A dental practice is on an acquisition treadmill — every new patient comes from ads that cost more each year, and nothing is built for the patients they already have. Brian and Dave move the problem from "buy more patients" to the back half of the marketing hourglass, the seven-stage model popularized by John Jantsch in Duct Tape Marketing: Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy — and then Repeat and Refer, where much of the profit hides. They walk each stage for the practice, the usually-skipped "Try," how to invite referrals without being pushy, and why it has to be a system instead of a mood. Monday Move: write the one sequence that fires after a patient's first visit — a check-in, a genuinely useful note, and one referral invitation, with timing — on a single page.

Written version and this week's Monday Move: The Operator's Library at mmsvegas.com.

A B2B software founder rode a wave of scrappy early customers, then watched growth stall as pragmatic buyers keep asking "who else like us is using this?" Brian and Dave name the wall — the chasm, from the playbook Geoffrey Moore popularized in "Crossing the Chasm," building on the older technology-adoption lifecycle. They get into why the vision pitch that won early adopters is noise to the mainstream, why references carry the most weight inside a segment, and the two-move fix — a narrow beachhead plus the "whole product" — along with where the model doesn't apply. Monday Move: write one sentence — "We are the obvious choice for ______" — and fill the blank with a single narrow segment. No "and," no second market.

Written version and this week's Monday Move: The Operator's Library at mmsvegas.com.

A coffee subscription-box founder caps acquisition at fifteen dollars — the price of the first box — and every channel looks tapped out. Brian and Dave reframe the cap as the ceiling he built himself and get into customer lifetime value: developed by database marketers Robert and Kate Kestnbaum, put in print by Shaw and Stone, and later made practical for small operators by Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy. They cover the four-part math in gross profit, why payback period and cash can bankrupt a "profitable" business, how the three-to-one ratio came out of SaaS, and the quieter game of raising lifetime value itself. Monday Move: do the LTV math once — order value, frequency, margin, and honest average lifespan, in gross profit — set it next to what you spend to acquire a customer, and just look at the gap.

Written version and this week's Monday Move: The Operator's Library at mmsvegas.com.