The thing we wrestle with about our small business meet-ups

I have a bit of a confession to make. I love our small business meet-ups. I really do…but I wrestle with whether we should be running them.

After the meet-up we ran on Monday, we had SO many people sharing things on Instagram about how much they'd loved it, and one of the DMs we got afterwards said that it had been “such a good session”, that it felt “really bright and light” and that it was such a great atmosphere, and that it was so nice seeing that everyone there was clearly enjoying just being in that room.

And that is exactly why we do them…but I still wrestle with them. Because, slightly ironically, one of the things we care most about at Coastal Media is helping small business owners do less, not more.

When we first started the meet-ups, they looked a bit different than they do now. The Cliftonville very kindly gave us the room and provided tea and coffee for free, and we basically said to small businesses, come along, grab a coffee and have a chat. There was no workshop and no expectation that you had to arrive at a certain time or stay for the whole thing.

The problem was, it felt a bit too much like networking, and I'd had some pretty bad experiences with networking over the years. I'd been quite anti-networking for a long time because it just wasn't my thing.

But we'd already seen something really interesting happening in our training courses. Yes, people were learning things and getting some of the overwhelm out of their heads, but what seemed to have an even bigger impact was when they looked around the room and realised that they weren't the only person struggling with something.

Because being a small business owner can be a very lonely thing, even when you're surrounded by people. You can spend so much time looking at what everyone else is doing and thinking they've all got it figured out, while you're the only one wondering what the hell you're doing.

Put a room full of small business owners together who are all going through some version of the same thing and something quite magical happens. People start sharing ideas, recommending each other, cheering each other on and telling each other about people who might be able to help. They start talking about the things that have gone wrong as well as the things that have worked, and suddenly you realise that you're not the only one making it up as you go along.

People kept asking us to do more of it, and kept telling us that our rooms felt different to the networking events they'd been to before. So eventually we thought, sod it, let's give it a proper go.

We ran a Christmas party in December 2024, which was genuinely one of the best things we've ever done, and that turned into the monthly meet-ups at The Cliftonville we have now.

The workshops were something we added to the meet-ups later though. A friend suggested that we could run a workshop at the beginning and then give people something to chat about afterwards, and we thought that was a brilliant idea. It meant people had something they could all talk about, rather than walking into a room full of strangers and having to do that awkward “so, what do you do?” thing, which is probably one of the reasons I've never particularly liked networking in the first place.

….and it worked. It worked really, really well.

We now give away 90 minutes of free marketing training every month, and the workshops have covered everything from SEO and Google Business Profiles to messaging, content, photography, and PR. And we love doing them.

But every month, there is still a little voice in my head saying, hang on a minute...are we adding to the problem? Because one of the biggest things we talk about with small businesses is overwhelm.

We see it constantly. People have been told they need to be on Instagram, they need to do SEO, they need a newsletter, they need to be posting three times a week, they need a Google Business Profile, they need to make Reels, they need to understand AI, they need a blog, they need to be on LinkedIn...and then we come along and say, “Come and learn about this other thing.” It doesn't sit particularly comfortably with me. Especially because I've been on the other side of this.

When I first started Coastal Media, we were much more of a traditional marketing agency. This was before Matt joined me, and I was running Instagram accounts, building websites, having banks of hours with 20-odd small businesses and doing bits for them whenever they needed them.

And I was good at it. I'm naturally good at Instagram and I love it, and the accounts I was managing were growing and getting amazing engagement.

But the more businesses I worked with, the more uncomfortable I became taking their money. Because the engagement wasn't converting into bookings or sales.

When I started digging into what was actually happening and used the formula we now teach in our Clarity Day to work out exactly what was going on with the customer journey and why someone was or wasn't buying from a business, it became really obvious that some of these businesses were never going to convert that attention into customers, no matter how good the social media was.

I was sending people to websites that were out of date, that didn't speak to their target customers, that were tired and old-fashioned or that simply weren't doing the job they needed to do.

I was doing a brilliant job of turning people on with their Instagram and then sending them somewhere that turned them straight back off again.

So I spoke to clients, showed them what was happening and suggested that instead of spending their money on me running their social media, we should use those hours to fix whatever the actual blocker was.

Most said no. What they wanted was social media. And I understood that, but I couldn't keep taking their money knowing it wasn't going to give them a return.

That was one of the big turning points for Coastal Media.

Around the same time, North Norfolk District Council had some funding called Future Skills Now, which was funding 75% of training courses, and Matt and I started talking about whether we could do things differently.

What if we stopped being a marketing agency and instead taught people how to work out what marketing they actually needed?

So we developed a 10-week training course covering pretty much everything when it came to marketing. But the most important thing we taught wasn't actually how to do marketing; it was how to work out what would be a waste of your time right now and what would actually work and move the needle for your business. How to stop wasting time and energy on things that aren't going to work. How to stop feeling like you have to do all the things and instead work out the one, two or three things that will actually make a difference for your business.

That course became our One-Day Marketing Bootcamp and eventually evolved into our Small Business Clarity Day.

And that is why I wrestle with the meet-ups. Because we can stand in front of a room full of small business owners and give them another piece of marketing information, and we know it is useful information. But we also know that useful information isn't necessarily useful to your business right now.

…and we say this at every single workshop we run.

We tell people, quite explicitly, that they do not need to go home and do the thing we've just talked about.

If we're talking about SEO, that doesn't mean you need SEO.

If we're talking about Google Business Profiles, that doesn't mean you need to spend your weekend sorting yours out.

If we're talking about content, that doesn't mean you suddenly need a content strategy.

We say this because we genuinely believe it.

The workshop isn't there to give you another job. It's there to give you some information that might help you make a better decision. And that distinction is really important. Because this is the bit I wish every small business in the world knew….there is a formula for working out what you should be doing. Not what everyone on Instagram is telling you to do. Not what the latest marketing expert says you need. Not what your competitor is doing. Not what the person selling you SEO says you need. What your business actually needs.

I genuinely wish we could give that formula away for free because I know how much time, energy and money it could save people.

We've worked with hundreds of businesses now and we've seen the same patterns over and over again. We've seen people spend thousands of pounds on things that were never going to solve the problem they actually had, and we've seen people spend years feeling like they're doing everything they possibly can while getting nowhere. We get so frustrated when we see it because it is so unnecessary. 

We've also seen what happens when someone finally understands what is actually going on. A business owner we recently supported through Go Digital told us that she felt like she'd spent the last three years hitting her head against a brick wall. After we'd worked through everything with her, she said: “I really cannot thank you enough for all your help. I feel so different after talking to you. You are so lovely and every business needs to find you!”

That is why this matters so much to us. We know what we do can genuinely change the way someone feels about running their business.

But the formula we use to work all of this out is also a huge part of what we've built Coastal Media around. It's our intellectual property, and we can't just give it away.

The Clarity Day is £95, which is literally as cheap as we can make it, but we're never going to stand at the end of a free workshop and tell everyone they need to come and buy it. That's not why we're there.

We don't want these mornings to become a sales funnel disguised as a community event. We want people to come because they love being in the room, because they get something from the workshop, because they meet other small business owners who understand what they're going through and because they leave feeling a bit more energised than when they arrived. And if we’re honest, we get just as much from them as everyone else does. They give us energy. They give us ideas. They inspire us. They remind us that we’re not the only ones figuring this whole small business thing out.

So yes, we'll keep doing them. We'll keep filling rooms with brilliant humans and we'll keep giving away 90 minutes of marketing training every month.

But we'll also keep saying the same thing at the beginning and the end of every workshop: you don't have to go away and do this. In fact, we'd really rather you didn't, unless you've worked out that it's actually the thing your business needs.

Because marketing isn't about doing more marketing. It's about being deliberate. Your business might need better SEO. It might need better social media. It might need neither. 

It might need a better website, a clearer offer, a better customer journey or a completely different approach to who you're trying to reach.

And it might need you to stop for a minute and work out what the heck is actually going on before you spend another penny or another 500 hours doing something because someone told you that you should.

So this is what I wish every small business owner knew…..not every business needs more marketing. Every business needs to understand what it needs. And perhaps the best marketing decision you can make is to work that out before you do anything else.