What does “strategy” mean?
What does “strategy” even mean? What’s your definition? Do you see it as just a “synonym for expensive,” as one economist called it?
Weekly Labs
100 posts
Average is deadly
“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.
How to not fit in
The hardest part about creating a marketing position that’s right for your ideal customers is that it’s necessarily wrong for your non-ideal customers.
It’s a slip and not a fall
At the age of 49, only a few years before being elevated to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln considered himself a flat failure. And on that evening in 1858, after watching the election results come in at the telegraph office, he walked home defeated.
Joy
There’s a tendency for consultants, especially new ones, to take themselves pretty seriously. I certainly did. Knowing, as Benjamin Franklin once said, that “grave men are taken ... as wise men,” I fell into the trap of trying to be overly serious in my conversations, marketing, and day-to-day work.
How to get better marketing advice
It’s hard to see our own business objectively. It’s hard because we’re so close to it. We can’t see much of ourselves without a mirror, and we can’t always see our own business from the inside, either.
How do you suppose customers choose?
A large part of my day-to-day work is applying marketing strategy to help people make a successful transition into consulting. And some of the most common struggles I help them work through are variations on, “My industry is so price-sensitive.”
The more you address, the fewer you attract
I don’t know about you, but for me, August has always been the month that made me suddenly aware that the year is going to end at some point.
You’ve already lost that money
You’ve probably tried a lot of things to market your business over the years. And you may have noticed that the tough part isn’t coming up with new ideas to try out. The tough part is stopping the stuff that isn’t working.
You have to get it done
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that, if you want to get a lot of things done quickly, you have to slow down. It feels counterintuitive. We can easily think that, in order to achieve a lot, we must do a lot—and fast.
The Worry List: Utterly unglamorous, incredibly important
This week’s newsletter builds on last week’s to demonstrate how to use and maintain a Worry List. It’s time to go full flashlight on our worries.
More before they are counted
Worrying can paralyze us. It can keep us from getting our marketing work done, from stretching ourselves beyond our current capabilities, and from experimenting with new strategies and techniques.
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