Right, here's the honest one. Not "look how amazing I am," not a £1,000-a-week screenshot — a plain review of what happened this month, what moved, and what still hasn't.
Quick recap for anyone new: Markus IT Support started as buying old iMacs and MacBooks, refurbishing them, and reselling. Moderate success — enough to keep going, not enough to retire on. It pivoted to a repair-and-OS-update service when that made more sense than chasing resale margins on ageing hardware.
Magazine ads. Leaflets through doors. Google ads. Facebook ads. All tried, all money spent, all failed to convert into real work. SEO used to be worth the effort — it isn't much any more, now that local traffic has largely moved to Facebook and YouTube reels. Sounds sensible, spending on ads to get found. It isn't, not for a business this size, not in this market. That's not a footnote I'm glossing over — that's most of the marketing budget for two years.
Organic short-form video. Still early, still unproven at real scale, but it's the first channel that's produced anything resembling traction after everything else failed outright. I'm not going to pretend it's "working" yet — that would be exactly the kind of overclaiming I'm trying to avoid. What I can say honestly: it's the one channel worth putting more time into this month, because it's the only one that's moved at all.
This is also where the AI-agent side of things earns its keep — not glamorously, just usefully. Drafting reel scripts from real jobs done that week, preparing captions, holding everything for me to actually check and post myself. I'm a victim of my own advice here too: I tell clients "don't let it post without a human checking it," and then I have to actually do that myself, every week, even when I'm busy. Given my track record with follow-through, that's not nothing.
If you run a local business, this is probably closer to your actual experience than most of what gets posted online: things you spend money on that don't work, one thing that might be starting to, and a lot of "let's see next month." That's the whole value of this review — not a finished win, just the process, in public, so you can see your own situation reflected in it.
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