A conversation with Alex McInnes of Andes and Alps Media
The most common solopreneur marketing strategy mistake
The clients who come to Alex don’t usually arrive knowing what’s wrong. They arrive with a diagnosis. The copy isn’t landing. The funnel needs fixing. The social posts aren’t getting traction.
He listens to all of it. Then he goes and looks for himself.
What he finds, almost every time, is a mismatch. What’s on the website doesn’t match what the person told him in two hours of conversation. The story someone presents to clients is completely different from the story that drew their best clients in the first place. People have followed advice they were given by people who didn’t know them, and now the whole thing feels like a costume.
“If there’s ever anything that gives people a reason to bail, they’re gone. They’re looking for a reason not to purchase, especially for high ticket items. That language has to be uniform the whole way through from the moment you connect with them to the moment that you make that sale.”
The fix isn’t better copy. It’s alignment. The copy can only do its job when it’s telling the truth about who you are.
The golden triangle: how to make decisions that actually stick
Alex has a framework he calls the golden triangle. When you’re trying to decide whether something is working or whether to change course, you need three things to point in the same direction.
Your intuition. Your data. What your clients are telling you.
If your gut says something isn’t working, that’s one point. Then look at your analytics. Is it backed up? If yes, you have two. Then look at your client feedback. What are the people who stayed saying? What are the people who disappeared not saying?
When all three line up, you have your answer. You know what to cut, what to keep, and where to stop spending time.
That’s the number worth optimizing for.
High-touch versus automated: where the line actually is
This is where most marketing advice for coaches and service businesses goes wrong. It treats automation as a volume game. The idea is: the more you systematize, the more you scale.
But for a premium offer, that logic inverts.
Alex’s position is that automation belongs at the top, when someone is still getting their bearings in your world. You’re putting your voice into the world consistently, without it requiring your daily attention. The emails, the posts, the welcome sequence. All of that can run while you sleep.
The moment someone raises their hand, it stops. No more automation. That’s when he switches to direct conversation. His version is a 45-minute audit he calls the Shotgun Audit, offered free, no pitch, no pressure. Just a real look at what’s happening with an honest read-back at the end.
“The people who are probably your best clients want you to give it to them straight,” I told him during our conversation. “They’re tired of politeness.”
He agreed. The clients worth having are not looking for someone to tell them their stuff is great. They want someone who’ll look at the front page of the website and say, you know that’s not who you told me you are, right?
What “tiny but mighty” means when you have a three-year-old
I end these conversations the same way. What does a tiny but mighty business mean to you?
To Alex, it means: Taking his daughter to school every morning. Doing homework with his older child in the afternoon. Football on Saturdays. A business that makes him feel proud, not just profitable.
Not wealth, not status. Work that fits around the life it’s supposed to be funding.
That’s the kind of business he helps people build. And the marketing, when it’s working, doesn’t feel like marketing anymore. It feels like being yourself, on purpose, in the places where the right people are already paying attention.
Key Takeaways
- The mismatch between how you describe yourself and what your marketing actually says is almost always the first problem to fix, before you touch anything else.
- Your intuition about what isn’t working is probably correct. Pair it with data and client feedback before making changes, so you’re not just redecorating.
- For premium, high-touch services, automation belongs at the top of the funnel and nowhere else. Once someone signals real interest, the conversation needs to be real.
- You don’t need reach. You need the right a few dozen people finding you each year and recognizing themselves in what you’ve built.
If this conversation landed for you
What Alex described, the mismatch between who you are and what your marketing says, is something I see in almost every solopreneur who comes to me at the reinvention stage. The marketing isn’t the problem. The identity underneath it has shifted, and the business hasn’t caught up yet.
If you’ve built something real but it’s starting to feel like a costume, that’s worth paying attention to.
The Tiny Business Method is a 1:1 partnership for established solopreneurs who are ready to close the gap between the business they built and the person they’re becoming.
Or if you want to start with a conversation, book a clarity call and we’ll get clear on what’s actually going on underneath everything.
