Copywriting · 4 min read

The "So" Trick That Turns Features Into Reasons to Book

Most tourism copy lists features. Gear provided. Small groups. Two nights. Here's a one word trick to turn every one of them into something a guest actually wants.

10 October 2026

Copywriting · 4 min read

Stop Being the Hero of Your Own Website

Most tourism websites open with a story about the owners. Your guest doesn't want a hero. They want a guide. Here's how to rewrite your homepage so it's about them.

6 October 2026

Strategy · 4 min read

The Holiday Park That Was 45 Minutes From the Wrong Thing

A beachside park, an iconic national park down the road, and a problem no amount of Facebook posting would fix. How two strategies, not one, turned it around.

2 October 2026

Strategy · 4 min read

Wondering If You're Too Expensive? It's Probably Not the Price.

Every owner has had the thought. Should we drop the rate, run a special, throw in a free night? Here's why that question is usually pointing at a different problem.

28 September 2026

Brand · 4 min read

You've Been Handed a Ferrari and a Two Page Rule Book

The strategy is written. It's on the wall. Then you get busy, post something because it's funny, and the whole thing quietly stops working. Here's how to stay on brand when it counts.

21 September 2026

Brand · 4 min read

Could You Pick Your Ideal Customer Out of a Room of 100?

Picture a Chamber of Commerce event with a hundred people in the room. You get one table, one banner and one new customer. Who are you setting up for?

14 September 2026

Brand · 4 min read

Personal or Classy? Two Tour Companies, One Region, No Competition

Give two winery tour companies a different single word and watch everything change: the vehicles, the wineries, the photos, the price. And neither one ends up competing with the other.

8 September 2026

Customer experience · 5 min read

How to Map Your Customer Experience on One Sheet of Paper

A pen, a sheet of paper and twenty minutes. Here's the exercise I run with tourism businesses to find the gap between the experience they think they deliver and the one worth raving about.

3 September 2026

Strategy · 4 min read

Your Quiet Months Aren't a Sales Problem

A caravan park, a shoulder season and a lesson in asking why. The problem you think you have is rarely the one you need to solve.

25 August 2026

Brand · 4 min read

Find Your One Word

Nurturing. Consistent. Fast. Alive. Together. Every business I've worked with has one word (or three) hiding in its DNA. Here's how to find yours, and why it has to be true.

17 August 2026

Brand · 4 min read

Your Guests Aren't Buying a Tour. They're Buying a Story About Themselves.

Nobody books a cellar door to buy wine. They book it to be the kind of person who found that cellar door. Once you see that, how you describe your business changes for good.

11 August 2026

Marketing · 3 min read

Stuck on What to Post? Stop Creating and Start Documenting.

If writing social posts feels like pulling teeth, you're trying to invent something. The stories are already happening in your business every day.

4 August 2026

Brand · 4 min read

Different Is Better Than Better

One business did everything right and I've forgotten its name. The other is held together with bras and number plates and I've told the story a hundred times. What the outback pub knows that the perfect ferry doesn't.

30 July 2026

Customer experience · 3 min read

What Would You Do If You Couldn't Spend a Dollar on Advertising for Two Years?

A thought experiment for anyone running a business that takes bookings. Your answer will tell you more about where your next booking comes from than any ad will.

22 July 2026

Brand · 4 min read

The Nike Hotel Test

If Nike opened a hotel tomorrow, you already know what it would look like. Could anyone say the same about your business?

19 July 2026

Strategy · 5 min read

Start. On. Strategy.

A tavern, a hand drawn graph and a game of credit card roulette. What happens when you do the research and write the strategy before you touch a single tactic.

16 July 2026

Why AI Always Agrees With You — And the Prompt That Makes It Stop

The thing agreed with you again. You brought it a decision. Explained the context. Added the nuance. It nodded, offered three supporting reasons, and sent you out the door feeling smart. That’s not a thinking partner. That’s a mirror. The positive reinforcement loop is the biggest trap in working with AI. It doesn’t feel like…

19 June 2026

Stop Treating AI Like a Chatbot. Start Treating It Like a System.

Most people use AI like a search engine. Ask. Get an answer. Move on. The people getting real leverage have stopped doing that. They’ve built a system. A system with parts, governance, and a direction. Not a better search engine. Something else entirely. There are seven parts. Identity is who the AI thinks…

19 June 2026

The AI Interview That Makes Every Prompt After It Better

Staring at a blank page trying to articulate your values is a particular kind of awful. You sit down to capture your goals, your rules, your tone preferences, the security constraints you want the AI to work inside. Within five minutes you’ve forgotten what you actually believe. So don’t write it from scratch. Let the…

19 June 2026

The Wall Every AI User Hits — and Why the Ones Who Push Through Win

There’s a moment, two or three sessions in, when the output still isn’t quite right and you wonder if any of this is actually going to work. Most people close the tab here. That’s the wall. The ones who push through figure out something the others don’t. The problem isn’t the AI. The problem is…

19 June 2026

The Two-Prompt Trick That Borrows Anyone’s Brain

There’s a moment in every AI training I run where someone says: yeah, but you know how to prompt AI. True. I’ve been doing it for four years. But that’s not the real answer. The real answer is twenty-five years running businesses and fifteen years in tech. When I sit down to prompt, I already know…

19 June 2026

How to Cut Your AI Costs Without Losing Any of the Quality

Open ChatGPT or Claude right now. Look at the top of the screen. Which model is selected? Almost certainly the biggest, most expensive one. The platform defaults you there. It doesn’t ask. It doesn’t explain. It just assumes you want maximum firepower for every single thing you type. That’s fine when you’re doing serious work….

19 June 2026

Stop Letting AI Just Agree With You: The “Run It By The Board” Prompt

You know when you’re having a conversation with AI, whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, or anything else, and you just find it responding to you overly positively? Reinforcing your own beliefs, nodding along to your decisions, when what you actually want is for it to act like a group of experts. To qualify what got you…

23 April 2026

The Four Things AI Needs Before It Can Make You Sound Like You

AI can’t fix bad strategy. Feed it clarity about who you are, where you’re playing, what you’ll say, and what you’ll do, and it becomes useful. Skip those steps and you’ll sound generic no matter how good the prompts are.

4 November 2025

The Cost of Advertising on Meta in the Clare Valley

Meta advertising in the Clare Valley is an affordable and effective way to increase brand awareness and drive engagement. In this video, I’ll break down exactly what it costs to run ads on Facebook and Instagram for a day, how I’ve structured my campaigns, and how you can do the same for your business. I’ll…

23 August 2025

Charge More Than the Competition and Still Win

Why do we pay more for a pair of Nikes than we do for unbranded shoes. And why it matters to your business.

23 August 2025

SA’s New Tourism Brand: A Bold Step in the Right Direction

Hi, Tim here. If you’re in South Australia, you’ve probably seen the big brand refresh from SATC over the past 24 hours—new TVC, Facebook content, and a revamped website. It’s a huge shift, and honestly, I’m into it. Most tourism brands play it safe and end up blending in. Not this one. South Australia’s gone…

23 June 2025

Destination Marketing Plan Workshop – My Take & What comes next?

Hello businesses of the Clare Valley. So I came out of that Destination Management Plan workshop on Monday probably like two things. One was inspired and one was a little bit impatient. The Funding Challenge So the Destination Management Plan is going to be released in July and, if we’re honest, unless something significant changes…

23 May 2025

A Momentary Manifesto for Clare Valley Tourism

My Tourism Apprenticeship For a decade I was part of the trusted inner circle working for the benefit of the Geelong and Bellarine Tourism Industry. When I was leaving the region 5 or so years ago, they even tongue-in-cheek offered me a Lifetime Membership (which doesn’t exist) for my work and commitment over those years….

23 April 2025

This is why people will drive past 5 other WINERIES (insert any business type here) to get to yours.

Different is easier to pick. Different is easier to repeat stories about. Different is why we’ll drive past other places to get to yours. And perhaps even pay a bit more. To prove it, here’s a short story about a pub we discovered while travelling. With the proper budget behind us, any one of us…

23 April 2025

Unlocking the Full Potential of Chat GPT: Proven Tips and Tricks for Maximum Efficiency

Discover how a small business can prime ChatGPT to write better prompts that give you better results. I’ve been using ChatGPT over 12 months. I’m sharing how you can prime it before you ask anything, to make sure the responses you get aren’t your typical marketing messages, completely off-brand and useless to you.

23 March 2025

3 dead-simple questions to fix your marketing in 5 minutes

When it comes to marketing, most businesses small and large, tend to attempt too much. For too little results. So how do you pick what the best thing to put your time, money, or effort into? First, there’s no best thing to do in marketing. So get the idea out of your head that you’re…

23 March 2025

Your ‘Book Now’ Button Isn’t the Problem — This Is

Web designers and marketers will tell you to put an unmissable book now button at the top of your website. Maybe at the bottom too, or locked to some part of the screen even when the user scrolls. So convincing they’ll be about the colour, style, or size, it’d seem silly to ignore the advice….

23 March 2025