What’s your bicycle of the mind?
Marketing cannot save a company, nor can it make one.
focus
100 posts
Spinning Your Marketing Wheels
You know the expression: “All roads lead to Rome.” There are lots of ways to get to the same place. It applies to marketing. There are a lot of ways to do marketing, and an awful lot of them will work.
"You'll get eaten alive."
In 1916, the Saturday Evening Post published “Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Business Man” by Robert Updegraff. In the story, the titular Adams becomes a sought-after consultant to business leaders who know they've been blinded by their own narrow perspective.
You can’t skip this step
Today’s newsletter is, hopefully, applicable to everyone, but it’s specifically focused on small business owners and consultants. No one else—no agency, partner, or consultant—can care more about your dream, your business, or your marketing than you do.
Charge your value or lose it
I was talking to a good friend about a business idea he’s been mulling. He presented his (excellent) plan for the work he’d do, and the clients he’d attract. And then he said, “And I think I’ll just charge a couple hundred bucks for it.” Because I can’t help myself, I immediately blurted out, “No.”
It’s not everything—it’s this one thing
Everything is overwhelming. Writing the copy for your new website. Your social media marketing. Your latent guilt over not yet joining TikTok, and your growing worry that everyone else is moving faster than you are.
You want to be weird
There are only two dependable ways to create a profitable business: By being meaningfully different from your competition in a way that provides greater value to a specific set of customers. Or by being so streamlined, efficient, and operationally effective that you can be the cheapest option.
How to build a marketing team you trust
When I work with the leaders of marketing teams, I’ll often hear that their job has slowly mutated into mere oversight.
Will it make the boat go faster?
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."
You’re not being paid to suffer
A lot of us were raised to believe that, if we’re having fun or doing something we find easy, we’re not really working. And that feeling can stick with us even as business owners, consultants, or creators.
What is there to meet about?
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.
Getting better at the wrong things
The astronaut Chris Hadfield once provided perhaps the most important lesson in all of business, life, and marketing: “No matter how bad a situation is,” he wrote, “you can always make it worse.”
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