The opposite of honesty
Isn’t it often true that when someone—whether a government official or a friend—is too eager to tell us what should have been assumed, we doubt them?
position
100 posts
People don’t eat in the long run
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.
Never a settled product
Our immediate measure of the quality of our marketing is whether we are enjoying the process or not. We need to enjoy it, which means we need to feel confident in what we’re doing, embrace joy and celebrate our achievements, and set a measured, sustainable pace.
That which you actually do
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that “action creates its own courage.” Moving forward makes continuing on easier. Taking action builds confidence, and getting what we want is its own motivation.
What we can and cannot do
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.
Getting unstuck in the middle
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.
Is there a person in your marketing?
Abraham Lincoln told the story of an “automaton chess player,” a complex machine that, all the way back in the early 1800s, could beat human players at the game.
Wishes feel good and rarely come true
Entrepreneurs are full of ideas. It’s what inspired us to start our business, create our products or services, and sell them to the world in the first place. But, over time, we can start to think that the valuable part is the idea, and not the action that follows.
You can positively unenjoy it
“You can make people feel guilty enough to do something,” advertising legend Howard Gossage once wrote, “but you can’t make them enjoy it. As a matter of fact, you can make them positively unenjoy it.” Many business owners positively unenjoy doing their own marketing.
Not an evil at all
"There’s only one thing you can count on...On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up."
The irresistible pressure to expand
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.
The most important question in strategy
Building a sustainably profitable business is a bit easier, and a lot more likely, when you couple that drive with a strong strategy.
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