5 Questions with Michelle Passfield

Thirty-plus years in marketing, a stint in the City's most formidable law firms, and now she's telling small business owners exactly what they're doing wrong, kindly, but clearly.

1. You spent fifteen years inside international law firms, including Freshfields. What on earth made you leave all that to work with small businesses?

Honestly? Small businesses are where the energy is. You're talking to the person who made the decision, who lives with the consequences, who genuinely needs the thinking to land, not disappear into a committee. After years working in environments where marketing had to navigate enormous internal politics, working one-to-one with an entrepreneur who's ready to act is, frankly, thrilling. The impact is immediate and real.

2. You talk a lot about relationships being at the heart of good marketing. Isn't that just something everyone says?

Everyone says it, very few people mean it. I mean it structurally, I built an entire business community, Connect & Chat withMichelle, specifically to give people a place to build genuine professional relationships, not just hand out business cards and disappear. The marketing advice I give is rooted in the same principle: know your clients, manage those relationships properly, and the rest follows. Trust is not a soft metric.

3. What's the single most common mistake small business owners make with their marketing?

Doing too much of the wrong thing. They scatter time and money across every platform and tactic they've heard of, without any real clarity about what's actually working for their specific business and audience. My job, usually in the very first session, is to cut through all of that and help them focus, which often means telling them to stop doing certain things entirely, which can feel radical but is almost always a relief.

4. You're a recognised f:Entrepreneur Top 100 female founder, you mentor young entrepreneurs, you sit on arts and festival boards. Do you ever just… sit still?

Not really, no, and I think that's deliberate. I describe myself as a competitive achiever, which means I'm always looking to improve: listening, questioning, attending webinars, having the uncomfortable conversations. I'm currently registered for sessions on AI for business owners and on why profitable-looking companies still fail financially. If I'm not learning something, I'm not being as useful to my clients as I could be.

5. Who is your ideal client, and be honest, not diplomatic?

A small business owner who knows they have a marketing problem but isn't quite sure what it is yet, and who is genuinely ready to do the work. I'm not for people who want a magic fix or a one-size template, I don't do those. I work bespoke, one-to-one, and I ask questions that some clients tell me they've never been asked before. If someone is open to that kind of rigorous, practical conversation, we'll get somewhere very good together.