Here is how the trick works
If you run a business, your time is worth something. Real money. Most business owners I speak to could be charging somewhere between 40 and 60 pounds an hour for the thing they are actually good at. At least.
Now let us say you spend 10 hours a week on marketing. Writing posts. Trying to work out why your Facebook ad got rejected for the third time this month. Googling “what is a meta description” at 11pm while your partner asks if you are coming to bed.
That is 40 hours a month. At your hourly rate, that is somewhere between 1,600 and 2,400 pounds of your time. Every month. Gone.
And here is the part that stings. You are spending all of that on a version of marketing that is costing you the exact thing you would have charged a real client for.
Except you are not getting marketing. You are getting an attempt
I am not being harsh. I am being honest, which is a different thing.
And the numbers back it up. In a 2025 survey of nearly 6,000 small businesses across 25 countries, Fiverr found that 70 percent of owners spend less than five hours a week on marketing. Not because they do not care. Because there are not enough hours in the day. Separately, recent industry research suggests that roughly 73 percent of small businesses are not even sure their marketing is working at all.
Read that again. Most business owners are pouring hours they cannot spare into something they cannot tell is working.
That is not a marketing strategy. That is a very expensive hobby.
You would not rewire your own house
You changed a lightbulb once. Brilliant. That does not make you ready to rewire the kitchen.
Marketing is the same.
SEO,
paid ads, email, content, analytics,
brand. Each one is its own discipline, with its own rules, and the rules change constantly. Doing a little bit of all of them at 11pm is not the same as doing any of them well.
The professionals are not smarter than you. They just do this one thing, all day, every day, while you get on with the thing you are brilliant at. That is the whole trick.
The worst part is that the cost is invisible
Here is why this is so easy to miss. The cost never shows up on a spreadsheet. There is no line item called “the 40 hours I lost this month.” So it feels free. It is the opposite of free.
Instead it shows up in quieter ways. Tiredness. Missed opportunities. A slowly growing feeling that you are running on a treadmill somebody else controls the speed of. Around 63 percent of business owners say they have hit burnout at some point, and trying to be your own marketing department at midnight is a very reliable way to get there.
It also shows up as a LinkedIn page that gets three likes. One of which is your mum. Bless her.
So what is it actually costing you? Let us put a number on it
We built a free tool called the Marketing MOT. It checks eight areas of your marketing, gives you a score out of 100, and shows you exactly where you are passing, where you need an advisory, and where you are quietly failing.
It also does the maths on what your own time is costing you. That is usually the bit that makes people go very quiet and reach for a strong cup of tea.
It takes about two minutes. No email. No sales call. No data harvested. Just an honest score.
Click here to view your Marketing MOT.
Here is the honest truth
You started your business because you are brilliant at something. Genuinely brilliant. That is why people pay you. Your marketing is probably not that thing. And that is completely fine. That is exactly why people like me exist.
So stop doing the thing you are not great at, and let someone else be brilliant at it instead. Your evenings will thank you. So will your numbers.
Go and check your
MOT score. And if the hidden cost makes you wince a little, good. That means it is working.
