In 2020 I stood in my front yard with a rubber mallet and a sign with a farting pickle on it.
A funny, very practical marketing book for small business owners. It tells how a clip-art pickle and a ridiculous domain saved a business, then hands you the six-step PICKLE Formula behind it, so you can run your own stupid idea on purpose.
[FORMATS: Paperback · Hardcover · Kindle · Audiobook] · [★★★★★ RATING + REVIEW COUNT FROM AMAZON]
My neighbor hammered a sign with a cartoon pickle farting on it into his front yard at 6:30 in the morning. I asked him what it was for. He said, “You’ll see.”
I did not see. The dog and I walk the long way now.
Gary, across the street
(Name changed to protect Gary.)
The sign was the culmination of more than a decade of owning a business. The struggle. The screw-ups. The constant learning. And one slow realization: a stupid idea done right is not stupid at all. It is just the idea nobody else had the guts to try.
This book is about the wins, the losses, the people, and the occasional kick in the ass you did not ask for. Then it hands you the formula.
Want to know what the sign was for, why it worked, and whether Gary ever came around? He shows up again on the last page.
...and you are tired of marketing that gets seen and forgotten. You want customers who find you, remember you and call you first.
Your list of reasons is not crazy. It is just full of excuses. This is what the road looks like from a little further down it.
You will learn exactly what is on your invoice, what questions to ask, and how to get more from a smaller budget.
The six-step process behind the yard signs, the golf balls and the radio jingles that turned a farting pickle into a six-figure client funnel. The whole thing rests on one idea: let people experience your value before you ask them to buy it.
Do something worth noticing. The first job of marketing is to earn attention, not explain.
Give them enough to be curious and not enough to be satisfied.
Turn curiosity into one six-inch step. One address. One tap.
Teach them why what they just experienced worked. Proof beats promises.
Help them understand their problem better than they do, before they pay you a dime.
Make hiring you the obvious next step. Never sell. Wait to be asked.
Nick Packard started NP Connect as a side hustle in 2009 and has spent more than 15 years doing stupid things for smart reasons ever since. He runs it as an employee-less marketing agency: a hand-picked collection of freelancers and specialists he credits with most of his success.
He is the guy behind the Pass Me a Beer videos (look it up… and thank him later), inappropriate hat and shirt nights… and, coming soon to a town near you, the adventure date night app.
Picklefarts is his first book. He is now officially an author, a title he plans to work into every conversation, introduction and drive-thru order for the foreseeable future.
Nick grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, where business was dinner-table talk and starting something was just what you did. Today he is raising four daughters with his wife in Wisconsin, doing all the things at once, with a group of friends who inspire him daily and talk him into most of the stupid ones… or maybe they just go along with his.
12 free marketing tools built from the book. Find out if you have a reach problem or a frequency problem, grade your landing page, X-ray your agency invoice, or plan your own stupid idea with the PICKLE Formula.
