Every SME owner Kevin coaches eventually asks the same question: how do I get more customers without spending more on ads? The honest answer is that the channel with the best return on investment in your business right now probably doesn't involve an ad at all — it's the audience someone else has already spent years building. Your ideal customers are already listening to a handful of podcasts, reading a handful of newsletters, and showing up at a handful of events. Your job isn't to build a new audience from nothing. It's to find out who already has the one you want, and earn ten minutes of their trust.

The enemy is the default marketing instinct: go find strangers, interrupt them with an ad, and hope enough of them convert before the budget runs out. It's expensive, it's slow, and most SME owners were never taught another way to think about it. The better question isn't "how do I reach more people" — it's "who has already spent years building the exact audience I need, and what would it take to borrow it for an afternoon?"

This is the idea behind the Dream 100, a targeting method built by sales legend Chet Holmes, later adapted for online marketing by Russell Brunson and refined further by Dana Derricks: instead of marketing to the whole market, you build a list of the places — podcasts, publications, conferences, newsletters, communities — where your exact ideal customers already pay attention, and you earn your way onto their stage.

Dream 100 targeting is one of the modules inside the Simple-Growth System's marketing pillar, built to get an SME owner onto six or seven relevant stages without spending a cent on media.

"Kevin, you distilled business, marketing and sales strategy into powerful simple concepts and actions with real life stories of your start-up business and corporate life. You walk the talk with empathy and passion. Feedback has been off the charts. The energy in the room was palpable."

— Nikki, MahiTahi / The Colab

The obstacle isn't the idea — it's that borrowing someone else's audience means putting yourself in front of people without the safety net of a paid ad you can just switch off. It takes a pitch, a follow-up, and the discipline to keep going after the first three noes. That's exactly where most owners stall, and it's exactly where a structured plan and someone checking the pipeline every week changes whether the list of 100 ever turns into a single booking.

If you close this tab and keep buying ads aimed at strangers, you'll be paying for the same strangers this time next year. Borrow an audience instead, and Kevin will help you build your list.

Be the owner whose next customer comes from a stage you earned, not an ad you paid for.