Why the Ability to Acquire Customers Is the Real Competitive Advantage

You may have heard this quote before:

“Whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer, wins.”
— Russell Brunson, Founder & CEO, ClickFunnels

At its core, this isn’t a marketing quote.

It’s a business truth.

For decades, only large companies could afford to dominate attention — TV, newspapers, billboards, and massive ad placements required capital that small businesses simply didn’t have.

If you didn’t have millions, you couldn’t compete.

That reality has changed.

Today, any serious business owner can compete with established brands through platforms like Meta (Facebook & Instagram) and TikTok — if they understand how customer acquisition actually works.

The challenge isn’t access anymore.

The challenge is clarity.

My Turning Point

Years ago, I was still in corporate sales, burned out, and determined to build something of my own.

I began studying Meta advertising with my own limited resources.

At the time, I was earning ₱20,000 per month.

I forced myself to allocate ₱1,500 for ads — even when daily expenses were already stretched.

That small budget allowed me to learn the mechanics of Ads Manager, but what it didn’t give me was scale, context, or real business understanding.

It took me over a year of trial and error to truly understand how advertising works as a business system, not just a tool.

The reason?

I was trying to learn in isolation.

The Strategic Shift

Everything changed when I stopped treating ads as a personal experiment and started treating them as a business function.

I reached out to business owners who needed advertising support and offered my services.

Their ad budgets gave me the environment to apply everything I had learned — properly, consistently, and at scale.

That first client unlocked:

Real-world experience

Portfolio results

And eventually, long-term opportunities

Zig Ziglar once said:

“You can have everything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want.”

That’s exactly what happened.

I helped businesses grow — and in the process, built my own.

The Business Model That Changed Everything

I realized there are only two core business paths:

Product-Based Business

Service-Based Business

Advertising sits at the center of both.

By mastering customer acquisition, I was able to:

Build a service-based business (my agency)

Generate consistent revenue

And later fund product-based ventures of my own

This is the part most people miss:

Advertising is not an expense. It is the engine that funds every business decision that follows.

The Real “Cheat Code”

Here is the simplest version of what took me years to learn: If you don’t have money yet → offer your time and skills

Use that income to build capital

Then use that capital to launch and scale your own businesses

When you control customer acquisition, you are no longer guessing.

You are no longer dependent on luck, trends, or timing.

You have leverage.

And in business, leverage changes everything.