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Years ago, my friend and mentor Chris Lund handed me a quote called the Optimist’s Creed:

“As you ramble on through life, brother, whatever be your goal: keep your eyes upon the donut, and not upon the hole.”

It sounds like something you’d find inside a fortune cookie. It took me years to see that Chris had handed me a marketing budget.

Picture your market as the donut. At any moment, about 5% of the homeowners in your service area are ready to buy. The water heater died this morning. The AC quit in July. They are typing “plumber near me” into Google right now, credit card in hand.

That 5% is the hole.

The other 95% is the dough: homeowners whose equipment works fine today and will fail next month, next year, or three summers from now. Each one is a future customer.

Now watch where the money goes. Every dollar aims at the hole. So does every dollar of the competition’s. Ten contractors bid on the same emergency search, auction prices climb every quarter, and everyone brawls over 5% of the market while 95% of it sits unclaimed.

Two researchers, Les Binet and Peter Field, studied nearly a thousand ad campaigns and found the split that grows companies fastest: roughly 60% of the budget building the brand, 40% chasing immediate sales. I’d say it’s plainer than they do. Forty percent for current demand: the hole. Sixty percent for future demand: the donut.

Two different jobs. Two different scoreboards.

Sales activation gets scored on ROAS, return on ad spend. Brand gets scored on market share. The Marketing Architects podcast has my favorite way to say it: ROAS is pecan pie. Delicious, quick rush, and you cannot live on it. Market share is broccoli. Nobody craves it, and it is what makes you strong. Are more of tomorrow’s buyers walking around with your name already in their heads? That’s the broccoli doing its job.

Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, said it best: “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.” Google collects that tax, and its billing department never misses. The weaker your name in the minds of the 95%, the higher your tax rate when they finally fall into the hole.

Want to see the tax bill? Across the home services companies we manage, over the twelve months ending this June, branded search (people typing our clients’ names into Google) returned 55.6x on ad spend. Unbranded search (people typing “water heater repair”) returned 4.1x.

That 55.6x looks like genius. It isn’t. It’s a vanity metric. Those customers were already coming. Years of brand work put the name in their heads, and Google charged a toll at the door. Branded search is your past brand building showing up on Google’s invoice. The real work hides behind that shine: earning 4.1x from strangers.

Which raises a question about who prepares your taxes. Nobody hires a tax preparer who earns a percentage of the tax bill. Yet that is how most agencies charge: a cut of your ad spend. The more you pay Google, the more they make. And when they blend everything together and report a 9.8x account-wide ROAS as their win, they are collecting a commission on demand your brand created. They take credit for the broccoli while selling you pie.

Don’t make ROAS and market share race each other. If they compete in a meeting, pie wins every time, and the brand starves for a year. The truth is stranger: the rabbit rides the tortoise. Sales activation rides on the brand. A known name earns better quality scores, higher click-through rates, higher close rates, cheaper clicks. The tortoise sets the pace. The rabbit collects.

Airbnb proved it at scale. In 2020, they cut marketing spend by over $600 million, and 95% of their traffic came back anyway. So they made the cut permanent and moved what remained from search ads into brand. By the fall of 2022, they posted the most profitable quarter in company history: $1.2 billion. And the executive bragging about the marketing shift on investor calls wasn’t the CMO. It was the CFO.

Spend down. Profit up. That is what feeding the tortoise looks like.

So here is the test to run on your own account this week. Ask whoever manages your Google Ads to split every number into branded and unbranded. If they resist, you have learned something already. Then ask two questions:

  1. Is unbranded Google spend more than 4% of your revenue? If yes, you may have a problem.
  2. Is unbranded revenue at least four times the spend? If no, you may have a problem.

I call it the four-and-four test. And remember: 4x is the floor, not the finish line. ROAS is a smoke detector, not a compass. It screams when something is burning. It will never point you toward growth.

Which leaves one question. Is your ad spend feeding the rabbit but starving the tortoise?

Growth lives where Chris pointed all those years ago.

Keep your eyes upon the donut.

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