Total Addressable Market is a venture capital talisman that somebody, somewhere, decided to drag into the services world. It doesn’t fit here. It’s never belonged here. Every time an agency owner uses it to talk themselves out of a niche, I want to set something on fire.

if you were like the average agency owner, your brain probably cramped a little bit thinking about the words "support a investment liquidation value” because it doesn't really have a corollary in the professional services world. For a venture capitalist, if you are investing, let's say, $10 million and you get 25% of a company, the total enterprise value of that company is $40 million.

Because there are so many failures in venture investing, you have to reasonably believe that any investment you make can return ten times the amount of money as you invest, if you need that $10 million to turn into $100 million, you have to be really sure that the $40 million company you invested in is going to be worth at least $400 million.

There are very, very few marketing agencies that can solicit an investment of $10 million or have an enterprise value of $400 million, so there is a need to use TAM math.

If you are not a global connoisseur of snack foods, you may not have run into the Tim Tam, which is a delicious Australian chocolate and jelly biscuit that is terrific for snacking. If you are an advanced user, you can use the Tim Tam as a straw for a hot beverage and then eat the deliciously soggy cookie before it falls apart.

VCs care about TAM because they need 100x returns. They invest $10 million for 25% of a company, that company needs to be worth $400 million on exit, and to justify that math, the market it competes in needs to be enormous. TAM is a story they tell their LPs so the LPs keep writing checks.

You are not raising a Series B. You are running an agency. You need 100 clients, not a 15000. The math isn't the same. The math isn't even adjacent. It's a completely different fucking game - so stop playing by rules that don't apply to you.

If you are a $5M agency at $100K average contract, you need 50 clients. If you want to get to $20M, you need 200. There are more than 200 of basically anything that matters in the United States. There are more than 200 orthodontists in Ohio, more than 200 SaaS companies in Austin, and more than 200 wedding venues in Texas. The market isn't the constraint. Your thinking is.

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Your TAM should work the same way. You aren't measuring it to project out your future VC gains, you are trying to understand how much of that market you can suck through that delicious cookie until the whole thing dissolves.

Here's the right way to think about your Tim TAM: the number of customers you need to build the agency that actually feels successful to you. It isn't a market category, it isn't a vertical, and it isn't a number you can defend in a pitch deck. It's the number of clients it takes to fund the business and the life you want.

For most of you, that number sits between 30 and 200. That's the whole TAM conversation.

I know an agency that helps religious orders with their product marketing. Think nuns with a vineyard, a monastery that runs a wood shop, or a church-affiliated bakery. The niche is tiny, the budgets are small, and the buying cycles are slow. Everything about it sounds, on paper, like a market you should run away from.

It's a husband-and-wife team with three employees. They are very spiritual, they make a great living, they love their clients, and they don't want to be a $100M agency. Their ambition and their market are perfectly suited.

Could they get to $100M in their initial target market? Probably not, but if they went global, maybe. but since that isn't their ambition, it doesn't fucking matter, does it?

That isn't where the story ends, because their Tim TAM isn't the religious orders themselves. It's the problem they know how to solve, which is marketing for organizations with low inventory, high scarcity, deep mission orientation, and tight community ties. That problem exists in faith-aligned charities, in artisan cooperatives, and in any small heritage brand where the product is inseparable from the meaning behind it.

If they ever wanted to expand, the problem is the opportunity (shoutout to Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way - and I'd wish you would just read that book. Will you do it for me?) The the religious organization secular product marketing vertical was just the room they happened to be standing in when they decided to solve a problem. They love that room and don't ever want to leave, but if they wanted to know how to solve that problem gives them the lockpick is to enter any other room where that problem exists.

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Years ago we had a great consumer electronics retail client with about 1,000 storefronts. We got really good at one specific thing, which was combining broad national paid search with hyper-local advertising to drive in-store foot traffic. We tracked it, we knew it worked, and we had a real process and defensible data behind it.

Then we got the chance to work with One Medical. On paper, it was a completely different industry, because healthcare isn't retail. The problem was the same, though, and that problem was how you drive a person from a screen into a physical location, right now, near where they live.

So we treated medical conditions like products. STD testing, digestive issues, school physicals, and bloodwork each got a national-plus-local treatment, which was the same pattern we'd honed in retail. It worked because the problem transferred even though the industry didn't.

That's when we stopped defining our TAM by industry and started defining it by problem. We expanded into insurance, chemical manufacturing, and shipping. We went anywhere that had a lot of products, a location element, and a need for broad-plus-local advertising.

We tried pharma and banks and credit unions, but we couldn't crack them because we didn't understand the regulatory shape of those industries well enough. That's the honest part of this whole conversation. Your problem-defined TAM is unlimited within the industries you can actually navigate. It isn't infinite, and it's bounded by the texture of what you genuinely understand. That bounded market is still much, much bigger than whatever vertical box you started in.

1. What problem do we actually know how to solve? Because you are a dorky marketer, you are immediately going to say "grow sales, increase click-through rates, or improve ROAS." Wrong. Those are the outcomes of what you do. The problem is the thing in the way of the outcome that you've learned how to dismantle. Get specific.

2. Where else does that problem exist? Look at different industries, different sizes, different geographies, and different stages of company. The problem is the constant, and everything else is variable.

3. Which of those places can we actually navigate? Consider regulatory understanding, buying culture, sales cycle length, and the technical or industry knowledge you'd have to absorb. Be honest, because some markets you can walk into and some will eat you alive even if the underlying problem is identical.

4. Of the markets that pass that filter, are there 30 to 200 of them buying this year at prices you can live with? If the answer is yes, you've got a Tim TAM. Stop worrying and start working.

Your market isn't the problem, and it almost never is.

The agency that thinks the market is too small is generally speaking terrified of making a mistake and is usually an agency that has defined itself by the industry it landed in instead of the problem it learned how to solve. Those are fixable problems.

The market you are worried about is bigger than you think, and you are just looking at the using another industry's math to justify your fears.

Stop counting companies and start counting problems you can solve in places you can actually work. That's your Tim TAM, and it's plenty.

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