Dan Kennedy has been called the “millionaire maker” because of his long career in marketing and helping all sorts of business owners, including service professionals, with growing their businesses beyond their wildest dreams. Here’s the advice he gives to small business owners:
“For most small business owners their number one job should be chief marketing director. Because almost nothing else matters if that is screwed up.” ~ Dan Kennedy
And he’s not the only one who gives this advice. In his book, Ready, Fire, Aim, Michael Masterson gives similar advice.
In the section, “How to change your business the right way,” he wrote:
“In addition to giving your managers authority that is equal to their responsibility, you should be spending 80 percent of your time with your marketing manager and only 20 percent with all the others.
“There are two reasons for this:
Marketing is and always will be your main job.
You know – and should always know – much more about marketing than anything else
And in the section, “The real business every business person is in,” he added:
“It doesn’t matter what sort of expertise you bring into a new venture – whether you are a numbers person, a people person, or a systems person. To be a truly effective entrepreneur, you must become your business’s first and foremost expert at selling. There is only one way to do this: Invest most of your time, attention, and energy in the selling process.
“The ratio of time, creativity, and money spent on selling as opposed to other aspects of business should be something like 80/20, with 80 percent of it going toward selling and only 20 percent toward everything else.”
Here, Masterson is giving advice to entrepreneurs and managers of big companies, but this is still very good advice for service professionals and owners of small service businesses.
If you’re reading this and you own your small business, begin thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur and as the CEO. This would make you the marketing manager as well, the chief marketing director that Dan Kennedy mentioned.
This may come as bad news, almost, for most service professionals because you’ve been taught that being good at what you do should guarantee your success. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Lots of service professionals live paycheck to paycheck, barely able to make ends meet. You find that some of those making it big in your industry or profession can’t hold a candle to your skills and experience – just because they’re better at marketing and self-promotion!
Marketing and self-promotion has a bad rap only if you look at it from a monetary (money-making) point of view, But here’s another useful point of view…
Obviously you went into business with dreams of greater freedom, increased income, greater control in your life, more free time to do what you want, ability to take holidays on demand and being your own boss.
But for most people in professions, if you love what you do, you also want to help people improve their lives in some way. If you don’t go out and promote that wonderful service that you could give these people to improve their lives, you’re doing them a disservice. Never mind if your prospective customers are not seeking you out, or they are apathetic!
Listen to Grant Cardone in the quote below:
“I am most worried about noncustomer satisfaction; that is, the people who are dissatisfied because they do not have my product [or have not used my service] and may not even know that they are unhappy.” ~ Grant Cardone (in The 10X Rule)
If you want to continue to grow your business, and your profits, so that you can enjoy all those benefits we mentioned above that drove you to get into business for yourself in the first place, then you must continue to innovate, improve, and expand your business in every area, so that your customers keep feeling that the service or product you deliver is of tremendous value.
One of these areas is getting really good at marketing and self-promotion!
Do you have guys or gals in your profession or industry who you know couldn’t hold a candle to your skills, experience, and concern or care for customers, but who are a lot more successful than you?
This is because they have come to dominate market share because they’re doing things you won’t do! Marketing things. Self-promotion things.
Here’s Grant Cardone again:
“In the business world, you always want to be in a position to dominate – not compete.
“How do you dominate, you may wonder? The first step is to decide to dominate. Then the best way to dominate is to do what others refuse to do. That’s right – do what they will not do.
“This will allow you to immediately carve out a space for yourself and develop an unfair advantage. Let me be clear: I want an unfair advantage if I can create one. Though I am always ethical, I never play fair. I seek out ways in which I can get an unfair advantage – and one surefire way to do this is to do what others won’t. Find something they cannot do, maybe because of their size or their commitment to other projects, and then exploit that.”
(Source: The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success And Failure by Grant Cardone)
Make this the day you decide to get an unfair advantage in business for yourself – because nobody has a copyright on that!
Then rise and shine.
