When Stopping Means Everything Stops
At the beginning, there is no strategy.
There is only effort.
If you want more work, you go and get it.
If you want the phone to ring, you make it ring.
For me, that meant knocking doors.
Hundreds of them, most nights we would knock on 400 doors or more.
Night after night, walking the same streets, repeating the same conversation, knowing that most doors would stay closed and most people would say no.
A few would say yes.
Just enough to keep things moving.
If I stopped, everything stopped with me.
No knock meant no conversation.
No conversation meant no customer.
No customer meant no money.
So the work never really ended.
This is what most people call “hustle” when they look back on it.
At the time, it felt more basic than that.
It felt like survival.
There was no compounding effect.
No delayed payoff.
Each day started at zero, regardless of how hard the day before had been.
And the quiet truth underneath it all was this:
The business didn’t exist unless I was actively in front of someone.
Interruption Has a Ceiling
There is a limit to how far this kind of visibility can take you.
Not because you stop caring.
Not because you stop trying.
But because interruption only works while you are present.
Every new customer costs time.
Every conversation costs energy.
Every yes is earned one doorstep at a time.
And once the day ends, so does the demand.
There is no accumulation.
No momentum carried forward.
You can work harder tomorrow,
but tomorrow still starts from scratch.
That’s when the questions begin to surface.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
Just a quiet awareness that this model depends on you showing up, again and again, to manufacture attention.
It doesn’t matter how good the service is.
Or how fairly it’s priced.
If people can’t find you without you going to them,
the business never really stands on its own.
And over time, that starts to feel fragile.
Not because the work is hard,
but because nothing exists unless you’re actively creating it.
Looking for Demand That Already Exists
The change didn’t come from inspiration.
It came from friction.
After enough time knocking doors, the effort stopped feeling productive and started feeling circular.
Not because it was hard.
But because it reset every day.
So I stopped asking how to reach more people
and started asking a quieter question.
Is there a way to flip the switch 180 degrees?
Instead of trying to find customers, is there a way they could find me?
Where do people go before they talk to anyone?
It sent me down a rabbit hole, and I thought about what I did, back in the day I’d use the the yellow pages.
Now, we simply ‘Google it’
Not when they’re being sold to.
But when the problem is already on their mind.
I didn’t know the answer at first.
I only knew that interruption was always late in the process.
People had already decided how they felt by the time I reached them.
I was just arriving uninvited.
So instead of pushing harder, I began paying attention.
To the language people used when they explained their problems.
To the questions that came up before they ever asked for a quote.
To the moments where they were looking for clarity, not a salesperson.
That’s where the shift began.
Not in tactics.
In orientation.
Visibility Compounds When It Isn’t Tied to You
The first thing I noticed wasn’t scale.
It was independence.
People weren’t discovering the business as a whole.
They were arriving at a specific place, for a specific reason.
A page that matched the problem they already had in mind.
A page that answered the question they were already asking.
Each one stood on its own.
Someone could find it without me being there.
Read it without a conversation.
Decide what to do next without being chased.
That changed the shape of the work.
For the first time, something I created continued to do its job after I stopped working on it.
Effort didn’t disappear overnight.
It carried forward.
One page didn’t change much.
But then there were more.
And slowly, demand stopped arriving only when I was actively creating it.
Visibility was no longer something I had to manufacture in real time.
It began to exist independently of me.
That was the moment it became clear that being seen wasn’t about effort.
It was about building things that could be found.
Accumulation Changes the Odds
At the beginning, there was no certainty.
I didn’t know the exact words people would use.
I didn’t know what Mrs Jones would type when the problem finally bothered her enough to look for help.
All I knew was this – guessing one phrase was no better than guessing none.
So instead of trying to be precise, I focused on being present.
It reminded me of something simple.
When people buy raffle tickets, they don’t buy one and hope for the best.
They buy rows.
Sometimes whole books.
Not because they know which ticket will win.
But because they understand the odds improve with volume.
This was no different.
Each page was another ticket.
Another way to be found.
Another chance to meet someone at the moment they were already searching.
I didn’t need to predict the exact search.
I just needed to give myself more chances to show up when it happened.
At first, nothing dramatic changed.
Some pages were found.
Some weren’t.
But as they accumulated, the effect became clearer.
Demand stopped feeling like luck.
It stopped resetting every day.
Not because I was doing more work,
but because the work I’d already done was still in play.
That was when visibility stopped feeling fragile.
And it was also when I realised that being found was only the first step.
Being found solved one problem.
It didn’t solve the next one.