What a Roof Tiler Taught Me About Marketing

I grew up watching a man carry a roof on his shoulders, five or six tiles at a time. My dad, Mark Rasmussen, was a roof tiler based on the Central Coast, and if you owned a tiled roof anywhere between Sydney and Newcastle any time from the late eighties to the mid two thousands, there is a decent chance he stood on it. This is not really an article about roofing. It is about the day I understood what his work had been teaching me about mine, and about why I run my marketing business the way I do.

The House on the Way to Anywhere

Here is the memory. We would be driving somewhere, anywhere, and Dad would ease off the accelerator outside some ordinary brick house. Then the line I heard a hundred times growing up.

As a kid I would think, that's nice, Dad, and go back to looking out the window. It took me twenty years of working life to understand what that sentence actually cost, and what it meant that he could still say it, years later, at forty kilometres an hour.

What the Roof Actually Cost

Roof tiling is brutal work. Up at the crack of dawn every day. On top of a blistering roof through 30 and 40 degree summers, humping five or six heavy tiles up a ladder at a time. He would come home covered in coloured oxide, sunburnt everywhere the hat didn't reach, and absolutely starving, because he had worked straight through to get a job done rather than leave it half finished.

The bill for all of it arrived later. Both wrists fused. Both knees replaced. Two new hips. We call him the robotic man now, and he laughs, but every one of those joints was spent on somebody's roof. That is what it takes to slow the car down outside a house and say I did that. Getting up every day. Doing it when you are tired. Doing it when it hurts.

The Same Grit, a Different Ladder

I went into marketing more than twenty years ago, and the work I loved most was always with small business owners. It took me a while to work out why, and the answer was always in the front seat of that Mitsubishi Triton. Owners may not be on a hot roof, but the determination is the same. The tenacity is the same. The early starts, the working through lunch, the pride in pointing at something and saying I built that. The struggle is real, and in this economy it is realer than ever, because a small business has to make every single dollar work.

That is also why so much of the marketing industry frustrates me. People who have never carried anything up a ladder charging owners for jargon, lock-in platforms and reports nobody can act on. Confusion, sold on retainer, to the hardest working people in the country.

How I Treat a Marketing Budget

I come from the working class. I watched what it costs to build something with your own hands, and what it means to be proud of it. So when a small business hands me their marketing budget, I know what that money took to earn, and I treat it like it was carried up a ladder in 40 degree heat.

In practice that looks like plain English instead of jargon. Prices published on the website like it is the most normal thing in the world. Websites the owner actually owns, portable to any host on earth, because tradies do not rent their tools back from the hardware store. And honest advice, including the times the honest advice is keep your money for now.

It also shapes what I actually sell. I want every small business to have its best chance of success from the very first day, so I build websites the right way from the very start, with the foundations baked in rather than bolted on later. And for businesses already online, I diagnose everything holding back their entire online presence, the website, the Google profile, the socials, and show them exactly how to fix it so they can thrive. A roof does its job for decades because it was laid properly the first time. A website is no different.

Saltline Studio is a small business too. I am not serving small businesses from above. I am one of them, betting the same way they do.

Work You Would Slow the Car Down For

Dad is off the roofs now, but he can still slow the car down outside half the houses on the Coast. That is the standard I hold my own work to. Not impressive-sounding, not award-winning. Just built well enough, and honestly enough, that years from now I could drive past a thriving local business and say to someone, you see that business right there? I did their foundations.

That is the kind of work I want to do. The kind you would slow the car down for.

If that is the kind of marketing help you have been looking for, start with the free Found Score, or just say hello. No discovery call, no pitch. That was never Dad's style, and it is not mine.