Knowing Where LeBron Buys His Shoes Doesn't Mean You Can Dunk
Brianna Javon had me on What's Good Podcast for a conversation aimed squarely at Black entrepreneurs, and we spent most of it on the gap between knowing about marketing and being able to do it.
Knowing where LeBron buys his shoes doesn't mean you can dunk
We now live in an age where twenty or forty dollars a month buys genuinely sophisticated software. That's a good thing, and it has produced a specific confusion: people mistake their ability to buy a tool for their ability to get results.
Knowing which gym Steph Curry trains at won't get your three-point percentage anywhere near his.
I have clients right now who believe they're more sophisticated at marketing than they are, and I encourage them to go and try it themselves. They usually come back. That's not a criticism — having the software and having a fragment of the information simply isn't the same as having a team who does this all day.
When to hire
Brianna asked when it's time to bring people on, and there are two conditions, not one.
Enough clients, obviously. But also a process you've documented that produces predictable results. This input reliably gets that output.
People get it wrong in both directions. Hire too early and you haven't figured out the process, so there's nothing to hand over and no standard to measure against. Hire too late and you've built a book of business with yourself at the centre of every part of it. Now you have staff who can't finish anything without running it past you first, which rather defeats the purpose.
I knew it was time because I had the customers, I'd worked out the process, and I'd written it down well enough to teach it.
Niche down until it's uncomfortable
The question I get most is how to sound different from everyone else in your industry. Two answers: be honest about your story rather than only the attractive parts, and narrow your audience further than feels sensible.
You can market to small and medium businesses, which is about ninety percent of the market. Or to small and medium businesses that are Black-owned and female-led. Or to Black-owned, female-led spas — of which there are plenty in this city and across the country.
Each step down makes your content, your message and your services specific to someone real. The conversation you'd have with a solo founder opening her first spa has nothing in common with the one you'd have with a sixty-year-old man running a forty-million-dollar company. If you're talking to both, you're talking to neither.
Marketing is not social media
The most common misconception is that they're the same thing. Someone comes in convinced that better reels will fix everything, and I'm asking how many leads they're generating, whether there's a funnel capturing anything, whether traffic is being driven anywhere.
Organic social media mostly exists to tell you which content is worth putting money behind. It's an indicator, not the engine.
Which means most of my conversations with entrepreneurs are education. What a funnel is. What a lead is. What your sales process looks like and how many touch points it takes.
You met someone at a networking event once and they became a great client. Wonderful. Are you at an event every week? Do you have a target for how many leads you're converting? If you got ten leads, spoke to five, booked meetings and two showed up — that's a twenty percent lead-to-appointment rate. How many of those two closed? None? Then you need to talk to more people.
Looked at that way, the numbers tell you exactly how much activity your revenue goal requires. Most people never look.
The lead magnet, properly explained
A lead magnet is an ethical bribe: something with high perceived value in exchange for contact details. Both the collection and the delivery should be automated, and everything should flow into a CRM that tracks the relationship afterwards.
It sits on a landing page — or a squeeze page, same thing, and the name is fairly literal.
The part people skip is testing. Not every lead magnet works. You might think it's a great thing to give away and the market disagrees. You need roughly a hundred to two hundred people hitting that page before the conversion rate means anything. If you're getting five visitors a month, it'll be years before you know, which is precisely where advertising earns its place: you can force a thousand people to that page tomorrow.
Most business owners aren't celebrities, aren't especially interesting, and their content isn't good enough to go viral. I say that plainly because it's true of nearly everyone, including me at the start. So skip the queue and pay for the traffic.
Eleven touches, seven hours
The rule of thumb I work to: around eleven touch points before someone will seriously consider your offer, and roughly seven hours of consumed content. Not to buy — to consider.
Which is why nurture matters more than acquisition for most businesses. And why segmenting your list matters more than the size of it.
I came from the promotions world, where everyone burned their lists. If you've ever given a nightclub your number and then been buried in messages until you begged them to stop, that's a segmentation failure. They weren't asking questions, weren't watching behaviour, weren't dividing anyone by interest.
Split the list by interest or demographic and you can actually say something relevant. Collect birthdays and use them. Collecting data isn't the point; making it actionable is.
A free event that cost twenty thousand dollars
Someone in my industry ran an in-person boot camp as a lead magnet. Free to attend. He spent thousands on ads, thousands on a conference room in a good hotel downtown, paid his staff to be there and paid an influencer to speak. Call it fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.
Ten to fifteen people signed up on the day, at one to three thousand a month.
He made it back that afternoon. A lead magnet can cost almost anything as long as you've done the arithmetic first — and that arithmetic is exactly what most entrepreneurs can't produce when I ask.
A soloist or an orchestra
Most agencies do one thing. Video. Graphics. Ads. Social. All necessary, none sufficient.
I hear the results constantly. Someone built me a site but nobody visits it. People like my posts but never give me their details — because that isn't what posts are for. I'm running ads and getting nothing, because nobody built the thing that converts the traffic.
Every one of those is a piece of a puzzle bought without the rest of it. The pieces have to play together.
Know your numbers
If I leave you with one thing, it's this. Most people track vanity metrics — likes, views, watch time. Those are indicators, not goals.
I'd rather be the most unpopular billionaire than the most popular broke person.
Watch what happens after the view. How many real conversations. How many became leads. How many leads became customers. Once you know your view-to-customer rate, the only remaining question is how to do it faster.
Listen to the full episode
Watch on YouTube | Listen on Spotify | Listen on Amazon Music
Digital Marketing for Black Entrepreneurs: Strategy, Storytelling and Scaling. What's Good Podcast with Brianna Javon, May 2025.
The pieces that have to work together — capture, nurture, segment, convert — are what Ignite Funnels puts in one place.
