We'd been telling clients the same thing for years. Show up. Keep showing up. Consistency on social sparks action.
We'd never tested it on ourselves.
So we ran a build challenge: make something new every day, blog about it, post it on the two social channels we bother with, and Ian was meant to film a short video about each one.
Nine days ago that run finished. Here's what actually happened, including the part that's a bit awkward.
Consistency didn't build an audience. It built a phone that rang.
The Gary Vee version of this story is about reach. Followers, views, the slow climb of a number going up. That's not what we got, and honestly that's not what we cared about.
What we got was people writing in.
Cold leads who'd gone quiet came back. Warm ones who'd been circling finally asked us to actually do the work. And the one that mattered most: people from the cold market, who'd never spoken to us before, just reached out off the back of seeing us turn up day after day.
We hate the word leads. It makes a person sound like a row in a spreadsheet. New friends is closer to the truth. Either way, the quiet channels we'd half-ignored started doing the one job we'd always promised they could do for clients.
The mechanism is dumb and it works: showing up repeatedly makes you the obvious person to think of when the need finally lands. Not because you got clever. Because you were there when nobody else was.
The receipts include the part that makes us look bad
We were genuinely consistent for the first stretch. Build, blog, post, repeat. Then the wheels started showing.
Ian's videos were the first to slide. There was a lot of what we'll generously call video-adjacent leadership, which is a phrase that means no video got made. So even at our most disciplined, one leg of the plan was already wobbling.
Then the funny thing happened. The consistency worked, the enquiries came in, and the new work landed on the desk. Which is exactly when keeping up the daily posting got hard.
This is the bit nobody tells a small business. The reward for showing up consistently is more work, and more work is the single biggest threat to showing up consistently. The thing that proves the strategy is the thing that sabotages it.
- Cold market approached us, unprompted.
- Warm leads converted into actual jobs.
- Old, gone-cold conversations restarted.
- And now, referrals from that new work.
None of that came from a clever campaign. It came from being a visible, predictable presence on two channels for long enough that we stopped being strangers.
The hard part isn't starting. It's surviving your own success.
Anyone can post for a week. The trap is that consistency only pays out after the boring stretch, and by the time it pays out, you're busy with the work it created and you stop.
So you go quiet right when the proof arrives. The channel cools off. Three months later you're wondering why social never worked for you, when the truth is it worked fine and you walked away from it.
If you're a tradie, an allied health clinic, a cafe fitout crew, the move is the same as ours: pick the one or two channels you'll actually maintain, and treat posting like invoicing. Not optional. Not when-you-feel-inspired. A thing that happens whether or not you're slammed.
We put our money where our mouth is and tested the advice we sell. It held up. The challenge now isn't proving it works. It's not abandoning it the moment it does.