According to Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan in The Gap and the Gain, the British Olympic rowing team had a simple secret to their success at the 2000 Sydney games. “They developed a one-question filtering response to every single decision they made."
We don’t need to predict what’s going to happen. We just have to prepare.
Frequent marketing meetings are often a sign of marketing struggles. Of course, when marketing is struggling, we tend to meet about it. But the meeting itself is part of the problem, or at least a symptom of a greater one.
“Because George believed he was supposed to find a solution, he did.” Whether we believe it or not, our beliefs affect our actions and our abilities.
The long-term benefits of focusing on a clear, reinforceable position are obvious: We get to do work we love, that we’re the best at, for clients who appreciate our value and are happy to pay profitable prices for it.
People reportedly spend about an hour every week just deciding what to watch on Netflix. And more than two hours every week deciding what to eat. And that was before the pandemic.
This is the first in a short series on moving your service business up-market through marketing strategy. If the Ever Given container ship fiasco taught us anything, it’s that getting stuck is a lot easier than getting unstuck.
There’s a dangerous pressure in business. The pressure to have more and more products, so we can capture more of the market. To further and further expand our target market, so we can appeal to everyone. Or to provide more and more services, so we can do more work with our current customers.
If you don’t have the resources, capabilities, or equipment necessary to make something that looks like it had an enormous budget, or which matches the prevailing trendy aesthetic, try something else.
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.
