The Duct Tape Marketing Story

The Duct Tape Marketing system was born out of an initial failure to serve the small business clients that were drawn to my agency over ten years ago.

Shortly after departing college I went to work for a large advertising agency. It only took me about five years in this job to realize I had to own my business.

At first, I went to work serving the marketing project needs of very large corporations but found that I was always much more interested in working with small business owners.

But, I found it very difficult to help small business owners using the traditional advertising agency model. Small business owners simply couldn’t afford to spend marketing dollars on image advertising, creative briefs and research teams to form their marketing strategies.

I found the missing ingredient to my puzzle in Michael Gerber’s brilliant small business book titled the E-Myth Revisited. Through the E-Myth, Gerber was one of the first to introduce the idea of the duplicatable small business system.

While I had found that small business owners had little trouble grasping systems for things like accounting and shipping, no one was talking about marketing as a system.

It became painfully clear to me that only way to effectively deliver simple, effective and affordable marketing results for small business owners was through the development and application of proven set of marketing principles and strategies.

This system had to be duplicatable, produce predictable results and come with a fixed, almost product like, price tag.

The Duct Tape Marketing system is the outcome of over twenty years of work in the real world small business marketing laboratory and my continuing passion.

I still love working with small business owners and do so everyday. I derive considerable joy knowing that thousands of small business owners have now succeeded growing a business the Duct Tape Marketing way.

John Jantsch
Creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System