventually hit. That’s Why We Built Thinking OS™ We stopped waiting for AI to learn judgment on its own. Instead, we created a system that embeds it—by design. Thinking OS™ is an installable decision layer that captures how top founders, strategists, and operators think… …and makes that thinking repeatable , scalable , and usable inside teams, tools, and platforms. It’s not a framework. It’s not a chatbot. It’s not another playbook. It’s the layer that knows how to: Think through complex decisions Apply judgment when rules don’t help Guide others —human or AI—toward strategic outcomes This Is the Missing Infrastructure Thinking OS™ isn’t just about better answers. It’s about better thinking—made operational. And that’s what’s been missing in AI, consulting, leadership development, and platform design. If you’re trying to scale expertise, install judgment, or move from tactical to strategic… You don’t need a faster AI. You need a thinking layer that knows what to do—and why. We built it. Let’s talk.
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