What Percent of Revenue Should a Guide Spend on Marketing?

The figure quoted at small businesses is around nine percent of revenue, and it is the wrong row of the table. Nine percent is the all-firm average, and the same survey publishes a breakdown by company size showing that smaller firms spend far more of their revenue on marketing, not less: 13.34 percent among companies under ten million dollars of revenue, and 16.26 percent among those with fewer than fifty employees, against 4.28 percent at companies of ten thousand people or more. So the honest correction runs upward. Then you look at the dispersion in those small-firm cells and discover the number cannot bear the weight anybody puts on it, which is the actual finding here.

Where does the nine percent come from?

It is the total across all respondents in The CMO Survey, which reports marketing at 8.96 percent of revenues across 154 companies answering that question. It is a real number and it describes a population that includes some very large firms.

Averages across mixed populations behave badly when the underlying groups differ systematically, and here they differ enormously. The gap between the smallest and largest employee bands is roughly four to one. The same caution applies to every benchmark quoted in this category, as the straight answers piece works through.

That direction surprises people, because the intuition is that big companies with marketing departments must spend proportionally more. They spend far more in dollars and much less as a share of revenue, which is what scale does.

So if you are going to use a benchmark at all, use the row that describes something closer to your business. Doing otherwise imports a discount that belongs to companies with thousands of employees.

Hartman Guide Services, VA

Which row is closest to a guide business?

The smallest one available, and it is still much larger than you. The under-fifty-employee band means under fifty employees, not one person and a boat, and the under-ten-million band is a company turning over ten million dollars.

Nothing smaller gets published, and I could find no figure specific to guiding anywhere. That gap is the central fact here, and it is why everything below is about method rather than about a number to copy. It is also why the marketing cost piece works from real quoted prices instead of shares.

Sector cuts do not rescue it either. The nearest industry category, consumer services, shows 11.00 percent, on three respondents. Three. That number should not be used for anything and I am reporting it only so nobody else quotes it at you as though it meant something.

The broader business-to-consumer services grouping is a little better at 7.24 percent across eighteen respondents, and it is still describing a different kind of company from a one-boat operation.

Why does the dispersion matter more than the average?

Because in every small-firm cell the standard deviation is roughly the size of the mean, which means the answers were spread so widely that the average sits in the middle of almost nothing.

Look at the numbers. Under fifty employees: mean 16.26, standard deviation 13.43. Under ten million in revenue: mean 13.34, standard deviation 13.21. In each case the spread is nearly as large as the figure itself.

Compare that with the largest band, ten thousand employees and up, where the mean is 4.28 and the deviation is 4.08 across twenty-four respondents. Still wide, and noticeably tighter than the small-firm cells.

The plain reading is that small companies do not share a marketing spending norm. Some spend almost nothing and some spend a quarter of revenue, and both are represented in that average. There is no consensus for you to conform to.

So what should you actually do with the number?

Use it as a ceiling test rather than a target. If somebody proposes a spend that lands you well above the small-firm band, ask what justifies being an outlier. Below it, ask nothing, because underspending is not a diagnosis.

That is the only defensible use of a statistic this dispersed. It can tell you when a proposal is unusual. It cannot tell you what is correct.

The reason people want it to do more is understandable. A percentage feels like an answer, and the alternative requires arithmetic with your own figures, which is more work.

The alternative is also the only thing that produces a real number, and it is short, which is the next section.

What replaces the percentage?

Your open capacity multiplied by what a day nets you. That is the whole prize any marketing spend is competing for, and unlike a benchmark it describes your business.

Those per-trip figures are illustrations; the fee is not. A thousand dollars monthly is the lowest posted rate anywhere in this market, aimed on its own page at one-boat outfits, with two further rungs at $2,250 and $3,500 before any advertising money.

Put your own two numbers in. Open days you could realistically sell, and what a day leaves after fuel, food, ice, launch fees, insurance and maintenance.

What comes out is an upper bound rather than a prediction. Nothing any supplier does can exceed the days you have left, and the solo operator piece works that limit through in detail.

Prisoner Rock, CA

What if you do not know your net per day?

Then finding it out is the job, and an afternoon covers it. Start with what came in last season. Take out what went on fuel, on food and ice, on ramp and launch charges, on insurance, on keeping the boat running, and on every permit and licence you paid for. Divide what is left by the number of trips.

Rough is good enough. What matters is arriving at a figure instead of an impression, and the figure tends to land lower than expected once towing costs are inside it.

Requirements for licences and permits vary by state and by water and they get revised, so use your actual paid amounts from last season rather than what you believe the current fees to be.

Lacking it, no proposal can be assessed, no rate can be set with confidence, and a full calendar tells you nothing about whether the year worked. Holding it also changes how sales conversations go, in your favour.

Should the percentage be of revenue or of profit?

Neither, for a business shaped like this, and that is the deeper problem with importing the benchmark at all. A share-of-revenue rule assumes revenue can grow with spending. Yours cannot, past a hard ceiling.

A software company can sell one more unit forever. You can run one boat on one day, and once the calendar is full every additional dollar of marketing produces nothing at all.

That is why capacity arithmetic beats a percentage here rather than merely being more accurate. The percentage is answering a question about a business model you do not have.

It also explains why guides at different points in a season should behave completely differently. A guide at ninety percent capacity and one at forty percent are not the same customer, and no single share of revenue describes both.

What does the spend actually go on?

Less than the benchmark implies, because a large part of what a guide needs is free or nearly so. The website platform is $29 a month on annual billing at the mid tier, which is $348 a year.

I checked that page on 25 July 2026. Four steps on the ladder, from nineteen dollars monthly up to ninety-nine, every figure assuming a year paid at once. Pay by the month and the page says it can run a third higher.

Want the messaging software as well? Posted at $299 monthly, rising to $349 once the chat agent is included, which annualises to $3,588 with message charges still to come. After that the map listing is free, and so are reviews, photographs and answering the phone quickly.

Add it up honestly and a fully equipped one-boat operation can run its whole online presence for well under a thousand dollars a year in tools. Everything above that figure is advertising or somebody's labour, which is the ledger set out in the ownership cost piece.

When does spending more make sense?

Three conditions have to hold at once. A wide space between what you sell and what you could. Days worth real money. And time, not cash, as the thing you are short of. Two out of three is not a case.

It happens, and less often than proposals imply. Picture an operation with half its calendar empty, a day rate at the top of the local range, and a winter shift somewhere else that swallows the months this work would otherwise occupy. For that person the self-service route genuinely does not exist.

One other case holds up: a skill that takes real practice to acquire, chiefly running paid search, and only where the advertising budget is big enough that a management charge on top still leaves the arithmetic working.

The version that collapses under scrutiny is an operator with a handful of unsold days, an ordinary rate, and an empty winter, paying cash for something the offseason would have supplied. The agency versus freelancer piece works that trade through.

How should you phase it across a season?

Unevenly, which no percentage rule accommodates. A business with a season should not spread its budget across twelve equal months, and a supplier proposing that has not thought about your calendar.

The shape that makes sense front-loads the slow work into the offseason, where it has months to land, and concentrates anything fast into the weeks before the months you are trying to fill.

That means your spending should be lumpy on purpose. A flat monthly retainer is convenient for the supplier and is not obviously the right shape for you, which is worth raising rather than accepting.

It also means the annual percentage, even if it were reliable, would tell you nothing about the timing, and timing is where most of the difference is made. The argument in full is in the offseason piece.

Does the survey say anything about which direction spending is moving?

Down, modestly, and the headline reading matters less than the fact that it contradicts the sales register. Marketing budgets across all respondents sit at their lowest share of revenues in several years.

Hold onto that, because most selling in this category leans the other way, hinting that competitors are pouring money in while you stand still. What the survey records is contraction.

It also means a benchmark quoted from an older report describes a higher-spending year than the current one. If somebody cites a figure at you, ask which edition, because this survey has run since 2008 and the number moves.

None of which changes the conclusion for you. A tightening industry average is still an average of companies unlike yours, and your capacity arithmetic is unaffected by what anybody else did last year.

How should a first-year guide think about this?

Differently from everybody else, because the ratio breaks down entirely when the denominator is small. A percentage of a first season's revenue is a percentage of very little, and it would justify spending almost nothing at exactly the moment visibility matters most.

That is the clearest illustration of why the rule fails here. A new operation has maximum open capacity and minimum revenue, so a revenue-linked budget is inversely related to the actual opportunity.

The capacity framing handles it without special-casing. Open days times net per day gives a new guide a large upside figure, which is the correct answer, because a first season genuinely is mostly unsold.

What it does not do is make spending affordable. The upside being large is not the same as having the cash, and a first-year guide is usually better served by the free work than by any purchase. Which items those are, in order, is in the offseason updates piece.

What do experienced guides do differently?

They budget from capacity rather than from revenue, and they convert every quoted fee into a cost per booked trip before answering.

Budgeting from capacity means the number changes as the season fills, which is correct. Twenty open days in March justifies a different spend from four open days in June, and a fixed percentage of revenue cannot express that.

The per-trip conversion is the other habit and it takes ten seconds. A monthly fee divided by the trips it produced is a figure you can hold directly against what a trip nets you, and it makes bad value obvious immediately.

Experienced operators also record what they spent and what happened, once a year, in a form they can read next year. Without that, every season starts the argument again from scratch. More on choosing and sizing outside help sits on the marketing help hub.

What are the common mistakes?

Using the all-firm average. Treating a dispersed statistic as a target. Applying a share-of-revenue rule to a capacity-limited business. And spreading a seasonal budget evenly across the year.

The all-firm mistake is the most common and it now has a specific correction: the small-firm rows run roughly two to four times higher, so anybody quoting nine percent at a one-boat operation is quoting a figure that belongs to much larger companies.

The target mistake is subtler and worse. A mean with a standard deviation of similar size is not describing a norm, and treating it as one manufactures a false obligation to spend.

The capacity mistake is the one that costs real money, because it justifies spending against revenue you have no ability to serve. Once the calendar is full, marketing spend has a return of zero, and no percentage rule contains that idea.

What surprises people?

That small companies spend a bigger share of revenue, not a smaller one. That the smallest published bucket is still enormously larger than a guide business. And that the spread inside those cells is as wide as the numbers themselves.

The direction reversal is worth carrying into any conversation where somebody quotes a benchmark at you. The correct question back is which row, from which survey, with how many respondents.

The deeper point is that a percentage was never equipped to answer this. Two figures decide it: unsold days, and the money one day leaves behind. Neither appears in any survey, because both live only in your own records. Any article that hands you a percentage instead has substituted somebody else's business for yours.