Consulting · Westcliff-on-Sea / Essex
Michelle Passfield
Marketing withMichelle
The Feature
The Power of Connection
After more than 30 years in marketing and business development, Michelle Passfield knows that real growth rarely starts with another tactic — it starts with understanding people, building trust and knowing where to focus.
THE POWER OF CONNECTION
There is a particular kind of professional fluency that comes from years of understanding clients, building relationships and seeing what genuinely helps businesses grow. Michelle Passfield has spent more than thirty years working across marketing and business development, and today she brings that experience directly to SMEs that need clarity, direction and commercially useful advice.
Her career has spanned professional services, higher education and the public sector, including fifteen years within City and international law firms. It was around eighteen years ago, while working within that environment, that Michelle was introduced to client relationship management in its most structured form.
Through meetings focused on clients, CRM, effective business development and communications, she saw first-hand how strong professional relationships are built and maintained. She also learned the importance of resilience, particularly when navigating difficult conversations in competitive, high-achieving environments.
That experience shaped a belief that now sits at the heart of her work: business development is ultimately about people, relationships and meaningful connection.
Michelle founded Marketing withMichelle in 2019. Today, she works with SME owners who are often excellent at what they do but feel stuck when it comes to marketing and business growth.
Usually, they have too many ideas, too many channels competing for their attention, or simply no clear idea of where they should be focusing their time and money.
Michelle helps move them from chaos to clarity.
Her approach is deliberately bespoke. Rather than applying the same formula to every company, she starts by understanding the individual business, its challenges, its customers and what the owner is realistically able to implement.
The result is practical, strategic advice tailored to where that business is now and where it wants to go.
“Strong businesses are built through trust, authenticity and meaningful connections.”
Michelle has also recognised a recurring challenge among the SMEs she advises: even with a strong strategy in place, many business owners simply do not have the internal capacity to manage and implement their marketing consistently.
It is an insight that is influencing how Marketing withMichelle will develop in the future. For now, however, her focus remains firmly on providing strategic advice, mentoring and support to businesses that need help finding the right direction.
Her belief in relationships extends beyond consultancy.
Michelle created Connect & Chat withMichelle as a business community built around genuine professional connection rather than transactional networking. The idea is simple: create an environment where people can properly get to know one another, build trust and allow meaningful business relationships to develop naturally.
She also mentors entrepreneurs through the Young Entrepreneurs Network and sits on the advisory board of the Estuary Festival.
In 2026, Michelle was named as one of f:Entrepreneur’s Top 100 female founders, recognising both her work and the impact she continues to make through business and community.
For SME owners overwhelmed by marketing advice, unsure what to prioritise or struggling to turn activity into genuine business growth, Michelle offers something refreshingly straightforward: experience, perspective and advice built around the realities of their business.
Thirty years of marketing experience matters. But it is her understanding of relationships, clients and connection that gives that experience its real value.
Find out more at withmichellemarketing.co.uk.
Advertisement
Thirty Years. No Fluff. Just Results.
Strategic marketing for small businesses that are serious about growth.
Michelle Passfield spent fifteen years inside City and international law firms, including Freshfields, before founding Marketing withMichelle in 2019. She is CIM-qualified, f:Entrepreneur Top 100 recognised, and genuinely allergic to generic advice. Whether you need a clear marketing strategy, fractional support, one-to-one mentoring or practical training, Michelle works exclusively with small businesses and entrepreneurs, building something bespoke around your actual situation. Clients consistently say the same thing: she listens, really listens, then helps you see your business differently. That clarity tends to change things.
Start the conversation today.The Interview
5 Questions with Michelle Passfield
Thirty-plus years in marketing, a stint in the City's most formidable law firms, and now she's telling small business owners exactly what they're doing wrong, kindly, but clearly.
1. You spent fifteen years inside international law firms, including Freshfields. What on earth made you leave all that to work with small businesses?
Honestly? Small businesses are where the energy is. You're talking to the person who made the decision, who lives with the consequences, who genuinely needs the thinking to land, not disappear into a committee. After years working in environments where marketing had to navigate enormous internal politics, working one-to-one with an entrepreneur who's ready to act is, frankly, thrilling. The impact is immediate and real.
2. You talk a lot about relationships being at the heart of good marketing. Isn't that just something everyone says?
Everyone says it, very few people mean it. I mean it structurally, I built an entire business community, Connect & Chat withMichelle, specifically to give people a place to build genuine professional relationships, not just hand out business cards and disappear. The marketing advice I give is rooted in the same principle: know your clients, manage those relationships properly, and the rest follows. Trust is not a soft metric.
3. What's the single most common mistake small business owners make with their marketing?
Doing too much of the wrong thing. They scatter time and money across every platform and tactic they've heard of, without any real clarity about what's actually working for their specific business and audience. My job, usually in the very first session, is to cut through all of that and help them focus, which often means telling them to stop doing certain things entirely, which can feel radical but is almost always a relief.
4. You're a recognised f:Entrepreneur Top 100 female founder, you mentor young entrepreneurs, you sit on arts and festival boards. Do you ever just… sit still?
Not really, no, and I think that's deliberate. I describe myself as a competitive achiever, which means I'm always looking to improve: listening, questioning, attending webinars, having the uncomfortable conversations. I'm currently registered for sessions on AI for business owners and on why profitable-looking companies still fail financially. If I'm not learning something, I'm not being as useful to my clients as I could be.
5. Who is your ideal client, and be honest, not diplomatic?
A small business owner who knows they have a marketing problem but isn't quite sure what it is yet, and who is genuinely ready to do the work. I'm not for people who want a magic fix or a one-size template, I don't do those. I work bespoke, one-to-one, and I ask questions that some clients tell me they've never been asked before. If someone is open to that kind of rigorous, practical conversation, we'll get somewhere very good together.
More Marketing withMichelle in this issue
