What does £59 a month of marketing support actually get you?
There's a strange gap in the marketing support market. At the bottom there's free content, an endless all-you-can-eat buffet of videos and newsletters that know nothing about your business.
At the top there are agencies and consultants, brilliant and priced accordingly. And in between, where most small business owners actually live, there's been almost nothing. You either graze the buffet alone or you find four figures a month, and the industry has quietly decided that's fine.
We don't think it's fine. So in a few weeks we're launching Qrios Minds, a marketing membership for £59 a month, and this is the honest guide to what that money gets you, what it deliberately doesn't, and how to tell whether a membership is your rung on the ladder or a distraction from it.
Yes, we're biased. We're also going to be more upfront about the limits than anyone selling you a course ever will be, because members who join for the right reasons stay, and that's the whole business model.
First: what a marketing membership is (and what it isn't)
A marketing membership gives you ongoing access to experienced marketing brains and a group of business owners at your stage, for a monthly subscription. It sits in the gap between doing everything alone and paying someone to do it for you. The shape varies: some are content libraries with a badge on, some are communities with no expert in sight, some are group coaching by another name.
Here's the test that separates the useful ones from the shelfware: do you get access to actual humans who will answer your question about your business? A library of videos is a course on a subscription. A Facebook group with no expert in it is a pub without a bar. The value of a membership lives entirely in the access.
What a membership isn't: done-for-you delivery, a personalised strategy, or a substitute for putting the work in. Anyone selling a £59 product with the promise of £2,000 outcomes is fibbing, and you should run.
What Qrios Minds includes, precisely
Because vagueness is how this industry gets away with murder, here's the exact deal.
One live group call every month. An hour with us and your fellow members, working on real problems from real businesses. Bring the thing that's bothering you: the campaign that flopped, the pricing wobble, the "is this normal?" question. You'll leave with answers, and just as often you'll leave with the answer to a question you hadn't thought to ask yet, because someone else's problem is next month's problem of yours, solved early.
WhatsApp support, ongoing. This is the bit we'd argue matters most, and it's exclusive to Minds, no other Qrios package has it. Marketing problems don't book appointments. They turn up on a Tuesday when an agency quotes you £3,000 and you don't know if that's a bargain or a mugging, or when a post unexpectedly takes off and you don't know how to make the most of it. Having somewhere to ask that day, and getting a straight answer from someone who's seen it all before, is the difference between deciding well and guessing.
A crowd at your stage. SMEs, startups, freelancers and solo hustlers, all fighting versions of the same fights. If you've ever wanted to ask "what does everyone else pay for their website?" out loud, this is the room.
£59 a month per person. No minimum term, cancel whenever. That last bit is deliberate: memberships should be kept because they're useful, not because leaving is admin.
Who it's for (and the maths of why)
Qrios Minds is built for the business owner doing their own marketing who's tired of doing it alone. You don't lack effort, you lack a second opinion from someone who's seen forty versions of your situation. Sound familiar? Then look at the maths.
A single hour of senior marketing advice in the UK typically costs £150 to £275, and we've published the whole market's numbers in our guide to what a marketing consultant costs.
A year of Qrios Minds costs £708 (or £649 if you pay for it annually), less than three hours at those rates, for twelve group calls and a year of daft-or-brilliant questions answered while they're still small. The comparison isn't really membership versus consultant, it's membership versus the cost of guessing all year.
It's also the right first rung if you've read our guide to marketing support when you can't afford an agency and recognised yourself in the early stages of that ladder. Climbing beats leaping, and £59 is the least expensive climbing gear in the market that still comes with actual humans attached.
Who should save their money
Straight answers, as promised, because a membership sold to the wrong person helps nobody.
If you have zero time to engage, don't join. A membership you never use is a £59 donation, and we'd rather you didn't make it. The value needs you to turn up to calls, or at least fire in questions.
If your problem is delivery, not decisions, don't join yet. Someone drowning in execution needs hands or a smaller to-do list, not another call in the diary. Our breakdown of when a business needs a consultant covers how to tell which problem you've actually got.
If you're about to make one big expensive decision, buy an hour instead. A Power Hour at £150 gets that specific thing sorted with full attention on your business alone. Memberships are for the fifty small decisions a year, not the one giant one.
And if your business needs someone senior in the engine room every week, that's fractional territory, a different rung entirely, and we've written about what that looks like too.
The honest limits
Group support means shared airtime, so a call is not a private strategy session, and WhatsApp answers are directions, not documents. Qrios Minds will make you a sharper, more confident marketer of your own business; it won't write your plan for you or run your ads while you sleep.
When members outgrow it, and the good ones eventually do, the rest of the ladder is right there. That's not a bug, it's the design. We'd rather grow you out of £59 a month than lock you into it.
Is a marketing membership worth it? The five questions that decide
Whether you join ours or someone else's, run any membership through these before your card comes out. The answers separate the genuinely useful from the beautifully packaged.
Who actually answers the questions? A named, experienced human whose track record you can check, or "the community"? Communities are lovely, but peers guessing together is how myths spread. You want at least one person in the room who's seen the film before and knows how it ends.
Is it live access or a library? Recorded content can't look at your website and wince. If the offer is mostly videos, you're buying a course with a subscription attached, and courses are cheaper bought outright.
What happens between sessions? Marketing problems are no respecters of the calendar. A membership that goes silent for 29 days a month leaves you alone exactly when the agency quote lands or the ad account does something frightening. Between-session access is where the real value hides, which is why WhatsApp is the beating heart of ours.
How easy is it to leave? Monthly rolling and cancel whenever is the confident answer. Twelve-month terms on a £50-a-month product tell you the seller expects you to want out. Read that signal.
Does it want to keep you forever? Odd question, but useful. The best memberships expect to graduate people onwards as their businesses grow. If the pitch sounds like you'll need it for eternity, it's been designed as a dependency rather than a leg-up.
Qrios Minds passes all five by design, but so might others, and if a different room suits your business better, join that one. A business owner with support beats one without it, whoever's providing it. There's plenty of bold to back.
Why we built it
Because the industry's message to smaller businesses has always been "come back when you're bigger", and we built Qrios to say the opposite.
The whole mission is backing the bold ones, and bold doesn't start with a £2,000 retainer. It starts with someone in your corner on the months when you're not sure, which is most months, for less than most businesses waste on one forgotten subscription.
Doors open in a few weeks. If you want in from the first call, or you just want to ask whether it's right for you (see above for how seriously we take that question), get in touch or head to Qrios Minds to join the list. First group call, first cohort, ground floor. See you in there.