Pick the Channel You’d Use Anyway

How small businesses and subject matter experts build authority, without forcing a marketing medium they hate.

I have kept journals for more than twenty years. Nobody asked me to. Nobody paid me. Through university, through every move and career change, I kept writing. So when I finally decided to build something public, I did not agonise over whether to start a podcast or film videos. The answer had been sitting in a box of old notebooks the whole time: my natural mode of clarity is text. Translating private journaling into public essays was less a strategic decision than an admission.

Picture: Andrej Lišakov

I mention this because I keep watching capable people get the same decision wrong, and nowhere does it cost more than in a small, expert-led business.

Think of a solo consultant, an accountant with three staff, a specialist design studio. In a business like this, the founder is the product. That means the marketing channel is doing two jobs at once: it has to bring clients through the door, and it has to build the founder’s standing as the expert those clients are buying. A channel that fights your nature fails at both jobs, and it fails publicly.

Marketing is an open problem. There is no universal playbook for reaching an audience. One business grows through long-form writing, another through pictures and video, a third through relentless networking and word of mouth. All of them work for somebody.

Yet most owners choose their channel the way they choose office software: by looking at what everyone else is using. They start a podcast because every consultant seems to have one. They commit to daily video because an algorithm currently favours it. Then, three episodes or eleven clips in, they quietly stop.

We usually blame discipline. I do not think discipline is the problem. Ten years in research and strategy work taught me that plans rarely die because they were badly designed. They die because the people executing them are fighting their own nature every single day.

Here is the uncomfortable part: the market notices before you do.

A podcast host who does not love conversation asks their questions in order, nods, and moves on. Nothing is technically wrong. But listeners can feel the difference between someone doing the work and someone who cannot help themselves. Forced effort has a smell, and no amount of production polish covers it.

For a business, the stakes are doubled because your marketing is a sample of your thinking. A flat podcast does not just fail to bring in clients; it quietly argues against your expertise.

The deeper issue is volume. Mastering any medium takes years of unglamorous repetition. If the medium drains you, you cannot sustain that repetition, and you will be competing against someone for whom the same hours feel like play. I made a version of this argument in “Your Weird Obsessions Are Your Best Career Assets”. You cannot fake a decade of endurance. The same rule governs distribution.

Instead of asking “what is working right now?”, run a quiet energy audit on how your brain processes and communicates ideas:

Live conversation. If your energy comes from spontaneous dialogue, if you talk your way to clarity, then podcasts, webinars and rooms full of people are your natural ground, the places where clients hear you think on your feet.

Written synthesis. If clarity only arrives when you slow down, draft and edit, then essays, newsletters and structured briefs will beat anything you force yourself to say on camera. Writing also travels: clients forward what they read.

Visual narrative. If you think in pictures, diagrams, whiteboards and visual stories, then video and graphical formats will feel natural rather than performative, teaching in public, which is what expertise looks like from the outside.

The test underneath all three is simple: what form of communication do you already do, unpaid and unprompted? The evidence exists long before you launch anything. You do not need three failed projects to discover what you dislike. You need an honest look at how you already spend your unclaimed hours.

Sometimes the audit produces an awkward answer: the channel your business genuinely needs is one you hate. That is not a dead end; it is a classic design constraint, and you have three strategic moves.

Re-architect the strategy. Rebalance your marketing model so that a channel you naturally enjoy carries the heaviest distribution load.

Adjust your role. If a medium like video is essential, stay behind the scenes as the strategist or writer who shapes the ideas, rather than forcing yourself to be the face on camera.

Bring in talent. Find collaborators or employees whose skill in that medium covers the gap, while your expertise supplies the substance.

What you should not do is spend years forcing yourself to become someone else. That plan fails slowly and expensively, and everyone watching can see it failing before you can.

If I could hand one line to the version of me from ten years ago, it would be this: stop treating what you do naturally as a hobby and what you hate as the real work. The thing you do unpaid, unprompted, in the margins of your life is not a distraction from your edge. It is the edge.

I spent twenty years journaling before I realised the practice was the strategy. You do not have to take that long.