Stop Building Funnels, Start Spinning Webs: Why Your Marketing Won't Work

You did everything they told you to do. You ran the ads, you hosted the webinar, you posted consistently, you followed the playbook to the letter. Unfortunately, it just did not work the way it used to. If that has been quietly eating at you, I want you to hear something first. You are not bad at marketing, and you have not lost your touch. The ground actually shifted underneath you, and almost nobody told you the rules of the game changed.

In this episode, I break down the real reason marketing feels broken in 2026, and I use a little bit of biology to make it stick. For years, the smart move was: niche down, go deep, and build one optimized funnel, the way an elephant or an oak tree survives by specializing. That worked until it didn't. AI, collapsing attention, and sky-high skepticism arrived all at once, and the environment stopped being stable. Here is the brutal truth about extinction events. They do not spare the strongest or the most specialized. The dinosaurs were the most optimized creatures on the planet, and they are gone. What survives is whatever is the most adaptable.

That is the bigger picture, and it changes everything about how you market. The practitioners who keep pouring money into one perfectly optimized funnel are building a beautiful fossil. The ones who learn to spread their bets, run small experiments, and adapt fast are the ones who will still be standing years from now. 

Here is what we cover in this episode:

• Why marketing feels broken right now, and the one thing that actually changed
• K-selection versus R-selection and why the asteroid already hit our industry
• Why your one optimized funnel is the dinosaur and how specialization quietly became a liability
• Why you cannot be linear anymore and what replaces the straight-line funnel
• The spider web model, the perfect adaptable strategy, with real examples from my own practice
• How to build your web one strand at a time so you never feel overwhelmed
• The "shooting percentage" mindset, and why the practitioner who ships daily beats the one chasing perfect

If your marketing has felt flat lately, this episode is the reset you have been needing. Come listen and bring a colleague who needs to hear it too.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Fulfilled Practitioner Podcast. I'm your host, Ricky Brahr, and today we're going to talk about something that I know is frustrating so many of you, and it's a word that we tend to avoid a little bit as much as we can as well. It's marketing. So specifically, we're going to be talking about why marketing that used to work so well just doesn't hit the same anymore. So here's what I keep hearing in my many conversations with practitioners is hey Ricky, things just don't work like they used to anymore. I did the webinar, I ran ads, I posted super consistently on social media, I did all of the things that I was told to do, and it didn't work like it used to work. And I really want you to know that you're not crazy, you're not bad at this. The reality is that the ground has actually and literally shifted underneath you. So the rules of the game have changed, and most people unfortunately never got the memo. So today we're gonna dive into three things from high level and then getting into the the nitty-gritty here. So first, I want to explain the real reason marketing feels broken, and I'm gonna use a little bit of biology to do that. So for you clinical nerds like myself, you're going to appreciate this one. And I promise it'll make sense, just stick with me there. Second, I want to show you why you can't be linear anymore, why a single predictable funnel unfortunately is mostly dead. And third, I want to give you a model that actually works now, plus permission to start to build it slowly so you don't get overwhelmed. So let's jump right into it here. Let me start with the part that nobody ever talks about. And I'll be the first to say it. So hopefully this gives you a little bit of comfort, but it's not your effort, it's not your offer, it's not your skill level, it's not the billions of excuses you can think of. The environment has changed. So just a few years ago, we lived in a world where attention was pretty cheap and trust was easy. So just think about it. If you wanted to grow your practice, you could run a pretty simple and predictable system. You would run some ads to a workshop or webinar. You knew roughly how much you needed to spend, you knew roughly how many people would need to register, how many would actually show up out of that, and how many would actually say yes to whatever you were offering at the end. So you could literally do this math on a napkin and it was pretty much close to a science at the end of the day. But here's the thing that predictability, it was real, it absolutely wasn't fake or just uh something we imagined. It genuinely worked for one reason, and that's because the environment was very stable at the time. And unfortunately, the environment has not stayed stable. So we've lived through what I would call an extinction level shift. Uh AI, as you guys know and keep hearing about, and some of you might be sick of it already, it's changed what's possible overnight. So attention has collapsed, there's so much AI slop, there's so many things just hijacking our attention. Unfortunately, skepticism has hit an all-time high because people have seen the same funnel a thousand times. They can smell a pitch a mile away. And on top of all of that, their intention itself has changed. So there's a study I shared a while back showing that heavy short-form video consumption is actually linked to reduced activity in the frontal lobe. So that's the part of the brain responsible for focus, decision making, impulse control. So your audience isn't just uh busy, like that's not the only thing that's preventing them here. Their brains are being trained for speed, for novelty, for quick hits of dopamine. And you're over here trying to sell depth and transformation in a world that has been conditioned to scroll. So when you actually think about it, it's pretty tough to combat a system like that. So that's why your old strategies, they're kind of falling flat. And hear me on this. It's not because you got worse at marketing, it's because the environment has gotten harder and harder fast. So the water you're swimming in is completely different than the water you were swimming in a few years ago. And here's where we'll bring in one of my favorite analogies. Uh, it's a biology analogy. So stick with me if you're doing something, just tune in a little uh closer here. So I got this idea from a very sharp marketer that I follow named Qasim Aslam. And so, shout out to him. And he used it to explain what AI is doing it in the business world. And this example has stuck with me. I find myself thinking about it over and over in conversations as well. So I want to give him full credit for this because the second I heard it, everything clicked. And it really made sense why marketing has changed for practitioners and why it's very important for us to apply to our world. I find in the marketing world, a lot of the things that are taught don't apply to health practitioners because a lot of the things that are taught are taught from a sense of volume. So it's like DM a hundred people every single day. If you started cold DMing a hundred people every day as a health practitioner, your trust will erode very, very quickly. People won't appreciate that, especially with something so sensitive and vulnerable as talking about health issues. So let's get into the biology here. There's two completely different survival strategies, and some of you might remember this from grade school or high school. And this is called K selection and R selection. And which one wins depends entirely on the environment. So let me break it down for you. So first you have the K strategists. So think of a human being like ourselves, think of an elephant, think of an oak tree. They produce very little offspring and they specialize deeply and they optimize for the long term. So they build something that's big, strong, and rooted. And here's the key: this strategy wins when the environment is stable, when things are predictable. Going deep and building a moat is the smart move at this point. Then you have your R strategists. So this is bacteria, weeds. I know they're they're kind of everywhere at the time of this recording. Many insects as well. So leave an apple around for a few days and you'll see that it's just swimming with fruit flies and insects and things like that. Things can move really, really quickly. So these R strategists, they do the opposite of case strategists. They multiply fast and cheap. They spread their options everywhere, they adapt quickly, they don't get attached to any single form. And this strategy wins when the environment is unstable, when everything is changing fast, flexibility, beats, specialization every single time, right? So these R species, they'll overproduce that offspring because they know a big chunk of that will be died off. But then the ones that succeed, those are the winners overall. So in a very predictable environment like the one that we are used to and accustomed to, if weeds come in your garden, you pluck them, right? That's just your norm. So that's a controlled environment. But if you go and visit anywhere that's untouched on the face of the planet, that there's not a lot of human intervention, once the weeds sort of get there, they just expand and expand and expand. So here's the part that should stop you in your tracks. When a sudden, violent change like this hits an environment like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, whether you believe in that or not, follow me for example's sake, it's not the strongest or the most specialized species that survives. The dinosaurs were very specialized, right? They were the most optimized, there was apex predators, and then they were gone. So what survives an extinction event is whatever is the most adaptable. So the bacteria have survived it, the weeds made it, the specialists fossilized at the end of the day. So if we think about this with the marketing side of things and now connect the dots, the old marketing world was stable. So the winning move looked exactly like a case strategy. The advice was always niche down, go deep, build one funnel, stick to one thing, build your moat. And it was good advice, and it worked because the environment held still long enough for that deep specialization to pay off. But when the asteroid hit, AI came along, attention collapsed, skepticism goes all the way up all at once. Here's the big problem the thing that made you strong in that stable world before, that one that was deeply, deeply optimized and that specialized funnel you have, it's exactly like the things that fossilized during the dinosaur extinction, right? So this is where your moat actually became a tarp pit. You're the dinosaur, right? Beautifully optimized for a world that no longer exists. And unfortunately, many businesses I know have had to close up and they've literally turned into the dinosaur skeletons at the museum at the end of the day. So in this new environment, survival belongs to the R strategist. It's the practitioner who spreads their bets, who run many small experiments instead of one big one. And they value shipping stuff and adapting over perfection and protecting, right? So AI is not coming for your business, it's coming for your rigidity. And that's a line that I took from Cossum from his video. Just such a powerful line. So this entire thing should feel like a paradigm shift for you. So if you're starting to feel this, I hope you're starting to see, okay, maybe I have been really specialized in trying to do stuff that worked in 2017, 2018, 2019. And you know what? If I just look at it year over year, it's gotten worse and worse and worse. So we need to fix this, right? And the fix for this isn't a better funnel. It's not buying like a marketing course on how to do one thing really well. It's becoming more adaptable, right? So the thing I want to talk to you about next is you can't really afford to be linear anymore. So this is talking to how you market day to day. The old model was very linear, it was a straight line, right? So add to webinar to offer to maybe a call to sale, right? So it's one path, one funnel. It's a deeply optimized machine at the end of the day. So as long as the environment was stable, that single line was enough. That was the case strategy in action that we just talked about. And it was the right call at the time, but a single line is very fragile, right? So it's the dinosaur. When that one funnel stops converting and in the environment, it eventually will, in today's environment, your entire practice comes to a stall. So you have one oil well, and the moment it stops drying, you are stuck. So you could pour thousands of dollars into ad spend and you're really pouring it into a broken system and you're hoping it's going to produce, but I've had so many scary conversations with practitioners where they're just like, what do I do? This is completely shifted, right? So the problem is you've bet your entire survival on one specialized thing in a world that punishes specialization. And here's how trust actually gets built today. It's actually not one touch point, it's many. There's a framework I love, uh sometimes called the 7114 framework. And the idea is that before someone is really ready to buy from you, it can take something like seven hours of consuming your content across 11 different touch points in four different places. So take the numbers with a grain of salt. The point is the magnitude of it. It's not just a single ad that you do, it's not just a single webinar, it's not just a single podcast. It's mixing these things and having the ability to be omnipresent, be present in many places at once, right? So it might be a podcast plus a post, plus an email, plus a talk they saw you give, plus a book, plus a friend who mentioned your name. So over and over until they know you, until they like you, and most importantly until they trust you, they're not necessarily going to want to work with you. And there's some nuance to this, but just stick with me there. So a straight line can't do that. A straight line gives someone a chance to fall in love with your work only through one moment in time. And this new environment, it demands many moments in time. So it demands that you spread your options and it demands that you adapt. And you also have to double down on your winners fast and cut the losers very fast as well. And I think that's one thing that has affected many practitioners, is they've actually doubled down on their losers and continue to double down on their losers. So what we want to do from this point is get very practical. And I want to give you a visual because I feel that can really help a lot of people. And one of my favorite visuals is the visual of a spider web. So I know a lot of you have thought about the classical funnel. If any of you have never heard the term funnel before in the marketing world, it's just like a funnel in your kitchen where you're trying to capture something at the top. And in this case, it's an audience, it's people and their attention. And then what you're supposed to do is over time with the content you deliver, you're supposed to really narrow down the ones that are the best fit to work with you. So that was the old way of doing it. That's a single path with an opening at the top. It's the specialist. The new way to think about stuff is thinking about it as a spider web. So if you visualize a spider web right now, this is actually how you work with people. And that's at the center of the web. So this is your programs, your offerings, your frameworks. It's exactly what you deliver to your clients and patients. So this is your one-on-one care. It might be your group program, it might be some sort of training program you have. It's whatever your core offer is. Stick that at the center of the spider web. And then the web stretches out in every direction with strands reaching into different corners of the world. And here's the beautiful thing about a spider web and why it's the perfect R strategy. The spider does not know which strand or which area of the web is going to catch something. It does not bet everything on just one corner or one strand. It doesn't over-optimize a single thread, make it thicker than the others, and then just pray that that's the one that works. It builds a wide, connected, adaptable net so that no matter where someone enters, they get pulled toward the center, right? So if one strand breaks, in the case of a case strategist, the web will hold. There's another area of the web that will show strength. And that's the definition of adaptability. So this is how marketing works now. People come in through different strands. So if we think about the web around it, parts of this web might be a podcast that you do. Another aspect might be outreach that you do. Another could be your lead magnet or free resource that you provide. Another could be a friend who maybe read something you wrote, a blog article or a book. Another might be somebody who simply referred into you, right? Another might have seen your social media post. Another might have seen an in-person talk that you gave, right? But this is what I mean by spreading yourself out like a spider web. And we want to create ecosystems over funnels. An ecosystem gives people multiple entry points and lets them come in in whatever stage of readiness they're at. It feels way less salesy and it's more like an invitation. And it really cultivates an ongoing relationship. So at the end of the day, I hate that as health practitioners, we have to talk about sales and we have to talk about conversions and we have to talk about all these quote unquote dirty marketing words. But at the end of the day, we're trying to create a relationship with somebody who needs the help that we know that we can deliver and needs the transformation that we know we can help co-create. Right. So this is where I really want to make sure you understand this spider web concept. And I'll get real be uh with my own spider web because I'm not asking to do anything I haven't done myself. So if you think about the way that I've been marketing here, I do in-person talks, and that's because communities need people to help them connect and nothing beats in-person, and nobody is really leveraging in-person anymore. So this is a huge untapped space. I think everybody's into like building virtually and on the internet and connecting with people in person is huge, but I also host webinars because some people need to see me teach live and maybe they're not in the same province as me or same state as me, right? So this helps them learn from me with very little resistance. They don't have to have their camera on, right? They can just take in the information. I have this podcast because some people want to ride along with me uh in their ears, and and I hope that's true. Uh, but they they want to take in a lot of stuff here and they want to understand the frameworks I'm about and my practice philosophies and things like that. So they might never reach out until they've seen and heard enough. I wrote a book called The Fulfilled Practitioner, and you can get it for free. Uh, because a book it builds trust with people that it gives depth that a real never will. And I keep showing up for my community because the people who already know me are my most underutilized uh way to spread the word, right? These are individuals who got a great experience with me, and I'm someone who's been blessed to receive a lot of referrals over time, right? So if you notice something, as I'm going there, I'm not just tooting my own horn in any ways. I have so much to improve upon. There's so much I'm not doing well. Uh, but every one of those is a strand. So none of them is my entire strategy. I'm not married to any single one of them. If one stops working, I adapt, I lean into another. And that is the R strategy. There's been things I've tried and it's been radio silent. And those are quote unquote losers that I kind of felt, you know what, I'm giving a lot of time, energy, and effort here. I think maybe I should double down where I'm getting a little bit more traction. So you spread things out, you adapt, but you stay flexible. And here's the nuance, and it really matters. Spreading out, it doesn't really mean being scattered. So I don't want you to feel overwhelmed by all of this. Every strand says the same thing and points to the same center. So if your strands all say different things, the web doesn't hold together, right? So it's not a spider web and then a crab web and then a lion web. Like it's it's one thing, right? So you need what I call a golden thread. You need one consistent message running through all of it so that if someone takes a needle and has this golden thread attached to it and they pass it through every single thing you create, it all connects. You're adaptable in your channels, but you're consistent in your message. And remember, that's what ties a web together. I see too many practitioners who are just bouncing off the walls that one video or real, they're talking about recipes and another one, they're talking about politics and another one, they're talking about some sort of like uh MLM they're part of. And sorry to call people out, but that's kind of what I'm seeing. And there's no consistency in their messaging. So if somebody just found you and they didn't know you before, they have no idea what you stand for. And you're probably creating some inconsistencies in the eyes of people who follow you already. So I know what a lot of you are probably thinking and feeling right now. You you heard me talking about oh, podcast, book, uh, webinars, in-person talks, building a community. And you're probably feeling like, oh my God, this is like so much, Ricky. Like, like, who do you think we are? Like, this isn't possible for everybody. And I could barely keep up with one thing right now. And you want me to build this whole spider web? I absolutely don't want you to build this uh right away. So here's the good news the R strategy is actually less overwhelming uh because once you understand it, you'll know how to implement it. So the old way, the K-way, meant you had to build everything perfectly. It had to be one deeply optimized funnel before you saw a result, and everything's riding on that machine. So you'd be tweaking it over and over and over, kind of like a hot rod or something like that, where you're you always have a wrench in your hand. There's always things to tweak, right? And it just becomes exhausting. And unfortunately, it's really fragile as well. So when this extinction level event happened with AI, the R way is what's needed. So that's the opposite. So you make small, cheap. And what I mean by that is it doesn't expend a lot of your effort, a lot of your resources. And you want to make these fast bets, right? So you ship one strand at a time, see what happens. So you're not building the entire web in one shot. A spider doesn't build its web. It's actually a beautiful thing. If you YouTube a video, you'll see that it starts with one corner, gets a root in, and then starts to expand, finds another route, right? So you wanna see what works, let go of what doesn't. And you really want to build that one strand at a time and you get good at building these strands. So when you build your first one, guess what? Your second one's probably gonna be a little faster. And that's your feedback to keep going, right? And especially if you get any sort of reward. If somebody reaches out to you, somebody connects with you by building this strand of the web out, that's gonna benefit you a lot. It's gonna give you a hit of dopamine and keep you motivated. So really pick one thing and pick one that fits your strengths, right? You'll never see me making dancing videos on TikTok. I know never say never, but that's just not me. I can't dance. I have two left feet and um it just you don't want to see that. Nobody wants to see that, right? So that's not one of my strengths. But if you love to speak, I love to speak and connect with that community. This channel, this podcast is one of my ways to do that, right? If you love to write, start writing. If you love to talk, start a podcast or look for a speaking opportunity. If you're great one-on-one, start with maybe direct outreach uh to people you've already helped, right? So just pick one part of the strand that feels most like you and then start there, right? And this is the mindset piece because this is the part that really quietly kills practice. When you take your first shot and it does not land, you can't quit. So you may have checked out a few episodes ago, I did a shot on practitioners need to take more shots and improve with every shot. You need to have this mentality overall. So that's one of the most important things I tell you. Imagine you trained your whole life to make it to the big leagues. You step onto the ice, you take one shot, the goalie stops it, and you're like, you know what? I guess this isn't for me, and you walk away. That would be absolutely insane, right? My six and a half year old plays hockey, and I know how crazy the investment is, and like all of um the time commitment. If he made it to the big leagues, which which obviously I'm open for, uh, and uh he just took his first shot and walked off. Like as a parrot, I would just be devastated, right? So practitioners do this. They they start to build one part of the strand of the web. They think the web is all there is, the single strand is all there is, it doesn't work out, and they never give their web any intention again, right? So you have to stay in the shift. You have to take more shots, you have to improve your shooting percentage every time. Even the best player in the world doesn't make every single shot that they take. Nobody does. So your first attempt, it's not a verdict, it's data. So in this fast moving world, you will actually lose to people who maybe don't have the skills you have, who maybe don't have the intelligence you have, who maybe don't have the knowledge you have, but they ship very quickly. They get stuff out very quickly. So if you're an A plus student who needs perfection and you just keep modifying and just tweaking things that you've already built, but you don't actually get it out into the world, you're gonna lose to people who are putting stuff out there, right? So those people are shooting, they're improving their shooting percentage, and they're adapting, right? So let me bring this all home for you. Thank you for sticking through this. I hope this helped with a paradigm shift for you as well. At the end of the day, marketing's not broken, the environment's changed. So I really want you to honor there. Now, that doesn't mean all of a sudden you could just put the responsibility on the environment and use it as an excuse to blame it. The environment's changed, so that means we must adapt, right? We're creatures that live in an environment and different ecosystems, right? So we lived in these stable worlds before that favored the K strategy. So now we need to favor more of an R strategy, right? We need to spread out our shots. We need to build this web instead of a single linear line. And we have to really ship things out before they're perfect and adapt as we go. You can't afford to just stay linear anymore. Trust isn't built in a straight line. So it's built across those many touch points, many strands, and they're all pointing to the same center. And it's all connecting via this golden thread that I helped describe earlier, right? And most importantly, you don't have to build it all at once. You build one strand at a time. You take your shots, you raise that shooting percentage, and you let it grow, right? So this example, this analogy, it really helped hit home for me. And it's something I think about every single day now because I see this happening in real time. The world has a new shift. There's a new AI feature that gets launched, a new tech feature that gets launched. There's so much we have to keep up with as practitioners. Now you don't need to know everything. You just need to know that next step for you, that small detail. If you're overwhelmed with AI, the first thing you should do is just try out one AI. Pick a basic one that you hear about all the time and just go chat to it like a friend. So pick an LLM that's basically your Chat GPT or Claude. Those are gonna be your big two. And just ask it simple questions. Ask it for recipes, ask it for directions, ask it for restaurants in your area, right? Just have a conversation with it, get familiar with its chat feature. And then, like Lego pieces, once you have a foundation, you build upon that foundation, right? So adapt. And as always, I want you to make sure that you stay fulfilled, you stay inspired, and you keep doing work that lights you up because the world absolutely needs you. And I'll see you on the next episode. I'd love to hear your biggest takeaways. Uh, shoot me a message, and uh, I'd love to hear from you and what you're building. And if you found this helpful, and if you did find it helpful, my only request is you share it with a practitioner who might be in need of hearing this information. So have a great rest of the day, and I hope you enjoyed this episode.