Lineup 365: Business Growth Agency
MY STORY
My name is Michael, and I’ve spent the last 24 years running businesses with a front-row seat to one of the most painful patterns in small business: watching talented, hardworking people fail at something that was fixable.
In 2003 I started my sign company, Lineup Ink. In 2005 I started a magazine called Point Magazine. I eventually sold the magazine and still own the sign company today. Over those 24 years, too many of the customers I had grown to like ended up shutting their doors. That’s when I realized that making a new sign or running a new ad isn’t enough to fix what’s actually broken.
Most owners think the reason they failed was a lack of customers. For some, that’s part of it. But for most, the real problem was that they never stopped to ask WHY they weren’t getting the customers they wanted — and more importantly, why the ones they did get weren’t coming back.
At the time, that wasn’t my job. My job was to make them a sign or print their ad in my magazine. It wasn’t my place to help them write better ad copy, run a ad that gets directed to a landing page with an upsell offers, or track their CRM to make sure the campaign was reaching the right customer. That’s what a marketing company is for, right?
But here’s the truth — you need to solve way more than just a customer awareness problem. What good is a new advertising campaign generating $25 warm leads if your close rate is 5%, and of those new customers, 80% churn and never come back? At that point your ads aren’t the problem. There are other elements inside your business that need to get fixed before you spend another dollar on advertising.
The contractors, chefs, shop owners, and entrepreneurs I worked with were masters of their craft. What killed them was everything else — the marketing, the sales process, the customer acquisition, the numbers they weren’t tracking, the systems they never built, and a money model that needed adjusting. And the data proves it.
Nearly 50% of small businesses don’t survive past year five. But survival alone doesn’t tell the full story. Of the ones that do survive, 86% of owners never take home more than $100,000 a year — and 30% don’t pay themselves anything at all. The average small business owner earns around $69,000 a year. That’s after years of 60-hour weeks, personal financial risk, and sacrificing time with their families. Most would have made more money — and worked fewer hours — staying at a job.
More than 80% of the passionate, hardworking business owners I worked with over two decades eventually closed their doors. That number haunted me.
They didn’t fail because they lacked talent. They failed because nobody ever showed them how to run a business.
So I spent five years obsessively studying what separates the businesses that scale from the ones that stall. Lead generation, offer creation, customer lifetime value, conversion optimization, constraint theory — I went deep on all of it. Not for a degree. Not for a certification. Because I was sick of watching good people fail at something that was fixable, and I wanted to be the person who could fix it.
Lineup 365 and the BGAP I created is the result of that five-year deep dive — combined with over 24 years of real-world experience running businesses, managing teams, and solving operational problems from the ground up.
I’m committed to helping you grow your profits and beat the odds.
Let’s find your constraint.
Schedule your free, no-obligation discovery call today.
401-419-3007
Thank you.
— Michael