Most brands don’t fail because their strategy was wrong. They fail because they quit during the lag phase — right before it was about to work.
That’s the central idea behind a piece I was recently featured in over at Crave Magazine, drawing a direct line between what I learned competing as a Division I golfer and how I think about building marketing systems that actually compound over time.
Here’s what stood out most from the conversation.
Consistency is the edge no one wants to buy. The brands that write post-mortems about “wasted spend” almost always funded a solid strategy and then pulled the plug before it matured. Brand authority accumulates slowly, then accelerates. You don’t get to skip the slow part. My approach at Pabs Marketing has always been built around that reality — show up consistently, make calculated moves, and trust the timeline.
Reach isn’t relevance. One of the most expensive mistakes early-stage brands make is chasing the broadest possible audience on the highest-visibility channels right out of the gate. It sounds ambitious. It’s actually just loud. The smarter play is to dominate a narrow conversation where your positioning is genuinely differentiated, earn authority there, and expand from strength. Skipping that step doesn’t save time — it costs you twice as much later trying to rebuild credibility you could’ve earned cheaply at the start.
Campaigns produce spikes. Presence produces floors. This is the distinction that most marketing budgets completely ignore. A spike is a window — it opens when you spend and closes when you stop. A floor is structural. It’s the baseline awareness and inbound intent your brand generates without actively paying for it. Every campaign you run on top of a strong floor converts better and costs less. But floors take years to show up in attribution models, so most planning cycles are designed to never build them.
The athletic edge isn’t discipline — it’s composure. Knowing the difference between a signal that needs a response and noise that needs you to hold position is a skill. Sports trained me to reset fast and stay focused on what’s actually in my control.
If you’re building a brand and wondering why it’s not moving faster, the full breakdown is worth your time.
The scorecard is always a lagging indicator of decisions made several holes ago.
