Steve Lepore
Vol. I · 2026
Vol. I · San Miguel de Allende

Building marketing, ventures, and a reading list — from San Miguel de Allende. Notes from a studio in central Mexico, written for operators of the kinds of businesses that keep neighborhoods alive.

i.About

I grew up in California and spent my twenties learning how local businesses actually work — not from books, but from sitting in the back rooms of restaurants and dental offices while owners explained, with varying degrees of patience, why the marketing companies they'd hired before me hadn't worked.

I now live in San Miguel de Allende, a small colonial city in central Mexico, where I run a marketing practice for the same kinds of operators I've always worked with — independent dentists, restaurant groups, small hospitality brands — across the US–Mexico corridor. I'm also building real estate in the Bajío region, the part of Mexico that gets called the next Tuscany by people who haven't been here, and something more specific by people who have.

The thesis of this page, if it has one, is that local businesses are a craft, not a category — and that the people who build them, whether they're filling teeth, plating dinner, or pouring concrete, deserve better than the marketing industry has given them. The notes below work out variations on that thesis, plus the occasional dispatch from a hockey season or a concert hall.

Steve Lepore
ii.Notes

Short pieces, written as I think them through. Some are about the work; some are about the rest of life. Dated, in case it matters when.

№ 003 May 03, 2026 Dental · Hospitality

Why dental and restaurant marketing are the same job.

Both are local. Both are review-driven. Both are run by an owner who would rather be doing the work — actual dentistry, actual cooking — than thinking about marketing. Both lose customers slowly to a thousand small disappointments and gain them slowly through a thousand small consistencies. And both are aggressively underserved by the marketing industry, which keeps trying to sell them tools designed for SaaS companies.

A dental practice and a neighborhood restaurant are the same business. The only difference is the room.

I've run dental campaigns and restaurant campaigns side by side for almost a decade now, and the longer I do it the less I distinguish between them. The brief is the same: be the place that comes to mind first, and be there when it counts. Everything else — the channel mix, the budget, the creative — is downstream of that one sentence.

№ 002 April 14, 2026 Hockey

A Kings season I'm not quite ready to put away.

This was the year I stopped pretending the Kings' window was wide open. It isn't. It's the year I made peace with a defensive identity that wins ugly and loses uglier, and the year I came around — slowly, against my will — to the idea that Kopitar is going to retire someone other than the captain of a third Cup-winning team. That last sentence took me about four months to write.

The good news, such as it is: Byfield finally looked like the player they drafted. Kuemper had a real season. Doughty's leg held up. The bad news is the same as every recent year — the playoffs arrived and the team stopped scoring goals, as if a switch flipped on the ice and only they could see it.

I watched most of the games from a small bar in San Miguel that gets the feed via a sports package nobody can quite explain to me. The bartender doesn't know hockey. He's started to recognize when I'm having a bad night. Otra cerveza, no?

№ 001 February 22, 2026 Concert

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, in a room too small for them.

Saw GY!BE last week in a venue that, by my count, fit maybe four hundred people. The band has been making music since 1994 and the set was about as long as my drive home. They opened with a piece I didn't recognize — new album material, presumably — and built it the way they always do: a single thread held for ten minutes, then a second instrument, then a third, then the room.

There's an argument that post-rock is a museum genre at this point — that every band working in long crescendos is essentially restoring a building Slint and Mogwai already built. I don't know if I agree, but I know that watching seven musicians stare at the floor while a film loop runs behind them, refusing to acknowledge the audience for ninety minutes, still feels like the most honest thing happening in popular music. Nobody waved. Nobody said hello. They played, the loop ran, and when it was over they walked offstage without a word.

Walking out, I thought about how rare it is now for a performance to refuse the small social contract of seeing you, the audience. Most of culture works hard to make sure you feel acknowledged. GY!BE makes you feel like you're eavesdropping. I prefer the second thing.

iii.Reading
Reading
list
Now Slowly, as it should be.
  • The Master and Margarita
    Mikhail Bulgakov
    Re-reading. The Pontius Pilate chapters still wreck me.
  • Crossings
    Ben Goldfarb
    A road ecology book that turns out to also be about everything else.
  • The Drift, Issue 12
    Various
    The Christine Smallwood essay is the one to read.
On deck
  • How to Be a Stoic
    Massimo Pigliucci
    Mostly to argue with.
  • Pedro Páramo
    Juan Rulfo
    Living in Mexico without having read it has become embarrassing.
  • Trust
    Hernan Diaz
    Recommended by someone whose taste I trust completely.
iv.On AI

Notes on AI, written by someone who uses it daily, worries about it constantly, and thinks the question is more interesting than the answer.

№ 003 April 22, 2026 Prediction

What happens to local marketing in 2027.

By the end of 2027, the most successful local marketing agencies will be ones that have rebuilt their entire workflow around AI. Not as a tool layered on top of existing process, but as the organizing principle that the process is built around. The agencies that try to use AI as a productivity tool inside the old workflow will end up doing the same work for the same money on a faster clock, and they'll watch their margins compress while their competitors restructure entirely.

I think this happens specifically in local marketing first, before B2B, before brand work, before anything else, because local marketing is the field where the unit economics are tightest and the willingness to experiment is highest. A dental practice paying $4,000 a month is not patient. They will reward whoever figures it out first.

Writing this down so I can be wrong on the record.

№ 002 March 30, 2026 Observation

The thing about AI search nobody is talking about.

Dental patients are starting to use ChatGPT to translate their symptoms into vocabulary before they ever search Google. They describe what's bothering them in plain language, get a rough diagnosis or set of terms back, and then search for the term. By the time they hit a search engine, they're already inside a category they didn't choose for themselves.

The implication for review-driven local marketing is non-trivial. The reviews patients leave will gradually shift toward the language ChatGPT taught them to use. The reviews patients read will reinforce the same vocabulary. And the search queries that bring patients to a practice will increasingly be terms that ChatGPT supplied, which means ranking for those specific phrasings becomes a different kind of optimization problem than it was two years ago.

I don't see anyone in the dental marketing space talking about this. I think they should be.

№ 001 February 08, 2026 Concern

What I watch with growing unease.

Small business owners are letting AI write their replies to negative reviews. The replies are competent. They're warm, they apologize appropriately, they offer to make things right, they thank the reviewer for their feedback. They're indistinguishable from a thoughtful human reply. They are also, in aggregate, draining the last bit of authentic voice out of local commerce.

The thing I can't stop thinking about is that the *reviewer* still wrote their original review as a person. They were angry. They had specifics. They were trying to be heard. And what they get back is a perfectly tuned piece of conflict-resolution copy that says nothing in particular, addresses no one in particular, and is the same reply that the next angry reviewer will get tomorrow.

I use AI every day. I'm writing this with AI's help. I don't have a clean answer for what I just described. But I notice it, and the noticing has not stopped.

v.Places

I've never been comfortable handing photographs from my personal life to Instagram. These can live here instead. Places, random or otherwise, that I've passed through, mostly while traveling for work or thinking about it.

vi.Work
On working
together

Who I work with.

Independent dental practices, mostly multi-location group practices in the US. Restaurant groups and independent restaurants in Mexico and the US Southwest. The occasional small hospitality brand — a hotel, a tasting room, a coffee roaster — when the operator is the kind of person I'd want to spend a year working with.

Engagement sizes vary, but the relationship is always retainer-based and always at least twelve months long. I don't run one-off campaigns and I don't take on rescue projects.

What an engagement looks like.

The first month is mostly listening. I sit in on calls, read your reviews, walk through the practice or the restaurant, talk to your front-of-house people, and produce a written brief that says — in plain language — what I think the work is. The brief is yours. If we don't continue, you keep it.

After that, the work is whatever the brief says. Most of the time it includes some combination of local search, reputation, paid advertising, and creative direction. Sometimes it includes hiring a person on your team. Occasionally it includes telling you to stop doing something you're already doing.

What I don't do.

  • SaaS, B2B lead gen, or e-commerce.
  • One-off projects, sprints, or rescue work.
  • Logo design, brand identity, or anything starting with "rebrand."
  • Cold outbound, growth hacking, or "performance marketing" in the lead-gen sense.
  • Discovery calls.
vii.Ventures
Companies
& projects
viii.Speaking
Talks &
interviews

Available for talks on dental marketing, restaurant marketing, AI in local search, US–Mexico operations, and the long arc of running a small agency from abroad.

  • Oct 2026 The hospitality mindset, applied to healthcare. Forthcoming
  • Mar 2026 Local marketing is a craft, not a tactic. Podcast — link forthcoming
  • Nov 2025 Running an agency from Latin America. Private dinner, CDMX
  • Sep 2025 What dentistry can learn from good restaurants. Industry roundtable
ix.Contact
Two ways to reach me

Happy to meet up if our travel ever overlaps. Until then, the address below.

Or we can talk about marketing for your dental practice or restaurant — or about land in the Bajío.

I read everything. I respond to most things. I take on a few clients a year.