When we meet with a new client, a very common sentiment is a sense of anxiety that pervades their marketing. Some say they hate it. Some say they like it, but it stresses them out. Others have just been trying to ignore it, or let someone else handle it.
All of us can get caught in the trap of believing we can simply work our way out of trouble. Hustle culture has taught us that the answer to any given problem is to throw time and effort against it. But the truth is, if you’re going in the wrong direction, going faster doesn’t help.
As business owners, we can quickly forget about the good things that happen, and how they happened. The danger is in forgetting what made you successful in the short-term, which denies you the opportunity to notice patterns that will create success long-term.
If you’re looking to build more profit in your business and create more freedom in your life, you need to make sure you’re making meaningful progress, day after day.
Every great decision you make comes with downsides. There is never a perfect answer.
Just what is my marketing actually doing for me? What’s the point? The purpose of your marketing, from here on out, is to reinforce your position.
If you want things to change, you have to try to change things, and that entails assuming the risk that things might not go the way you want. Every plan is a guess about the future, and sometimes our guesses are wrong.
It’s a dangerous myth that struggling businesses just need more customers. In my experience, many businesses aren’t struggling because they don’t have enough customers, they struggle because they have too many customers. Or too many of the wrong customers. They’ve become busy, but broke.
If you’re too patient for profit, focusing on growth alone—which is a common problem in modern business—you’ll wait too long to find out if anyone actually wants to spend money on your product.
It’s easy to panic and imagine the worst-case scenarios for any project we embark on. And it’s just as easy to fantasize about the very best outcomes. But it’s a little more difficult, yet profoundly more important, to analyze the most likely best and worst cases.
A common mistake when things go wrong is to spend time thinking about how they could have gone. Or how we’d hoped things would turn out.
Everyone who knows me well knows there’s one rule I live by. They know it because I’m always saying it. So often it’s probably their least favorite phrase. But I’ll keep saying it: If this then that, and if that, then what?
