I spent my childhood in front of cameras—national ad campaigns starting at four years old, writing ad copy by thirteen. By seventeen, I was developing film in darkrooms with my father, watching images emerge from chemistry baths. I thought it was magic.

It wasn’t magic. It was pattern recognition happening in real time.

When I attended the University of North Florida to study advertising and marketing communications, my professor pulled me aside after a few weeks. “There’s nothing you’re going to learn in this class that you don’t already know,” he said. So I quit. That moment taught me something critical—if you already know how to do something well, the onus is on you to do it.

The Hidden Tax Nobody Talks About

Here’s what I discovered after working with over 350 companies: one out of three of my clients has been mistreated by an artist or so-called designer who didn’t know anything about the real job. They were spewing out nonsense for the sake of trying to earn a living.

That’s where the waste lives—in lost time, resources, expectations, and hope.

The marketing industry obsesses over creative costs and media spend. But I’ve watched something far more expensive destroy businesses: the compounding loss of time and accumulated disappointment when marketing systems fail to deliver on their promises.

Research shows that fragmented marketing approaches waste up to 26% of total marketing budgets on the wrong channels and strategies. But that’s just the money you can see.

The Trust Tax Compounds Daily

The real cost is trust. And the other way to say it is the cost of lost expectation.

If a founder goes to his leadership team and says, “We’ve hired an agency and they’re going to help us grow the business,” but nothing happens because they picked the wrong agency—the leadership team loses faith in the founder. The founder didn’t make a good choice.

By extension, if the leadership team goes to the staff and says, “Get ready, we’re going to have a sales campaign and everybody needs to be ready for it,” but nothing happens—that rot continues throughout the entire organization.

It costs momentum. Momentum turns into sales energy. Energy turns into forward growth. Growth turns into revenue. Revenue turns into job satisfaction, and then personal reward.

That’s a really big cost.

Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion annually. When employees see colleagues leave regularly due to failed initiatives, it shakes their confidence in the company’s stability and leadership—creating a psychological cost that financial metrics can’t fully capture.

The iThinQware Lesson

I learned this lesson the hard way when I built iThinQware—a public safety technology company that reached $13 million in annual sales before we exited in 2016.

iThinQware was born out of personal tragedy. My employee Tom McDonald was mugged at gunpoint in his hotel room by the Russian mafia. My brother’s fiancée was murdered in her college dorm at Johns Hopkins University—the case was never solved. Then I was mugged on my birthday in a parking lot across from my high school.

All three incidents had one thing in common: law enforcement couldn’t communicate effectively to the general public that they needed to be watchful, aware, and help by turning in crime tips.

I created the iWatch application—a smartphone app that could intake text, images, video, store the geocode, and send that data intelligently based on its location to law enforcement. It knew where it was, it knew where to send it, and it knew which police department or sheriff’s office needed it.

Here’s what matters: I didn’t make a single ad. I didn’t attend a single trade show. Every bit of that business came from referrals from other police departments and from email marketing, video production, social media posts, and our website.

Creating an integrated end-to-end solution of technologies that were complementary around a single message had tremendous power. It was an incredible accelerant to business growth.

The Fragmentation Tax

Most businesses don’t realize they’re paying this tax because they’ve never been to the top of the mountain—they don’t know how far they can see.

If you asked me, “Do you have a dog?” and I said “Blue”—not only is the question not answered, but there’s clearly something wrong in the logic that made me respond with a color instead of answering the question.

I find that less experienced agencies and agency personnel oftentimes obfuscate the truth by hiding behind buzzwords and trade jargon. That annoys me because it’s an insult to the customer and it serves no purpose except to obfuscate the inevitable—you’re an idiot and you don’t need to be working on my company.

Companies without documented marketing strategy waste an average of $847,000 annually on tactical activities that generate impressive vanity metrics but fail to drive revenue growth.

We Only Have So Many Trips Around the Sun

Here’s what I want you to understand: we only have so many trips around the sun. You want every one of those days and every one of those experiences to be as positive as they can be.

By allowing waste, loss, momentum, and opportunity to be in disarray—you are nurturing nothing except your anguish, your disappointment, and your lack of self-worth.

If you’re in a professional relationship and you are always in a state of confusion because you really don’t “get it”—you’re not doing anybody any justice, least of all yourself.

My father taught me: friends and lovers come and go, but enemies accumulate. You can’t be in a relationship with a business partner where you don’t trust that person.

The joy I have is that I get to be friends with these people. We start out as strangers, we become business partners, but ultimately we become close friends. Some of those close friends have been close friends of mine for two and a half decades.

The Integration Solution

At Appture Digital Media, I built a system to eliminate this waste from the ground up. I started with an interview process I call Entellogenesis—the beginning of the big idea.

It asks questions a simple conversation or lunch meeting doesn’t: What are you known for? What’s your customer profile? Who’s your ideal customer? What are your salespeople doing in the field? Do you have all the tools you need? What’s the greatest achievement you’ve had as an entrepreneur and founder? What are the things you wish you had done earlier?

This unlocks the toolkit in my brain. Once I hear those things, I can see those insights. I can smell where the smoke is coming from without even seeing the flame.

That’s because of the depth of experiences—decades of pattern recognition compressed into diagnostic clarity.

Instead of poking around in a closet blindly, I know exactly where it is because I can see it absolutely with crystal clarity. That allows me to not only be efficient but to be more cost-efficient and time-resource-management efficient.

The Bottom Line

It’s hard to soar with the eagles when you’re surrounded by turkeys.

The company you keep—especially your marketing partners—directly impacts how high you can fly. If you’re caught in that cycle of marketing disappointment, losing time you can’t recover and watching trust erode throughout your organization, you’re paying the most expensive cost in business.

The sooner you make the choice to work with partners who eliminate that waste, the better the ride will be for the rest of your time.

Because time is the one resource you can’t get back.