Every Saturday for the last ten-plus years, at 1pm, we've sent an email to our customers. New flavors, behind the scenes, the occasional mishap. Same format every time — a bit about our flavors, a funny story, a fun fact. This week it was pistachios. Over the years that little newsletter grew to over 2,000 subscribers, with an open rate consistently above 50%. For a small ice cream store, that's pretty good.
It's not that I think email is some magic marketing tool. It's that I want customers to remember we exist. That's really what marketing is — staying memorable.
So naturally, I thought we'd already cracked customer communication.
I was wrong.
Why Don't We Ever Send Texts?
One afternoon, one of my team members asked me a question that changed how I thought about marketing.
"Why don't we ever send text messages?"
I laughed. Not because it was a bad idea — because I genuinely hadn't thought about it. Which was a little embarrassing, because sitting in our customer data was over 5,000 people who'd given us permission to text them. Every loyalty member had agreed to it, automated through Square. We'd just never used it. No strategy, no reason we'd avoided it — we simply never sent a single message in over eight years.
That's when it hit me: sometimes a business doesn't have a marketing problem. It has an execution problem. We knew what we could do. We just weren't doing it.
Once I noticed it with texting, I started noticing it everywhere else. How many businesses are sitting on a tool that's already paid for, already switched on, already built into the software they use every day — and it's just never been turned on? An automation nobody set up. A review request nobody sends. A follow-up email that got built once and never activated. It's rarely about needing another piece of technology. It's about using what's already there.
So I ran an experiment.
The First Attempt
Before sending anything, I did some reading. Every article said basically the same thing: texts get opened far more than emails, most people read them within minutes, engagement is way higher than email. Sounded great.
So I logged into Square Marketing, wrote a short message about Ice Cream Wednesday, and hit send.
I signed it exactly the way we sign our emails. Big Love. Professional. It felt safe — it was the brand name. It also felt a little cold.
Which, I think, it was.
The One Change
The next week, I did something different. Instead of signing off as Big Love — or Frozen Fruit Co, as we used to be called — I used my own name. No company. No entity. Just, from Michael.
Honestly, it wasn't a clever marketing trick. It was just how I actually wanted to talk to people. I figured it probably wouldn't make much difference.
I was wrong again.
Almost immediately, people started replying. Not clicking — replying. "Thanks Michael." "We'll see you tomorrow." "I've been waiting for this flavor." Or just saying hello.
What surprised me most was how different the conversation felt. It no longer felt like a business broadcasting to customers. It felt like one person talking to another. The reply rate roughly doubled compared to when we signed off as a business.
Then customers started walking into the shop and asking, "Are you Michael? I get messages from you every week — I love them." Apparently people had been texting me back for weeks and I hadn't even seen it, because Square wasn't routing replies to me directly. I had to dig through the dashboard to find conversations that had been sitting there, unanswered, for days.
It's a strange thing — building something you assume nobody's really engaging with, then finding out people have been trying to talk to you the whole time.
Why It Actually Worked
Looking back, I don't think customers suddenly started caring about text messages. I think they cared that there was a real person on the other end. Me.
Small businesses have one enormous advantage over giant companies — we're allowed to be human. Nobody expects a personal reply from Amazon. But when someone chooses to support a local business, they want to know who's actually behind it. The owner, the founder, the baker, the coffee roaster, the ice cream maker. That's me.
We spend so much time trying to look professional that sometimes we accidentally stop looking human.
A lot of small businesses fall into this trap without realizing it. You start out signing things with your own name because that's just who you are — no marketing department, no brand guidelines, it's just you. Then as the business grows, you start "professionalizing" everything. The name gets replaced with a logo. The personal replies get replaced with templates. And somewhere in that process, the exact thing that made people trust you in the first place quietly disappears.
The Lesson
AI keeps getting better, and none of us can avoid it — even as a small business, you have to embrace it. Automation is everywhere now. But one thing hasn't changed: connecting with people.
If you're a small business owner, don't hide behind your logo. Put your name on your work. Answer the comments. Reply to the emails. Send the original text message. If you've got a customer list sitting in your point-of-sale system that's never been messaged, that's not a small oversight — that's an entire relationship you haven't started yet.
Because your biggest competitive advantage probably isn't your product. It isn't your advertising. It isn't AI. It's the fact that you're a real human being. That might be the most powerful marketing tool you already have — and you don't have to buy or build anything to use it. You just have to actually use it.
One last thing. It's been over a year since we made this change, and someone still replies most weeks just to say "thanks Michael" for the text.
Pretty amazing what a name can do.
About Me
I'm Michael Philippou, co-founder of Big Love, a plant-based ice cream business in Santa Monica that I've been running with my wife Victoria for over ten years. Before ice cream, I was a lawyer. I write about the real, unpolished lessons of running a small business — no gurus, no hype, just what's actually worked and what hasn't. Watch more on YouTube (Real Business Real Lessons) or follow along on LinkedIn.
Want to know how your business is actually doing? Start with the free Business Health Check — it scores your business in about a minute, no sign-up needed. Or dig into the other four: Valuation Estimator, Cash Runway, Customer Concentration Risk Checker, and Break-Even Calculator.