By Mfundo Mavimbela
A guy in one of my workshops put his hand up mid-session and said it straight:
“Mfundo, I think you are wrong.”
I love when this happens.
He runs a hardware store in Manzini. Been in business for eleven years. Sharp guy — the kind who has figured things out through trial and error rather than theory. He leaned forward and made his case.
“I put an ad in the newspaper last month. E15,000. The phone rang. Customers came in. I made money. That looks like a straight line to me — and it worked perfectly fine.”
The room shifted. A few heads nodded. Some people who had been writing notes quietly put their pens down. This was the question they all wanted to ask but had not.
He was right. And I told him so.
The Straight Line Does Work
I want to be honest with you the same way I was honest with him.
A straight line works. You put an ad out. Some people see it. Some of them buy. Real money. Real customers. Real validation. I am not going to stand in front of a room and tell a man with eleven years of business and a healthy till that he is wrong.
The straight line works.
What I told him next is the part that changed the energy in that room.
“What you are describing,” I said, “is something I call marketing scalping. And I borrowed that word from forex trading — because what you are doing is almost identical to what forex scalpers do.”
The Forex Scalper
In forex trading, scalping is a legitimate strategy. You get in, you take a small profit from a quick price movement, and you get out immediately. You are not building a position. You are not compounding. You are not invested in what happens tomorrow. You take what is available right now — and you exit.
It works. Forex scalpers make real money. Ask anyone who has done it successfully.
But here is what every serious forex trader will also tell you: scalping is expensive, exhausting, and the moment you stop actively trading, the income stops completely. There is no position growing in the background. No investment compounding while you sleep. Just — get in, take, get out, repeat. Forever.
The man with the hardware store had been scalping his market for eleven years.
Every time he needed customers, he spent. The ad ran. The ready buyers came in. The ad stopped. The customers dried up. Next time he needed a boost, he spent again. Eleven years of entering the market, taking what was immediately available, and exiting. No compounding. No customer base building quietly in the background. Just a business that needed a fresh injection every time it needed to grow.
“Does that sound familiar?” I asked him.
He did not answer immediately. But he stopped leaning forward.
Who Actually Responds To That Ad
Here is what the E15,000 print ad actually buys you.
It puts you in front of a large audience. Most of them are not ready to buy today — they have the problem your product solves, but the timing is not right, the budget is not there yet, or they simply need more than one encounter with your name before they trust you enough to spend. Research across industries shows that at any given moment, only 1 to 3 percent of any audience is ready to buy immediately.
The straight line captures that 1 to 3 percent. The ones who happened to be at exactly the right stage of readiness on exactly the right day. Your ad was visible at the precise moment their need, their money, and their trust aligned.
That is not strategy. That is timing. You were lucky — in the best possible way.
The other 97 percent passed through. Some were interested. Some even paused. Some thought about calling. But there was nothing to hold them — no follow-up, no reason to stay connected, no system to bring them back when their moment of readiness arrived. They moved on. And they took their money with them.
You paid E15,000 to reach all of them. You converted the lucky 3 percent. You left the rest on the table — permanently — and went back to work.
The Loop Is The Long Position
Going back to forex — because the metaphor earns its place here.
The serious forex investor does not only scalp. They also build positions. They identify something with long-term value and they invest in it patiently — compounding returns over time, building something that grows even when they are not actively in the market.
The loop is the long position.
It takes the same audience your ad reaches and builds a relationship with the 97 percent who were not ready yet. It stays in front of them — with value, with presence, with the right offer at the right time — until their moment of readiness arrives. And when it does, you are already there. Not as a stranger with a newspaper ad. As the business they have been hearing from for three months and have already decided to trust.
In Get Customers Every Day, the loop is laid out in six stages — each one building what the next one needs. The ad is Stage 1. What you build behind it determines everything else.
The man from the hardware store bought the book.
Start with the free preview here — and see what eleven years of scalping could look like if the loop was running behind it.