The Strategy Behind the Strategy

There is a particular kind of expensive mistake that small business owners make, quietly and repeatedly. They pick a marketing channel because a competitor seems to be on it, or because someone at a networking event said it worked for them, or because the algorithm briefly smiled in their direction. They spend. They wait. Nothing much happens. Then they do it again.

Michelle Passfield has watched this cycle play out across sectors for over thirty years. She is not unsympathetic. She has lived it herself as a business owner. But she is also, professionally, done with it.

'Clarity and a clear focus' is how she frames the antidote on her website, though in conversation the point lands with more force: without a coherent strategy, marketing spend is just hope dressed up as activity. Her consultancy, Marketing withMichelle, exists to close that gap, for the small business owner who knows their product intimately but has never quite cracked how to talk about it, price it, position it or put it in front of the right people.

Her background is unusually broad for someone working in this corner of the market. Fifteen years inside City and international law firms, including Freshfields, gave her a particular fluency with high-stakes business development and client relationship management. Before that and since, her work has taken her through professional services, higher education and the public sector. She founded Marketing withMichelle in 2019 and holds a Chartered Institute of Marketing qualification. That combination, corporate rigour, genuine sector range, practical small-business empathy, is precisely what her clients say they were not getting elsewhere.

The Return on Listening

Her sessions are structured, homework-included and built around the individual client rather than a packaged curriculum. Testimonials on her website return, with striking consistency, to one word: listens. 'Lots of consultants hear, but don't listen,' one client wrote. It reads like a small observation. It is actually a commercial point. Bespoke advice, correctly calibrated to a specific business at a specific moment, is substantially more useful, and more efficient, than generic frameworks applied wholesale.

'Michelle asked questions about my business that I'd never been asked before and really got me thinking.'

That listening informs everything, including her expanding fractional marketing offer, through which clients access ongoing strategic support without the overhead of a full-time hire. It is a model growing in popularity across the SME sector, and one well suited to businesses that need senior marketing thinking on a flexible basis rather than a junior pair of hands full-time.

Her work extends beyond one-to-one consultancy into mentoring (she supports entrepreneurs through the Young Entrepreneurs Network) and community building through Connect & Chat withMichelle, an event series she created to foster genuine professional relationships rather than the transactional card-swap variety. She was named one of the f:Entrepreneur Top 100 female founders in 2026.

The throughline across all of it is the same commercial logic she applies for her clients: strong businesses are built on trust, and trust is built through consistent, meaningful connection. Marketing, at its most effective, is just a structured way of doing exactly that.

For small businesses tired of spending without seeing results, Marketing withMichelle offers something refreshingly direct: a senior strategist who will tell you what is working, what is not, and what to do instead. Find her at withmichellemarketing.co.uk.