Getting back into it

When I look around Windsor-Essex, I see businesses that don’t service Chatham. They don’t service London or Kitchener. They service here, and their name means something here, and you can tell in about ten seconds of talking to the owner that they actually give a damn about this place.

Then I look at the marketing companies in this market. Most of them are technically in Windsor, have a handful of clients, and market themselves as serving Ontario, or Canada, or one niche spread across four hundred kilometres, or basically anybody with a pulse. Which is a strategy. I understand why people do it. But when you’re not really all about Windsor, you lose the pulse of what’s actually going on here, and then you’re selling the same playbook in Essex County that you’d sell in Mississauga.

I lost the pulse for a while too

I started YQG Digital gung-ho about being all Windsor. It’s in the name. Then unemployment started climbing, tariff talk got loud, and I did what a lot of owners around here quietly did: I started looking at whether the opportunity was somewhere else.

I’m not going to pretend that was some deep strategic pivot. It was shiny object syndrome with a reasonable excuse attached.

And honestly, it doesn’t matter much, because the answer was sitting in front of me. Windsor is where we are. It’s where my family is, where my friends are, where I want to be. If we’re going to spend money and time and effort building something, I’d rather it land here than get spent chasing clients in cities I couldn’t drive to for a coffee.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s wrong for a marketing company to take work from other markets. Sometimes you need the revenue and that’s the whole conversation. But if you actually care about the place you live and want everyday life to get better for the people around you, most of your focus should probably go there.

Who we’re building this for

Two things have to be true, and the first one usually surprises people.

You have to want to own this market. Not grow a little. Own it. Be the name people say automatically when they need what you sell, in Windsor and Leamington and Essex and Amherstburg, to the point where your competitors bring you up in their own sales meetings. If you’re comfortable at your current size, we’re an expensive way to stay comfortable.

That’s the type we keep coming back to:

• Trades and home services with multiple crews who could be running twice as many
• Multi-location operators who are strong in one town and invisible in the next three
• Companies whose payroll actually lands here, not in a call centre four hours up the 401
• Businesses that pull people into the region: hospitality, destination retail, showrooms people cross the border for
• Owners who sponsor the team, show up at the Chamber, and put their name on things they don’t have to

The packages we’re building are exclusive. One company per industry, per market. We’re not selling to you and then selling the same thing to the shop across the street six months later, because the whole point is to promote one company like crazy until they’re the obvious choice. That means we say no more than we used to, and it means we’re picky about who we say yes to.

The second thing that has to be true is that you’re actually invested here.

• Dayus Roofing has run a free roof giveaway
• I’ve watched Matrix Landscaping stop and plow driveways for people stuck in snow for FREE
• Red Seal Fire Protection shows up to a Christmas parade with $1,000+ of candy to hand out to kids
• Realty ONE Group Iconic gets out and volunteers, Habitat for Humanity builds among them

No commission attached to swinging a hammer. Nobody’s closing a deal on a job site.

For the record, none of those four are signed up for what I’m describing here. Nobody is yet. I’m naming them because they’re the kind of company I’m talking about, not because they’ve bought exclusivity.

I’m not naive about this. People do things partly because it comes back around, and I’m not going to write a paragraph pretending business owners are saints. But some of these companies were already sold out, already booked, with nothing riding on the gesture. That happens more in this market than it gets credit for.

Ambition and investment together are the combination. Plenty of companies have one without the other. The ones with both are worth going all in on, because when they win, the region gets something out of it too.

Where we’re actually headed

We’re going all in on Windsor-Essex, and I mean that literally. We aren’t running ads in other parts of Ontario. Not in other provinces, not in the States. Every dollar we spend acquiring clients gets spent trying to reach businesses within about a forty-five minute drive of my office.

We’ve built real partnerships here, including with the Windsor-Essex Regional Chamber of Commerce. We’ve worked with over a hundred clients across the region. I want a thousand. I want us creating jobs in Windsor. I want local companies pulling money into this region and pushing it back out into it. And I want tourism to actually work here, which right now it doesn’t, in any of it. Not downtown, not Leamington, not Kingsville, not the county.

And I’d like the negative sentiment about this place, which runs hottest among people who are twenty-five and have no plans to actually leave, to quiet down a bit. Every city has problems. Ours are real. You can spend a decade narrating them or you can spend that decade building something here. One of those changes the sentiment.

The next piece of this is bigger. What we’re putting together is aimed at businesses that want to take real market share across Windsor-Essex, and it’s less a service you buy off a list and more a coordinated strategy across everything you’re already doing. Bigger scope, bigger price tag, bigger swing.

I’ll have more to say about it shortly. If you want it when it lands, get on our newsletter, and you’ll hear it first.