Strategy Over Sparkles is a marketing publication for local service business owners.
It exists because most marketing advice aimed at small businesses is written for somebody else. For startups with runway. For online stores with a hundred products. For people whose actual job is marketing — not for people whose job is the work, and who get to marketing at nine at night when the trucks are back in the yard.
Why it’s called Strategy Over Sparkles
Sparkles are the parts of marketing that look like progress. A new logo. A posting schedule. A website that photographs well. None of it is wrong, exactly. It’s just rarely the thing that was costing you money.
Strategy is less exciting. It’s working out which single thing is holding everything else back, and fixing that one first — before spending a dollar on anything else.
Most businesses have one real constraint at a time. Almost nobody knows which one is theirs.
Who writes it
My name is Eddie Rodríguez. I’ve spent about twenty years in digital marketing, and I run Strategy Charlie, a digital marketing agency in Burlington, Ontario, working with local service businesses across Canada and the US.
I write these with AI as a collaborator — it drafts, it argues back, it catches what I’ve missed. The judgement is mine, and so is the accountability: nothing goes up that I don’t believe or haven’t checked.
It would be a bit rich to write about AI employees and then pretend I don’t use one.
What you won’t find here is a content team, or a pile of articles generated overnight to fill a calendar.
What you should know
I sell the things I write about here.
I’d rather say that on the About page than have you work it out halfway through an article. So: the writing isn’t bait. If a piece’s honest answer is “this probably isn’t your problem, don’t buy this,” that’s what it says — and you’ll find that in more than one article here.
Being upfront about it is also just the job. I don’t think you should take advice from anyone who won’t tell you how they get paid.
Who this is for
You’re good at what you do. Marketing happens in the gaps between real work. You’ve been sold a tactic at least once by someone who never asked what your business actually needed.
It’s probably not for you if you’re after growth hacks, algorithm tricks, or somebody to confirm that posting more will fix it.
How often
When there’s something worth saying.
I’d rather publish six pieces a year that change how you think about your business than fifty that waste an evening. Consistency matters, but not more than having a point.
Where to find the agency
Strategy Charlie is at strategycharlie.com.
If something here lands and you’d like to talk through your own situation, that’s where to find me.