The ROI Method: The Story Behind Relevancy, Omnipresence, Intimacy

The debt before the business

Most people who know my work know the LeadCraft story, because I've told it a hundred times and I'm about to tell it again in a minute. Fewer know the one before it.

I was 21, sitting in an accountant's office in Moncton, New Brunswick. $726,000 in debt. $450,000 of it secured against my parents' house. The accountant had the particular kind of measured calm people use when they don't want to say the thing they're thinking. Every decision that got me there had felt reasonable at the time. What I didn't have was any ability to see what I was doing, because what I was doing was running a pattern, not a strategy. I'd spent years reacting to whatever felt urgent that week and calling it strategy. It wasn't. It was momentum with no direction attached, and momentum with no direction is how you end up $726,000 in the hole without ever making a single decision that felt reckless in the moment.

I'd built my first real business selling eggs door to door at eight. By eleven or twelve I had something closer to a real company. By sixteen I had a seven-figure agency, contractors working for me around the world before I could legally drive. By 21 I'd blown it up and owed close to a million dollars. Broke, broken, and terrified in a way I couldn't hide from myself. I knew I had a problem. What I didn't know was who to trust. There were maybe twenty different marketing gurus competing for my attention that exact year. Some promised ten-figure exits. Some ran countdown timers on everything. Some just posted Lamborghinis. I didn't buy from any of them. I bought from the one guy who explained why most marketing fails using the same language I'd already been using in my own head. He didn't push. He didn't sell hard. He just made sense.

Looking back, that's the part worth sitting with. I was surrounded by louder options. Flashier ones. Ones with bigger promises and bigger production budgets behind them. None of it moved me, because none of it spoke to where I was, which was a 21-year-old who'd already tried the aggressive version of business and watched it collapse under him. The guy I bought from wasn't the most omnipresent voice in my feed that year. He wasn't even close. He was simply the one person whose message matched my exact moment, and that was enough to earn my trust before it earned my money.

That's the first thread of the ROI Method, years before it had a name. I didn't buy because someone was everywhere. I bought because one message, from one person, landed. Relevancy, though I wouldn't have called it that yet, and years before I'd have any use for the word.

I rebuilt from there, slowly and unglamorously, the way debt gets repaid in real life instead of in a highlight reel. There was no clean pivot and no single dramatic insight, just the plain work of understanding what had happened and refusing to repeat it. It took roughly seven times the original debt in new revenue, spread across multiple years, before I stopped being in the hole. That number used to throw me for a loop. It still does, a little. That rebuild is where the next two pieces of the method came from, and it took another business collapsing entirely, years later, for me to see all three pieces clearly at once.

LeadCraft, and the collapse that taught me the rest

On September 29th, 2017, I shut down a multi-million dollar business that had just started building real momentum.

I'd launched LeadCraft in May 2016 to help Entrepreneurs with their lead generation online. We succeeded, by every metric that's supposed to matter. Hundreds of business owners improved their funnels through us. It was my fourth seven-figure business, and for over a year I assumed it would be "the" business.

Then, over the summer of 2017, something stopped feeling right. I couldn't name it at first, and it wore on me more than it should have, because early that year I'd made more money than ever. I just didn't enjoy it. I used to wake up excited. Not anymore. I had money and authority, and somehow it left me with less freedom, not more. Worst of all, I didn't feel like I was making the impact I could, for me or for the people I served.

So in September I flew to Utah for a mastermind. I felt low. Real low. On the plane, I told myself this is it, I'm done, and I laid out three real options: stay miserable, kill the business and walk away even though it made no logical sense, or reinvent something I believed in.

After five days in those Utah mountains, in long conversations with people like Jesse Elder, Zach Obront, and Chris Stoikos, I chose the third option. Someone asked me flat out what I was going to do. It felt like my brain shut off and something else turned on, and I wrote out my three-year plan in a text message on the spot. The next day I called my COO and told him what we were doing. We killed LeadCraft. It took less than five days to blow up a multi-million dollar business I had believed, all the way down, was "the" one. It should have been hard. It was the easiest decision I've made, because we weren't serving our audience the way we could have.

Take LeadCraft's flagship product: a $997 do-it-yourself course we'd put real blood, sweat, and effort into. It was good. One of the best our industry had to offer. And month after month I watched hundreds of Entrepreneurs buy it and never log in.

I shouldn't have cared. We were making more money than ever. But I did care, because I knew we could do more, and that knowledge ate at me until I couldn't sleep, started eating badly, and put on weight I didn't want. I was depressed despite appearing to have "all of it." I decided if I was going to run a business, it was going to create real transformation for people, or it wasn't going to run at all. No more in-between.

So I shut LeadCraft down, and something unexpected happened. I became nomadic. I rebuilt my team with better talent. I found the person I'd marry. I felt more freedom than I had in years. People I used to admire in this industry became peers and clients. I started helping people in ways I hadn't imagined possible.

Out of LeadCraft's ashes I built what I called the Relevancy Engine, and it replaced, then exceeded, LeadCraft's revenue within 60 days. With fewer customers. That was the detail that made me stop and think, because everything I'd been taught said fewer customers should mean less revenue, not more.

Where the three came from

I'd always talked about the importance of being relevant to an audience. It was one of LeadCraft's founding principles. LeadCraft had also taught me, by accident, how much it mattered to be omnipresent, to become top of mind with the right people rather than loud to everyone.

But in the months after shutting LeadCraft down, the third piece clicked into place, and I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it sooner. I'd spent years building relevance and gotten reasonably good at staying top of mind. What I hadn't built, not really, was intimacy. I hadn't created the kind of connection that made the wrong-fit clients disappear and the right-fit ones show up already halfway sold. Once I started marketing and selling with real intimacy instead of the appearance of it, the shift in my business, and my team, was immediate.

Relevancy. Omnipresence. Intimacy. The ROI Method, for short, and not a coincidence in the name I've ever tried too hard to justify. It just stuck.

I built, tested, and iterated on it in real time, in a real business, with real client outcomes attached. What follows is what I watched happen when I finally had all three working at once instead of one or two.

Relevancy, the way I learnt it

Relevancy is what most people picture when they hear "marketing." I mean something narrower: your message and the journey it takes someone on before they ever consider buying.

If the whole game is the right message to the right person at the right time, relevancy is what makes sure you have the right message in the first place. The journey looks like this. Someone has to admit there's a real problem in their life or business. That puts them into discovery mode, which is your cue to show them your process and your story, the things that build a real connection instead of a pitch. Over time they start buying into you as someone worth listening to. They face their problem head on and decide whether they want to move from where they are to where they want to be, and you have to show them how. Only then does the ask make sense.

I still think about relevancy as three parts working together: the offer, the message, and the position. The offer is whatever you're putting in front of someone, and it doesn't have to be a sale. A lead magnet, a webinar seat, a program, all offers, matched to where someone is on their journey. The messaging is the language you use to describe that offer and why it matters to the specific person reading it, tuned to whether they're still discovering the problem or ready to solve it. The positioning is what makes you the obvious choice instead of one of many, your real differentiator, not a claimed one. I learnt this the hard way at LeadCraft, where we had a strong offer sitting behind a positioning statement that could have belonged to a dozen other companies in our space. Nobody could tell us apart from the noise, because on paper we didn't sound any different from it.

Get those three aligned and you have relevancy. Miss it and you can have the smartest content in your niche and still watch people scroll past without a flicker.

I go much deeper on relevancy, including how it's distinct from resonance (the emotional case, versus relevancy's logical one) and why that distinction matters more than either one alone, on the framework page: /frameworks/roi-method.

Omnipresence, the way LeadCraft taught it to me

Omnipresence is showing up everywhere your audience already is, until you stop being an option and start being the default.

Done badly, it's annoying. Done well, because it's paired with relevancy, it isn't. Something happens when you show up consistently in someone's life. You become an authority without trying to perform one. You start to feel like a trusted friend they've never met.

The version I learnt running LeadCraft's ad accounts came down to three things: timing, frequency, and platform. Timing is showing up when someone's ready to hear from you, the oldest goal in marketing dressed in new language. Frequency is not vanishing after one touch and hoping the algorithm remembers you later. You show up consistently enough, over days and weeks, to build something instead of hoping for a lucky moment. Platform is picking the channels where your specific audience already spends attention rather than chasing whichever one is trending that quarter.

I'll say the thing the framework page says more completely: omnipresence was never about volume. It's about being remembered by the exact people who matter, at the moment they're ready to act. I ran two different ad tracks at LeadCraft to test this directly. Cold traffic, people who'd never heard of me, got an email opt-in with no attempt at a same-day sale. Everyone who already knew me got what I started calling omnipresence ads, mostly valuable content with a soft ask for engagement, nothing built to close. I felt real anxiety spending money I couldn't trace straight back to a sale. I kept the test running anyway, because I believed the theory needed months, not days, to prove itself. By the second month, the core numbers in the business started moving faster than they ever had on the old model.

That's the piece most people get wrong today too, just with a new tool doing the posting. AI can help you show up more often in more places, and it will, but frequency without relevancy is just automated noise, produced faster and cheaper than it used to be. I've watched Entrepreneurs mistake a scheduled content calendar full of AI-drafted posts for omnipresence, and wonder why the numbers didn't move. The volume was there. The memory wasn't. Nobody remembered a single post a week later, because nothing in it was built to be remembered, it was built to be published. The framework page walks through the full diagnostic for telling the difference in your own numbers: /frameworks/roi-method.

Intimacy, the piece I was missing the longest

Intimacy is the one I avoided longest, probably because it doesn't scale the way the other two do, and for most of my twenties I was obsessed with things that scaled.

We live in a world of constant automation now, more than I could have imagined writing about this in 2020, and the people you're trying to serve want a real connection with a real person more, not less, because of it. Somewhere along the way a lot of online marketing turned into a quick-buck game instead of an actual offer to help real people. Intimacy is the correction.

I build it through three things: connection, conversation, and community. Connection means being open about what's happening in your life and business, without the polish. Not hiding the hard parts, not fudging numbers, not performing a version of things that's easier to sell. You let people see the real struggles, because that's what earns a real relationship. Conversation means being present in it. So many people run ads and never reply to a comment. Be in it. Answer the emails. Reply. Have the real exchange instead of broadcasting past people. Community means building an actual space, meaning somewhere your audience can support each other and interact with you and your work.

I learnt all three the expensive way, by not having them at LeadCraft and watching hundreds of good people buy a good product and never open it. That gap was an intimacy failure, and no amount of relevancy or omnipresence fixes it. Just ask Katya Varbanova, who was averaging $25K a month before she started applying the ROI Method and had her first $100K month within 60 days, while growing her audience and deepening the relationships underneath it. Or Sunny Lenarduzzi, in the mid-six-figures before she started using it, who did four times her prior year's revenue and grew her audience by over 25 percent, and went on to book stages like Traffic and Conversion and Social Media Marketing World off the relationships that intimacy built. Or Pat Brewer, who runs a marketing and consulting company for financial advisors, generating $20K-$30K a month when he started, clearing multiple $100K months within 90 days of putting all three pillars to work.

None of those results came from a better funnel. They came from Entrepreneurs who stopped treating relevancy, omnipresence, and intimacy as separate problems and started building all three at once.

Here's the part that's only gotten more true since I first wrote this down: intimacy is the one piece of the ROI Method that AI has no path to replicating. It can help you say something relevant to more people, faster. It can help you show up in more places, more consistently. It cannot manufacture trust, because trust breaks the moment it's outsourced. I've watched a business's community engagement drop by nearly a third within three months after AI-written check-ins replaced a founder's own words, and recover within a month of reverting back. There's a line I now call the Intimacy Threshold, the exact point where you cross from territory AI can support into territory only a human being can hold. Below that line, AI is leverage. Above it, it's damage. As relevancy and omnipresence get cheaper and more automatable by the month, intimacy is the one lever your competitors can't copy with a prompt, and it's becoming the actual moat. I built the full diagnostic for finding your Intimacy Threshold, and the rest of this thinking, into the framework page: /frameworks/roi-method.

Why one or two isn't enough

If you only build one of the three, you can get real results, and you can hit six figures fast doing it. The trap is that stopping at one leaves you as one of three types, and none of them are good.

The Marketing Nobody. Purely relevant, with nothing behind it. Think of the last interesting ad you saw for something you weren't ready to buy yet. You forgot about it within the hour, because there was no relationship, no reason to think of them again. When you're finally ready to buy, they're not on your radar, because relevancy without omnipresence just evaporates.

The Mosquito. Purely omnipresent, showing up everywhere without being relevant or intimate. You know this one. The person constantly on your feed whose actual point you couldn't explain if asked. They're not speaking to the right people, or giving them anything worth the interruption. Omnipresence without relevancy is just an annoying mosquito nobody asked for.

The Harmless Friend. Purely intimate, with no relevancy or omnipresence underneath it. These are the people you'd happily grab a coffee with and would never buy from. Nice, kind, caring, and not someone you'd take seriously in business. Intimacy without relevancy gets you loved and unpaid.

None of the three is the answer on its own. The answer is combining them, and almost nobody does, because it requires being good at three distinct, unrelated skills at once. I know plenty of successful people running on two. I know very few running all three.

What's strange is that most Entrepreneurs I talk to can tell you, almost instantly, which of the three archetypes they are. Ask someone if they feel like a Marketing Nobody, a Mosquito, or a Harmless Friend, and they'll usually laugh, wince, and pick one without much hesitation. The self-awareness isn't the missing piece. The missing piece is believing the fix requires all three at once, not just doubling down harder on whichever one already feels comfortable. I spent years doubling down on relevancy because it was the pillar I was naturally good at, and doubling down on a strength you've already maxed out is one of the quieter ways a business plateaus without anyone noticing why.

What happens when they compound

When all three are running together, something I started calling the Nuclear Effect kicks in, and I still think it's the clearest way to describe it. Three things start happening automatically: the Perfect Price, the Perfect Connection, and the Perfect Client.

Combine Relevancy and Omnipresence and you get the Perfect Price. When you're relevant to someone and consistently present in their world, you become an authority in their life, and authority is what lets you charge what you're worth instead of discounting out of fear no one else will pay it.

Combine Omnipresence and Intimacy and you get the Perfect Connection. This is what fixes the call where you show up excited and realize within two minutes there's no real connection with the person on the other end. That gap almost always traces back to one of three things: they didn't know your story, they didn't understand the offer, or you hadn't nurtured them enough before the call happened. Connection, conversation, and community, shown up to consistently, is how humans build trust at any scale. It's how you made friends in school. You're just doing it now with hundreds of people instead of a handful, and it works both ways. Your audience feels closer to you, and your own investment in them deepens too.

Combine Intimacy and Relevancy and you get the Perfect Client. You know the client who was never a real fit, who looked to you to save them, wouldn't take responsibility, and talked about you behind your back afterward. That's what happens when you take people on because you need the money instead of because they're aligned. When you show people who you are and what you value without the filter, the people who show up tend to share those values back, and working with people like that puts you in an entirely different kind of flow.

I think about this one the most, because it's the one I got wrong longest in my own businesses. It's easy to convince yourself a client is a good fit because their check clears. It's much harder to admit that a client who pays on time and still drains you is the wrong client, and that the wrong client, multiplied across a roster, is the quiet reason a business that looks successful on paper feels miserable to run. LeadCraft's real problem was fit, at scale, not revenue, and no amount of relevancy or omnipresence was ever going to fix that. Only intimacy, paired with the honesty to look at who we were serving, could.

Two of the three, run well, will build a real, working business. I know plenty of people running that way and doing fine. But they're leaving real growth on the table, because when all three compound, together, you get exponential growth instead of steady growth. You become the obvious choice in your niche. Revenue grows. The audience expands. The relationships get deeper and more profitable than a two-pillar business ever produces.

I think about it now as three currencies rather than one number to chase: Audience, Revenue, and Relationships. They build off each other in a loop. Audience helps you grow revenue, which helps you build deeper relationships, which grows the audience further. That loop is what creates momentum without the constant hustle most online marketing sells as the only path.

What's different now

I wrote the original version of this piece in 2020, and most of what I believed then still holds. What's changed is the landscape it has to survive in.

Back then the omnipresence conversation was mostly about Facebook retargeting and which platform to be on. Now platforms matter less than they did, full stop, and AI-generated content has made simple visibility cheaper than ever, which also makes it worth less than ever. Anyone can be everywhere now. Being everywhere was never the actual advantage. Being remembered was, and that hasn't changed at all.

The relevancy conversation has shifted too. It used to be enough to have a sharp message and a decent funnel. Now, with AI able to generate a passable version of both in minutes, relevancy has to come from something a model can't fake: a real read on where someone specifically is, not a demographic guess dressed up as personalization. A generic prompt can produce a generically relevant message about your niche. It can't produce a message that reads like it was written for the specific person holding the phone, because it doesn't know that person. You do, or you should.

And intimacy, the piece I was slowest to build originally, has become the one piece I'd tell you to build first if you're starting today. It's the only one of the three getting more valuable as the other two get commoditized, not less. When I first wrote about this method in 2020, I framed intimacy as the differentiator against other marketers. Today I'd frame it as the differentiator against software. The competition for relevancy and omnipresence used to be other people. Now it's increasingly a model that can draft a hundred variations of your message before lunch. It cannot sit on a call with someone and hear what they're not saying. That gap is where the entire game lives now.

If you want the sharpened, current version of the full framework, including the diagnostic that tells you which of the three is your real constraint right now rather than the one you assume it is, that's what /frameworks/roi-method is for. I built it to be the thing I'd hand someone instead of re-explaining all of this from scratch every time.

What I'd tell you to do now

I still believe the real starting point is admitting which of the three you're missing, not which one is easiest to work on.

If people see your content, engage with it, even compliment it, and never book a call, that's a relevancy problem, not a reach problem. More traffic won't fix a message that doesn't land.

If your message converts well when someone sees it, but too few people are seeing it often enough to reach that moment, that's omnipresence. The message is fine. It isn't showing up enough.

If people love you, follow you, reply to everything, and still don't buy, or buy once and vanish, that's usually an intimacy ceiling wearing a different costume, often really a relevancy-and-authority problem underneath it. Being liked isn't the same as being trusted to lead someone somewhere.

If cash is tight, intimacy comes first, full stop. Put every available dollar and hour into the list and into content that earns real replies, not just impressions. It's the fastest path to revenue that doesn't require ad spend, and it compounds with no budget behind it at all.

The fastest way to get an honest, specific answer instead of guessing is to run the free diagnostic at theroimethod.com. It asks about where your leads come from, how they convert, and where they drop off, and maps your answers to your real constraint instead of the one you walked in assuming.

I built the Relevancy Engine out of LeadCraft's ashes because I needed somewhere to put what I'd learnt, and it replaced that business's revenue within 60 days, with fewer customers, because fewer customers who are the right fit will always outperform more customers who are the wrong fit. That's still the whole bet underneath this method. Not more. Aligned.

I didn't fully understand this at 21 in that accountant's office, and I only partly understood it the day I shut LeadCraft down. Building a business on relevancy alone is building on being right. Building on omnipresence alone is building on being seen. Building on intimacy alone is building on being liked. None of those, alone, is building on being trusted, chosen, and remembered at the moment it matters, which is the only combination that compounds into something that lasts past the next algorithm change or the next platform shift. I've rebuilt from close to a million dollars in debt once, and rebuilt a business from its own ashes a second time, and both times the way through was the same three words, just in a different order depending on what was missing.

Run the diagnostic, find your real constraint, and go build the piece you're missing: theroimethod.com.