Every month, starting around 1991, I would load the fax machine on a Friday afternoon and let it run through the weekend. Five hundred faxes. Three languages. English, Spanish, Portuguese. Each one a newsletter of sorts, product updates and industry news and whatever I thought might be useful to the buyers and purchasing managers across Latin America and Canada who were on my list. And I did this every single month, like clockwork, because I understood something instinctively that I didn’t have a name for at the time, which is that if you show up consistently with something valuable, people start to trust you before they ever buy from you.
This was before email marketing. Before blogs. Before content strategy was a phrase anyone used. Seth Godin hadn’t written Permission Marketing yet. I was just a guy with a fax machine and a territory that stretched from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, and I knew that most of these buyers would never pick up the phone for a cold call, but they might read something that landed on their desk if it was useful and arrived regularly and didn’t waste their time. And so I built a system, one fax at a time, that turned me from a name on a business card into a presence in their offices.
The moment I knew it was working happened at the Chicago Housewares Show, which was one of those massive trade events where the entire industry shows up and everyone is networking and dealing and trying to stand out in a sea of booths and handshakes. I walked onto the floor and some buyer from across the hall, someone I had never met in person, shouts, “The fax man! You’re the fax man!” And people around him started turning, grinning, some of them recognizing me and some of them recognizing the name, and pretty soon I had a small crowd, and they were all telling me they’d been reading those faxes, passing them around the office, sharing them up the chain. One buyer told me his newsletter had gone six floors up from where it landed. Six floors. From a fax machine in my office to a senior executive he’d never even spoken to.
And that’s when I realized what I’d built. Not a mailing list. A community. These people knew me. They felt like they knew me. Because I’d been showing up in their world every month with something that respected their time and gave them something worth reading, and over time that consistency had turned into trust, and trust, in the sales world, is the only currency that actually matters. You can have the best product, the best price, the best pitch, and none of it means anything if the person across the table doesn’t trust you.
The results were concrete. CIFRA, one of the largest retailers in Mexico, sent a million-dollar order via fax after three years of outreach that had gone completely unanswered. No response to the newsletters. No return call. No acknowledgment. Just silence, and then one day, an order on my fax machine from a company that had apparently been reading everything I sent and decided they were ready to work with the guy who wrote it. And this happened because I had been showing up, month after month, not asking for the sale but providing value, and when they were ready to buy, I was the person they thought of.
I look at content marketing now, in 2026, and I see the same principles dressed up in different technology. Email lists instead of fax machines. Social media instead of trade shows. But the core of it hasn’t changed at all. Show up consistently. Provide genuine value. Respect people’s time. And trust that if you do those things long enough, the right people will find you. I was doing it with a fax machine and a Friday afternoon in 1991. The tools change. The principle doesn’t.
