It’s time to get a bit saucy

You've probably never heard of Paul Brown, but I guarantee his work has had an impact on you at some point in the past week.

Back in the early 1990s, Paul was a designer and fabricator working out of a small shop in Michigan.

A potential client of Paul's had realised that a big problem with shampoo bottles was the fact that people always ended up wasting shampoo because they couldn't squeeze the final bit out of the bottle.

So this potential client had asked Paul to design a valve that would allow shampoo bottles to be stored upside down without leaking.

The valve needed to open when the bottle was squeezed and then automatically close (with no leaks) once the squeezing stopped.

Paul was an old-fashioned kind of guy. He didn't like using computers and he often relied on his instinct. He had the required design fairly well mapped out in his head, but the prototypes weren't quite working.

He worked on the project for weeks. But the prototypes were expensive to create and he eventually maxed out all his credit cards.

Undeterred, Paul borrowed thousands of dollars from friends and family to allow him to carry on.

But, try as he might, Paul just couldn't get the design to work. And now he was running out of time as well as money....

It was Friday afternoon. The would-be client was due to arrive on Monday morning and all Paul had to show him so far was a collection of 111 failed prototypes.

He was feeling pretty desperate.

So he asked his mould-maker, Tim Socier, if he would work all weekend on one final version.

And guess what.....

Version 112 was the one that worked!

Paul had cracked it and, come Monday morning, the potential client became an actual client.

Over the next few years, Paul's patented valve became hugely popular.

Gerber bought it for their children's sippy cups. Cosmetics companies used it for all sorts of things, not just shampoo.

NASA even paid to use Paul's valve so they could make cups that wouldn't leak in space.

But the most interesting buyer of Paul's unique design was none other than.....

Heinz.

For as long as anyone could remember, people had struggled with the glass bottles that Heinz used for their ketchup.

The problem was that, because ketchup is quite thick and gloopy, it doesn't easily flow out of a glass bottle.

But Heinz had actually turned this drawback into a positive thing.

I remember an ad campaign called "Give It a Hand" which aired on TV when I was a kid. It showed a load of people in a cafe or restaurant all hitting the bottom of their Heinz ketchup bottles in time with each other - so it sounded like the whole place was giving the ketchup a round of applause.

This was followed by other ads such as the "Good Things Come to Those Who Wait" campaign, which also tried to convince us that struggling to get ketchup out of a bottle was actually a good thing.

Anyway, the point is this....

I think it's quite amusing that, after spending years (and a huge amount of money) trying to convince us that the flawed design of glass bottles was actually a good thing, Heinz then jumped at the chance to ditch the bottles as soon as Paul Brown's new valve became available.

But there's another reason why I like the Paul Brown story.

It's because it shows us how by turning a problem on its head (literally in his case!) we can often find an unexpected solution.

And it's the same with marketing your business.

I see so many solo business owners spending their time on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram every day, posting content and waiting for results.

And they will get results.... but, like the ketchup-loving diners of old, they're in for a long wait.

The reality is that social media is a slow burn. It's relationship-building. It's playing the long game. And whilst that's valuable, it's not going to solve your immediate need for more clients.

So if you want to start generating leads quickly, you need to be willing to take a very different approach.

You need something that's more like Paul Brown's squeeze bottle - reliable, immediate, and gets results when you need them.

That means focusing on strategies that put you in front of people who are actively looking for what you offer, rather than trying to interrupt people who are scrolling through their social feeds.

It means thinking about search engine optimisation, Google Ads, or even old-fashioned networking - approaches that connect you with people who have a problem they want solved right now.

The magic of innovation isn't just in the big, flashy ideas, but often in the small tweaks that make everyday business easier.

Just as Paul's valve transformed the mundane act of getting ketchup out of a bottle, small changes in how you approach lead generation can revolutionise your results.

It's not always about reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, it's about seeing the wheel from a new angle - like turning a bottle upside down.

So, when you think about your marketing strategies, ask yourself this: what's your 'upside-down bottle'? What simple, yet impactful change can you make that could turn everything around?

All the best,
David.