I Wasted Thousands on Marketing Before I Finally Learned to Do It Myself

I make aluminium windows and doors. That is what I know. I have been doing it out of a workshop in Boksburg for the better part of eleven years now, first on my own, then with two guys who have been with me long enough that they know how I like a frame squared before I even say it. I am good with my hands and I am fair with people, and for a long time I honestly believed that was enough. Do good work, treat the customer right, and the phone rings. And for a while it did ring, mostly from people my old customers had sent my way.

Then somewhere around 2020 things went quiet. Not dead, just quiet in a way that made my stomach turn every time I looked at the month ahead. The referrals thinned out. New estates were going up all over the East Rand and I was not getting a sniff of that work. Everyone kept telling me the same thing. You need to be online, boet. You need marketing. So I decided, alright, I will pay someone who knows what they are doing, because I clearly do not.

That is where the money started leaking. The first fellow I paid was a young guy who talked very fast and used a lot of words I did not understand. Impressions, reach, funnels. He wanted three thousand rand a month and he promised me leads. I paid him for four months. In those four months I got two phone calls, and one of them was somebody trying to sell me insurance. When I asked him what exactly he was doing with my money he sent me a screenshot of a graph going up. Up to what, I could not tell you. I felt too embarrassed to admit I did not understand it, so I just kept quiet and kept paying, and that is the part that still makes me cross with myself.

After him there was an agency. A proper one, with a nice office in Bedfordview and a lady who brought me coffee in a real cup. They built me a website. It looked lovely, I will give them that. It also cost me close to eighteen thousand rand by the time everything was said and done, and when I asked, months later, why nobody could find it when they searched for windows in Boksburg, the answer was that I would need to pay extra for that part. The finding part. I remember driving home that day genuinely angry, not just at them but at myself, because I had handed over money I worked hard for and I could not even tell you what I had bought. It felt like paying a plumber and still having a leak, except I could not even see the pipe.

The turning point was not some big dramatic thing. It was load-shedding, actually. We were in stage four, the workshop was dead because the machines could not run, and I was sitting in the office with nothing to do but drink coffee and stew. I picked up my phone and, more out of frustration than anything, I started typing my own business name into Google the way a customer would. Nothing. Then I typed the way a real person types, aluminium windows near me, and I scrolled and scrolled and I was nowhere. Other guys were there. Some of them I knew, and between us, some of them do work I would not put in a dog kennel. But there they were, and there I was not.

Something shifted in me that evening. I got tired of feeling stupid. I decided that even if I never became an expert, I was at least going to understand enough that nobody could sell me smoke again. I started watching videos at night after supper, the free ones, anything I could find that explained things in plain language instead of jargon. One evening I stumbled onto a free library of short marketing videos and I sat there with my reading glasses on watching a couple of them back to back, and for the first time somebody explained why a customer searches the way they search, and it actually made sense. Not because it was clever, but because it was simple. I took notes in the same book I use for measurements.

My first attempts were rubbish, I will be honest. I set up a Google listing for the business and I got the address wrong, so for two weeks I was apparently operating from a spaza shop three streets over. I laughed about it later but at the time I wanted to throw the phone. Slowly though, small things started to work. I put up proper photos of jobs we had finished, a nice stacking door we did in Sunward Park, a shopfront in town. Real photos, taken on my own phone, not stock nonsense. I asked a few happy customers to leave me a review, and to my surprise most of them did. I started answering questions on WhatsApp quickly instead of letting them sit until I got off a ladder, because I realised a person who waits two days for an answer has already phoned the next guy.

The wins were small and they were mine, and that made all the difference. The first time a complete stranger phoned and said he found me on Google and could I come measure for burglar bars and windows, I nearly did not know what to say. I wrote that job in my book with a bit of a stupid grin. It was maybe nine thousand rand of work. Nothing that changes a life, but it was proof that the thing worked, and that I had made it work, sitting at my kitchen table.

I am not going to pretend I turned into some marketing genius. I did not. There is plenty I still do not understand and probably never will, and eventually I did bring in a bit of paid help again for the technical side, a local outfit called Top Click Media, but the difference this time was that I could actually understand what they were doing and ask sensible questions, instead of nodding along and hoping. That is the whole thing, really. The money I lost early on, I lost because I did not understand it and I was too proud to say so. The moment I decided to learn a little, even badly, even slowly, the whole game changed.

What I would tell any other oke running a small shop or a trade is this. You do not have to become an expert. You just have to understand enough that you are not blind. Learn a bit. Watch the free stuff at night when the power is off anyway. Ask the dumb questions out loud. It is your money and your name on the side of the bakkie, and nobody is ever going to care about it the way you do. I wish somebody had told me that eleven years ago. It would have saved me a lot of rands and a lot of that quiet, sick feeling of knowing I was being taken and not being able to prove it.

These days when the phone rings and it is a stranger, I still feel that little bit of satisfaction. Not because the marketing is clever, but because I finally understand the thing I am doing, and no one is doing it to me anymore.