I have a stutter. Bad enough growing up that it nearly put my college graduation at risk — I was a broadcasting major, and broadcasting majors have to get in front of a camera and talk. I went through years of speech therapy just to function in that world.
Here’s the part that still makes me laugh: I can lecture a college classroom for three hours without a second thought. Put me in front of a camera, though, and something tightens up that speech therapy never fully untangled. Years after a broadcasting career, years after teaching broadcasting to other people, I still don’t love being on camera.
I’m telling you this because if the most camera-averse guy to ever graduate from a broadcasting program can post a video of himself treating mosquitoes in someone’s backyard, you can absolutely post a picture of a trash can full of leaves.
The bar is lower than you think. It’s always been lower than you think.
The jobs nobody wants to show off
Every service business has a category of work that doesn’t make it into anyone’s portfolio. The yard that’s clearly been abandoned for a season. The crawl space that smells like something died in it (because something did). The vending machine jammed in a way that looks like a crime scene.
These are exactly the jobs that make the most compelling content, because almost nobody else is willing to post them. A property going from “this has clearly been neglected” to “someone lives here again” is one of the most dramatic visual stories in the entire service industry — more dramatic, usually, than the routine weekly mow that looks fine but isn’t actually interesting to anyone outside your own head.
There’s a line here worth being precise about, and I draw mine clearly: I don’t post anything that would embarrass a client, and I don’t post anything gratuitously unpleasant just because it’s real. A dead animal under a porch isn’t content — it’s just gross, and showing it doesn’t build trust, it just makes people feel sick. But the search for the source of a smell, the crawling-through-spiderwebs part of the job, the visible relief on a customer’s face once it’s handled? That’s all fair game, and it’s the kind of honesty that actually builds credibility instead of just views.
You don’t have to become a production company
Here’s the trap a lot of small business owners fall into once they start paying attention to content: they look at polished, professional-feeling accounts and assume that’s the bar they need to clear. So they either try to become a full-time content creator on top of running their actual business, burn out fast, and quit — or they never start at all, because the gap between what they could realistically produce and what “good content” seems to require feels too wide to bother closing.
Neither outcome serves you. You can run a great content account, or you can be a genuinely productive, useful member of your community doing real work for real customers. Trying to do both at a professional content-creator level is a different job entirely, and it’s not the one you signed up for.
The fix isn’t more effort. It’s a different standard. You don’t need a videographer. You need to retrain yourself to see the phone already in your pocket as a tool that’s already enough — and to stop assuming “unpolished” means “unusable.”
Real builds trust faster than polished does
There’s a reason raw, slightly chaotic, occasionally uncomfortable content tends to outperform a perfectly composed photo with studio lighting: people can tell the difference between a business showing them something real and a business showing them an advertisement.
A messy job-in-progress shot, a problem mid-solve, a moment that wasn’t staged — these read as evidence. They tell a potential customer “this is what actually happens here,” which is a more persuasive argument than any polished after-photo standing alone. Perfection reads as marketing. Mess reads as proof.
That doesn’t mean abandon quality control on what you post — it means stop assuming only the flattering moments are worth sharing. The moment something goes sideways and you handle it competently, with a little humor and no drama, is often more trust-building than the moment everything goes exactly to plan.
Where to draw the line
“Ugly sells” isn’t permission for “anything goes.” The test I use is simple: would this embarrass the person I did the work for? If yes, it doesn’t get posted, no matter how good the content would be. A dramatic before-and-after doesn’t need to explain why a yard got that bad in the first place — the transformation can be the whole story without anyone needing to feel judged for needing help in the first place.
Show the real version of the work. Skip the parts that exist purely to make someone feel small. That distinction is the entire difference between content that builds a reputation and content that just generates a few uncomfortable views.
This is one idea from Chapter 6 of Constitutional Marketing — there are twenty-two more like it, built around the fifteen minutes you’ve already got. Read more about the book →