Talked About Marketing

25/09/2026

Steve recently queried SA Water publicly about toxin levels in the Port River. A stranger with a locked profile responded by suggesting he stick to playing snooker, apparently because Steve shares a name with the famous player. He could have replied. Instead, he recognised what was actually being asked of him: react, generate heat, help Mark Zuckerberg sell more advertising. Every social media platform is designed to produce that reaction, and every business owner who has ever been baited online knows the feeling. Steve and David talked through why leaving that particular game unplayed is the adult move, and why it matters more to your business than any clever comeback ever could.

24/09/2026

I finished a truly yay-worthy evening with Regional Development Australia Adelaide Hills, Fleurieu and Kangaroo Island by having an after dinner chocolate conversation with two legends of the field: Tom Foristal from Melba's Chocolates and Marcus Booth-Remmers from Red Cacao Chocolatier.

I now know more about praline and chocolate melting points than I thought was possible.

24/09/2026

Steve is gathering his thoughts ahead of MCing for Regional Development Australia Adelaide Hills, Fleurieu and Kangaroo Island. Wonder if the people at Lloyd Brothers W**e & Olive Company ever get sick of this view?

24/09/2026

At a networking event, almost everyone is doing well. Ask the same people in a smaller room of twelve, and the conversation shifts entirely. David observed this difference directly in his American consulting work: small business owners there are, he said, far more honest with each other about how close to the knife's edge they actually are. Steve added that Australia's networking culture too often invites people to measure themselves against a surface they cannot see behind, and that a business owner upping their car lease because the people around them appear to be thriving may be copying pain rather than success. The kind of support that actually helps is the kind where someone in the room tells you what is not working.

24/09/2026

I do declare, I hear the vicar’s voice in my head when carrying out writing tasks.

We might think AI tools do away with the need for checking our work. That’s a mistake. Exile the tools might get grammar right, they will often stray from our authentic voice and gravitate towards an average style.

Pray, continue.

Steve

22/09/2026

The day David Olney received his first large consulting payment, he called his accountant Phyllis before spending a dollar of it. She spent fifteen minutes on the phone walking him through what to put aside for tax, voluntary super, and long-term savings. That day he worked out his percentages, and they have been his percentages ever since. Steve and David traced this habit back to David's grandmothers, who had survived the Depression and World War II on exactly this principle: cover your obligations first, then survive on what is left. The Profit First system Mike Michalowicz built around multiple bank accounts is, in essence, the same old wisdom made hard to ignore.

21/09/2026

The latest update from Google Chrome made Steve as mad as hell. In fact, he has empathy for the woman who protested the dizzy way Canva pushes AI, at a company event in the UK over the weekend.

Yes, we do use AI tools but there are red lines we should not cross. And Steve argues that if we are thoughtful, we can have our cake and eat it too with AI.

My Chrome browser just updated and before I could do anything it had pushed its latest "welcome" screen. This one was forcing AI down my throat like a severe

20/09/2026

Steve's wife made the mistake of inquiring with a real estate agent, and they have been fielding unsolicited calls from different agents ever since. Steve's solution cost nothing and took 30 seconds to implement: the iPhone's Screen Unknown Callers feature, set to ask reason for calling. Any number not saved in contacts is intercepted. The caller is asked who they are and what they need. A text transcript appears on Steve's screen, silently, and he decides whether to answer. David described it as a well-behaved moat dragon. Steve said it had given him genuine psychological relief across the week, because the small finite ability to concentrate is a real resource, and it was no longer under threat from random interruptions. The same capability exists on Android via Google's call screen and Samsung's Smart Call. If unsolicited calls are interrupting your working day, this is a reasonable morning to turn it on.

18/09/2026

Steve and David examined something specific at the start of this episode: what it actually feels like to use Google's AI overview, compared with the older habit of working through a page of search results yourself. On the surface, it feels like the same activity. You go to Google, you find something useful, and you move on. But the cognitive work is different, and Steve put the consequence plainly: anything not used starts to diminish. David connected this to James Clear's habit-stacking idea. The old habit was to search and then evaluate. The new habit is to search and accept. The trigger is identical. The outcome is not. For anyone in business who makes decisions based on research, the question worth sitting with is whether the speed of the new habit is coming at a cost to the quality of what you are deciding.

16/09/2026

David made a point in this episode that runs counter to most of the anxiety around AI search tools. The shift toward answer engines does not disadvantage small business owners who know their work deeply, he argued. It disadvantages the tactic of smearing Adelaide into a paragraph 7,000 times and calling it a website. The expertise that has always made a good small business valuable, the ability to explain which product suits which customer and why, the knowledge built from thousands of individual interactions, is exactly what the new search environment is looking for. Steve and David have been doing what they call GEO-ready work with clients: converting that real expertise into content that AI tools can find, evaluate, and surface. The work is not complicated. It is mostly a matter of saying plainly what you know.