Unfiltered

The read

25 Common Sense Things You Shouldn't Forget About

I run a marketing agency. Web design and Google Ads for small businesses — anywhere in the world. Which means I spend a lot of time on the phone with owners who are stuck.

Here's what I've noticed: almost none of them are stuck because they're missing some secret. They're stuck on common sense. The stuff that's so obvious it's easy to skip right past.

So I pulled five lessons each from five people who've actually built something. None of this is clever. All of it is common sense. That's exactly why it's worth writing down — common sense is only common until you have to act on it.

Chris Do — The Futur

Ran an Emmy-winning design agency for 20+ years. Best person alive on pricing creative work.

Where this comes from: Price the Client, Not the Job and How To Charge For Creative Work at The Futur.

Charge for the outcome, not the hours. Nobody wants a website. They want more customers. Price that.
Ask questions before you pitch. The diagnosis is the sale. You wouldn't trust a doctor who prescribed before the exam.
Say your price and shut up. No apology. No discount already baked in. Just the number.
Free work needs a purpose. Portfolio piece or case study, agreed on upfront. Not hope.
If you can't say who you're not for, you have no positioning. "We work with everyone" means nobody remembers you.

Codie Sanchez — Contrarian Thinking

Built her whole thing on boring businesses. Laundromats. Vending machines. Landscaping.

Where this comes from: Her book Main Street Millionaire and the free Contrarian Thinking newsletter.

Boring businesses print money. Sexy ones burn it. The car wash beats the app.
Cash flow beats valuation. What actually hits the bank, not what a spreadsheet promises.
Owning beats earning. A small piece of something beats a salary over time.
Talk to owners before you sell to them. The problem you assume they have is almost never the one keeping them up at night.
Sell to the fear, not the trend. These are real people worried about making payroll. Talk to that.

Neil Patel

Fifteen-plus years of digital marketing content. Not deep, but it works.

Where this comes from: His conversion rate optimization guide and the rest of the CRO archive on neilpatel.com.

Consistency beats brilliance. Pick a schedule you can actually hold.
Track what converts, not what looks good. Traffic isn't revenue. Impressions aren't customers.
Fix the conversion rate before you spend more on ads. More traffic into a leaky page just costs more per leak.
Steal what's already working. Look at competitors' top pages and ads instead of guessing.
Compounding is the whole game. SEO doesn't work at week three. It works at month eighteen.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Turned a wine store into a media company. Figured out where attention was going before most people did.

Where this comes from: Document, Don't Create — the post that started it.

Attention is the asset. Earn it before you try to sell anything.
Document instead of create. Post the work you're already doing. Cheaper and more honest than inventing content.
Volume beats perfection. You find out what lands by shipping, not planning.
Play the long game with people. Goodwill pays out in years, not weeks.
Self-awareness over hustle. Know what you're actually good at. Stop performing the rest.

Alex Hormozi

Scaled gyms into a portfolio worth hundreds of millions. The most systematic guy on this list.

Where this comes from: $100M Offers and $100M Leads, both on acquisition.com.

Make an offer so good people feel stupid saying no. Most marketing problems are offer problems.
Do more volume than feels reasonable. Most people quit at 10% of the required effort and decide it doesn't work.
Charge more. Cheap prices attract the worst clients and leave you no room to deliver well.
Pick one thing and run it until it works. The money's in boring repetition, not the next idea.
Know your numbers. Leads, conversion rate, price, churn. If you can't name yours, you don't have a business. You have a hobby with expenses.

The common sense underneath all of it

Read those 25 again and they collapse into about four things:

Charge more than feels comfortable.
Do the unglamorous thing over and over.
Measure what actually makes money.
Talk to customers before you talk at them.

Every one of those is common sense. Ask any owner and they'll nod along. Then watch how many of them undercharge, chase the new idea, and never check their numbers.

That's the whole gap. Not information — execution. Common sense isn't worth anything sitting in a blog post.